visual arts: Flashing lights and ringing bells
Rachel Johndrow, David Ediger and Raffi Mahseredjian, The Peak
The crossed-out images of a square, triangle, and circle began the show, warning us of the lack of care for these forms. Forms are too static for Atsuko Tanaka; there is a pulse to everything. The Electrifying Art exhibition of Atsuko Tanaka explores the mapping out of space, whether it is the sound of a bell ringing further and further away, or the visual echo of a flourescent light that is more off than on. Tanaka explores the importance of these pulses as she maps the resonance of sound and light, and the path from one system to another. In Three Black Balls (1962) a small system of circuited circles of colour are anchored by related connections to other parts of a larger system, perhaps too big to imagine. Systems that can be broken down to the smallest of relations are of the most interest for Tanaka. Each painted enamel circle is necessary to create the bigger form. Tanaka chooses to celebrate the beauty of these small systems, as the larger ones are bound to a different set of rules.
Electric Dress (1956), shocked us all visually. It is a violent, flashing spectacle of light that quickly disappears. The effect reaches as far as light can travel, burning itself like a candle with a kaleidoscope of colours. The images of Tanaka wearing the dress have her fashioning the work on the runway with the light stretching out from her toward the audience.
Inspired by Electric Dress, Tanaka created a series of child-like drawings. The drawings represent the beginnings of her exploration of connectivity. At first, the drawings seem simple and even crude, with their colourful circles and lines. A closer look, however, reveals a complex visual system of wires and diodes, veins and nerves, bones and joints, electrically interacting in space and time. One drawing, Drawing after Electric Dress (1956), is in the shape of a human skeleton, with lines and dots replacing bones and joints. The missing head suggests a lack of direction which, combined with her other drawings of this period, reveals a skeptical view of technology and technical progress. In a technically-ambitious post-war Japan, the work seems to be calling into question the motives behind the kind of technological ambition, which in the United States ended in the development of the atomic bomb. Tanaka's drawings of this period end with a return to painting, as she explored her infatuation with connectivity.
This connectivity was also present in her Work (Bell) (1956), a refreshing disruption that made a witty and playful comment on gallery space. Below the plaque for this piece was a button which, when pressed, created the loud, obnoxious sound of a succession of ringing bells on the floor, running along the gallery wall. This sound installation challenges the authority of "Do not touch" signs common in gallery spaces, and relates to her other work in that all of her art pieces are a succession of one another. The transition of passing from one form to another, continually moving and pulsing through space: the space of an exhibition. Yet this work also has the element of disruption amidst succession, a rebellious critique of art's inaccessibility and privilege, while also noting the importance of co-creativity.
For Tanaka, a system must be the unification of complex juxtaposing elements, which may appear opposite, but are integral.
Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954-1968 runs at the UBC Art Gallery through March 20.