Circuitries of color: a pioneer of the postwar avant-garde in Japan, Atsuko Tanaka has pursued the idea of circuits and linkages using light, sound and performance as well as conventional painting materials. A traveling exhibition introduces her to North American audiences

In 1955, in the Osaka area of Japan, the avant-garde Gutai group held the first of several outdoor art events, the 13-day, 24-hour "Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun." These exhibitions were full of works that were overscale, wildly playful and theatrical. So it was not much of a stretch to move to an actual performance space, indoors. In the 1957 "Gutai Art on Stage," Atsuko Tanaka created a performance she called Stage Clothes. (1) She came before the audience from under a giant red dress that formed the backdrop, wearing a short green dress from which she began to remove various parts: the lower sleeves detached, then the upper, then the lower section of the skirt came off to reveal one of another fabric and color, and so on. Her actions repeatedly revealed a different garment in a new color configuration, such as wide diagonal stripes. Making her body the scene of a sequence of abstract compositions, she was performing something more than a striptease: she was expanding the concept of what a painting could be. (She ended, in any case, in nothing more risque than black tights and a leotard.)

Tanaka was not the only female member of Gutai, but she was by far the most prominent. Her works with that group are featured in any account of the period, and her most famous work, the Electric Dress (1956), which she also wore in performance, was, for example, the cover picture for a 1990 Italian presentation of Gutai (2) and was the centerpiece of a solo room in a major American exhibition of international performance art. (3) Now Tanaka, 72 and frail, has become the first Gutai artist given a North American museum solo. With "Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954-1968," the Grey Art. Gallery of New York University and the Belkin Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, are introducing Gutai to a new generation of viewers. Although the group exhibit ed at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, and more recently Gutai works were part of Alexandra Munroe's mammoth survey, "Japanese Art Since 1945: Scream Against the Sky," which appeared at the Goggenheim Museum's late SoHo branch as well as at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1994-95 [see A.i.A., Jan. '95], Tanaka is still largely unknown here. That situation is likely to change in response to this lively exhibition, along with Paula Cooper Gallery's concurrent New York presentation of recent work. Tanaka seems likely to become as noted as two other Japanese women of her generation, Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama, although she differs in having done all her work in Japan.

The Grey show, guest-curated by Ming Taimpo, an art historian at Carleton University in Ottawa who spent two years in Japan researching Gutai, and Mizuho Kato of the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, who also curated Tanaka's Japanese retrospective in 2001, includes some documents and films of Gutai events. Although the treatment is brief, it provides a hint of the context in which Tanaka's work was initially seen, and the inventive and exuberant activities possible in the surge of social and expressive freedom following the defeat of Japan's militarist regime in World War II. Tanaka's work is a surprising combination of science and art, the mundane and the dramatic, perhaps reflecting the reindustrialization following the war and the infiltration of technology into everyday life. Her work is strikingly focused on systems, which makes an interesting irony of the fact that she operated outside the systematic structures of Japanese art (such as craft hierarchies or schools of traditional painting), and found a place where innovation was most valued.

The earliest works in Tanaka's show, dating from 1954, are pre-Gutai: a series of number-focused collages and subsequent paintings based on calendars, blueprints and printed documents that Tanaka began during an extended hospital stay. The blocks and overlays in these works can be seen to presage the layering in her Slate Clothes, and their obsession with time is subsequently played out in performance time. Other early works include a series of bright geometric shapes painted on paper a yellow square, a red circle and a green rectangle--that she canceled with long painted X strokes. These were made when she was part of the Zero kai (association), (4) an affiliation of conceptually inclined recent art-school graduates whose motto was "every work of art begins from nothing." (Affinity and genre groupings were typical in Japanese art until recently.) The Zero kai artists, holding their first exhibition in the display windows of an Osaka department store in late 1954, were invited to join the new Gutai group. Its founder, the painter Jiro Yoshihara, is said to have told them, "You can't fight alone, so come fight in a group." (5)

Gutai was the first Japanese avant-garde movement to become internationally known--especially when its members were celebrated as kindred spirits by the French critic and Informel advocate Michel Tapie--and Zero was largely forgotten. Yet it's interesting to note that four of the major Gutai participants were the Zero recruits who had set the tone of their work before Gutai existed. Besides Tanaka, they were her husband, Akira Kanayama (best known for his densely looped paintings made with a sort of remote-control car that crisscrossed vinyl or paper, automatically distributing a trail of quick-drying paint), (6) Kazuo Shiraga (notorious for the tactile, gestural oils on paper and canvas that he painted with his feet) and Sahuro Murakami (who in performances flung himself through kraft paper screens--a transgressive act in a country where traditional houses had paper walls and windows). It seems that Gutai had a gift for PR, probably due in part to Yoshihara's family wealth and his greater maturity (he was 20 or 30 years older than the others). Tanaka and Kanayama left the Gutai group in 1965. It disbanded after Yoshihara's death in 1972.