Tetsumi Kudo

By Ryan Holmberg 3/1/09

CULTIVATION BY RADIOACTIVITY IN THE ELECTRONIC CIRCUIT, 1970. AOMORI MUSEUM OF ART, JAPAN

It is an ugly body of work. Snot green and biohazard orange are its flagship colors, feces and dick its main forms. The work is intentionally cheap-looking, dominated by lacquered plaster and inexpensive consumer plastics. Through its base materiality and lurid subject matter—characterized by a kind of dystopian science-fiction kitsch it aims at repulsion. Inside a small hemispherical terrarium work from 1970, for example, is a lemony swampland of lacquered acrylic mucus and spongy lime colored growth. Circuitry diagrams are visible beneath the effluent, from which sprout small straight transistors, cylinder—topped like cattails. Picturesque in a fashion, the landscape is punctuated with outcroppings-not of rock, but of fat, discolored, plaster noses, their nostrils dark caves of black bristly fur. A nappy toy mouse is stuck in the muck, and a penis crawls through it, slow as the plumpest slug. Or consider a work from 1966: Two striped deck chairs, laid outbeneath a parasol for a beachside holiday, glow a caustic fluorescent orange and green under black light. Along the backrests and seats are smears of what looks like waxy flesh, among the leftovers of a melted woman and a melted man. Polyester foot soles dangle off the end of one chair. Each sitter has one remaining hand, and each hand holds a birdcage. One houses a brain, and the other a bloated and splotchy heart: the couple's organ pets.

The work of Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990) has had a marginal presence in North America. From time to time, individual pieces have appeared in group shows on abjection or in the rare survey of postwar Japanese art, and in summer 2008 Andrea Rosen in New York presented his first one-person gallery show in the U.S. But Kudo has been by no means obscure. In Japan and Europe, his work is recognized for being as singular as it is outlandish, and since the '60s he has been the subject of numerous exhibitions abroad, both large and small. "Garden of Metamorphosis," the survey of Kudo organized by Doryun Chong for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, thus aims to introduce a celebrated unknown to a broader North American audience.

As its title suggests, the exhibition presents "metamorphosis" as the prime trope of Kudo's oeuvre. Kudo claimed that the chrysalis best symbolized his philosophy of art. Indeed, the sculptures are filled with cocoon and larval forms, and the materials he chose often render intermediary states between solid and liquid. Though he believed that art has the power to incite and transform the viewer through the presentation of social and existential truths, Kudo was no progressivist. He was antihumanist and strongly antimodernist. The human body is pervasively disfigured throughout his work, and the overriding theme of his dioramas and installations is irreparable earthly degeneration. He places the blame on blind faith in technology and progress, and behind most of his apocalyptic visions is the mother of all man-made catastrophes, nuclear holocaust. Kudo and his apologists have connected this grotesquerie and doom with practices of "negative utopia," in which an enhancement of the undesirable is thought to repel one toward the good. In other words, humanity might be reborn through the exaggeration of its failures. Yet even if one embraces, as Chong does, a positive reading of Kudo's work and discerns in the artist's degradations figures of hope, it must also be said that at no point did Kudo offer an optimistic picture of a post-humanist human.

Kudo began his career in Tokyo in the mid-1950s making heavily impastoed paintings à la Gutai and Art Informel. In 1958, taken by the fad of performative painting, he began publicly punching canvases and smearing paint with his hands and feet. A key figure of the Tokyo Anti-Art movement (1958-62), Kudo was responsible for some of its most iconic assemblages and installations. In 1962, he relocated to Paris, quickly gained recognition for his happenings, and began making art in the  vein of Nouveau Réalisme. During his years in Paris, Kudo performed and exhibited often, but his revulsion toward the European intellectual scene seems to have been strong, for in numerous works from the '60s he vehemently attacks modernist and humanist notions. He remained in Paris for 20 years, and from the early '80s on divided his time between France and Japan.

Kudo's work was informed by an atomic imaginary: he titled first his paintings, then his assemblages and biomorphic sculptures made of kitchenware, with phrases that include references to "confluent" or "proliferating" chain reactions. In 1959, he began incorporating into his collages electronic circuitry diagrams, the patterns of which also inspired a series of loosely  geometric assemblages. Kudo was no techno fetishist, however. In the tradition of the Dadaists and their bachelor machines, he hybridized the mechanical and the biological to cynical effect. In the assemblage Aggregation-Proliferation (1960),  a switchboard-like base of small, blackened rope knots is overcome by maggoty and visceral elements made of colored string  and massed like vomited spaghetti in a thick soup of synthetic resin. Lightbulb eggs have been discharged and incubate in wormy swirls, infesting the orderly grid with parasites and organic entropy. Later in Kudo's career, he would posit such monstrosities as positive and even salvationist. But in the early work, they appear purely catastrophic, like the final failed fusion in the 1958 film The Fly (better known in its 1986 remake by David Cronenberg).  POULTION—CULTIVATION—NEW ECOLOGY, 1971–1972. GALERIE ALBERT BENAMOU, PARIS.