Tetsumi Kudo

February 2009 Reviews

Giorgio Morandi

Italics

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Jost Münster

Charline Von Heyl

Hannah Villiger

Vik Muniz

Joseph Cornell Yves Klein Jackson Pollock Bruce Conner Allan Kaprow Tetsumi Kudo Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring

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Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990) once made a small collage that incorporated bits of electrical engineering diagrams. This yellowed paper, covered in tiny, precisely printed black figures that represent alternating and direct currents, conductors, and resistors, would become an integral material persistently appearing throughout his oeuvre. One might think of it, within the context of the exhibition at the Walker Art Center, not as a diagram of electrical circuitry but as a genealogy showing lines of historical force, which Kudo’s art productively disrupts and reconfigures. The first solo museum show of Kudo’s work in the US, "Garden of Metamorphosis" seeks to rearrange our understanding of postwar art — its key figures, energies, stylistic and theoretical circuitry, and highly charged lines of influence.

Kudo is perhaps best known for his collaged sculptures and installations, in which he used a surprising array of found materials — a tree stump, nails, human hair, electrical cords, black tape, ropes, scrub brushes, lightbulbs, plastic tubes, electrical wire, Peg-Board, synthetic resin, film cartridges, plastic bowls, glass jars, birdcages, and images of muscle-bound men in calisthenics poses. We might be tempted to chart connections between his Philosophy of Impotence (1961-62) and Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956), between his Your Portrait, Your Game (1962-63) and Joseph Cornell’s found materials and arcades, or between Kudo’s knotted strings and tangled cords and Bruce Conner’s detritus aesthetic. However, the wall text and catalogue repeatedly warned against reductive lineages, particularly since Kudo fiercely maintained his independence and cultivated an idiosyncratic persona.

Indeed, one of the frustrating and at the same time profoundly important things about curator Doryun Chong’s exhibition and catalogue was his intentional ambiguity about not only how, but whether, Kudo can be located within more well known artworld trends. Kudo’s early work, from the late ’50s, consists of Abstract Expressionist-style paintings (Proliferating Chain Reaction, 1959) and "anti-art" happenings similar to those of Kazuo Shiraga and other Gutaï artists, in which Kudo used his own body to smear paint onto unstretched canvas. From this we might sketch yet another genealogy connecting Kudo to Jackson Pollock, to the Gutaï group, to Allan Kaprow, and to Yves Klein, but it is unclear who exactly influenced whom or whether "influence" is even a viable historiographic concept. Chong’s claim that Kudo was an "odd man out" casts such historical methods into serious doubt. And some of that doubt fell directly on the exhibition itself. Does this straightforwardly chronological exhibition work against the oddness to which Kudo aspired or the challenge to history that his work invites?

Working in Paris in the 1960s, Kudo pursued and expanded his interests in metamorphosis, and expounded on his "philosophy of impotence" in which he claimed humankind was entering a new phase — humanism itself had become just another commercial slogan and man would have to accept his impotence in the face of nuclear technologies, ecological destruction, and the burgeoning of a plastic culture. Populated by hundreds of phallic shapes that suggest penises and cocoons, molting skin and cracked seed pods, larvae and excrement, his work from this period is both charged with nostalgia (its materials having hardened, yellowed, or crumbled) and seems surprisingly contemporary. Even as we are tempted to draw a line between Kudo and Yayoi Kusama or Louise Bourgeois, we are surprised by how freshly the work seems to address contemporary forms of biopower and ecological destruction.

In his later work made in Japan, Kudo incorporated other somatic fragments such as hands and feet, crafted from paper and molded plastic, and commercially produced plastic body parts such as eyeballs and brains. In Grafted Garden/Pollution — Cultivation — New Ecology (1970-04), these are combined with plastic flowers and pieces of AstroTurf. Using this vocabulary, Kudo explored the relation between humans and technology, including not only communications (telephones, radios, and Morse code), but nuclear physics, genetics, and computers. One might describe his sculptures and installations, with their green and orange Day-Glo paints viewed in black light (which eerily enhances their radioactive appearance) and their seemingly melted or dismembered bodies, as a particularly visceral form of posthumanism avant la lettre.