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The Wedding Project

by Bethany Clark

Breaking Conventions and Forms: “Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968”

By Carrie Wong

I spot the infamous dress. It is a pied concoction of colors: red, blue, green, yellow, and white. But it can hardly be called clothing, even more so a dress. It lacks all the materials and forms commonly associated with the idea of a dress. The item in question was not sewn together. Neither was it made out of fabric. Rather, it consists of light bulbs in both various shapes and colors gathered and draped over one another. At the bottom of the dress, where either a hemline or a train would usually find rest, there is instead a labyrinth of white wires. And yet, the look of the dress is not the thing that puts me off guard. Despite the appearance of the non-dress, perhaps the most startling thing about the dress is that it lights up, drawing the viewer into a sentimental reverie starring fuzzy sweaters, presents with metallic bows, Santa, and eggnog inebriated relatives.

Atsuko Tanaka, the dressmaker, you might have guessed, is not really a dressmaker; she is in reality, a revered artist from Japan who helped to pioneer an avant-garde art movement called Gutai in the post-war years. She had entitled her dress, or rather, her work of art, Electric Dress. Created in 1956, the dress caused quite a stir upon its inception. Electric Dress debuted with much fanfare, and most likely, also with many quizzical expressions from its audience. In her performance piece, Tanaka wore her Electric Dress, a spectacle of incandescent light bulbs and crossed wires. Using neither the form nor function of a traditional dress but its antithesis, Tanaka sought to discombobulate and redefine conceptions of everyday and familiar objects.

With Electric Dress as her magna opus, Atsuko Tanaka has made a career out of rejection, and dissemination. A quick survey of the body of Tanaka’s artwork would demonstrate her self-conscious penchant for questioning and challenging social conventions. But Electric Dress represents more than just a singular cry against socially accepted and unquestioned behavior and emblems. Her work is at once much deeper, and more provocative. Besides, a cry alone would seem futile and belated; the war had already happened. Rather than merely pushing away the technology and modernity threatening to consume post World War II Japan, there is an element in Tanaka’s work that also sought to embrace and reconcile elements of traditional Japanese culture with the onslaught of Western industry.

In Electric Dress, Tanaka attempted to marry tradition, in this case of her native Japan, with modernity, signified by the explosive onset of industrial technology. With her multicolored electrically wired dress, Tanaka united the Japanese traditional idea of dress, the kimono, with objects representative of a modern world, namely lights and electricity. During her performance piece, Tanaka would walk and move around wearing her Electric Dress on stage, literally embodying her art. By putting on her electrical garment, she, the dress, and everything the dress represented became one; Tanaka had become the bridge between tradition and modernity.

Electrifying Art is the first exhibition of its kind, namely being a showcase of an individual Gutai artist. Displaying Tanaka’s most important works, as well as early paintings and drawings, the Grey Gallery’s current exhibition essentially surveys the artist’s long and seminal career. Other than Electric Dress, the rest of Tanaka’s artwork is no less electrifying. Take for instance, Work (Bell), 1955. In this installation, twenty bells, each at a set distance, are lined along the wall of an exhibition space. Viewers are invited to partake in the artwork by pressing a button, which will trigger the bells to sound off. Sounds bland, doesn’t it? But here’s the surprise: the bells ring sequentially, blasting the silence of the subdued exhibition space as the sound first travels from, and then, subsequently, returns, to the original space. Why am I fascinated by this piece?

If beauty is the value upon which art is judged, then Work (Bell) is not beautiful, and therefore, not art. Yet, if I have learned anything from the Grey Gallery’s exhibition on Atsuko Tanaka, and admittedly I have, it would be to question everything. Reflecting on Tanaka’s work, I realize she constantly asked whether the conventions attached to an object or concept gave the said subject its identity. In her work alone, she had questioned if art was truly governed by symmetry and beauty by daring to create works that were both fluid in form and unconventional in appearance. Now back to Bells. I remember the disruptive and rhythmic clamor was devilishly entertaining. Tanaka reveals there is indeed beauty in rebellion.