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

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Janet Koplos

But back to the Electric Dress and Untitled (Bell). Both involved literal circuits--circular connections. Tanaka appears to deal with this motif formally, if playfully. A second interactive work at the Grey is a rotating painting of circles in bright enamel on a canvas-covered plywood disk. A black-and-white film shows the young Tanaka with a stick drawing a world of huge circles and lines on the damp sand of a beach and, using chalk, drawing similar patterns on the decking of a pier. Her paintings in marker on paper occasionally adopt a more rectilinear organization that can nowadays remind viewers of circuitry on computer chips.

In her enamel-on-canvas paintings in the Grey show, coupled with the more recent acrylic-lacquer paintings and drawings in pencil, conte, gouache and colored pencil shown at Paula Cooper, the formal and associative richness she has sustained with her circle-and-line motif over almost 50 years is astonishing. She has devised a variety of configurations, with or without intense colors: densely concentric circles, small circles clustered inside large ones, round fields of small and near-transparent patches of pigments interrupted by larger shapes in opaque hues. The lines may run around the edges of circles or radiate from their centers or follow unpredictable paths. The works evoke myriad associations: equal-size balls of entangled yarn, machine wheels in motion, pairs of eyes, round bodies caught in spiderwebs, seeds sprouting, ocular "floaters," doodles, weavings, confetti and, where two circles are linked by a repeated contour, a uterine environment. Some works from the '90s feature the light colors of spring, while the dark, flat circles of a 2002 painting punch forward in space as sets of wiggly parallel lines encourage your eyes to follow them.

At the Grey, gallery labels note the importance of rhythm in Tanaka's works and compare her compositions to music, particularly in the large 1962 painting Three Black Balls. The observation is reasonable if not entirely convincing; a few rectilinear drawings might recall piano keys. Yet it seems just as easy to speculate that Tanaka's underlying theme is circularity and connectedness in a Buddhist sense, traditional motifs expressed here in the frenetic movement and electric colors of Japan at the beginning of its high-tech modern times.

(1.) An earlier version of the work had been prepared for the "One Day Only Gutai Exhibition" organized for LIFE magazine photographers in April 1956.

(2.) "Giappone all'avanguardia: II Gruppo Gutai negli anni Cinquanta," Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Dec. 6, 1990-Feb. 28, 1991.

(3.) "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979," Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Feb. 8-May 10, 1998 [see A.i.A., Nov. '98].

(4.) Unrelated to the German and Dutch Zero movements.

(5.) Alexandra Munroe, ed., Japanese Art Since 1945: Scream Against the Sky, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 89.

(6.) In a Sept. 14 conversation between Tanaka, Kanayama and Japan Society Gallery director Alexandra Munroe held in association with the Tanaka show, Kanayama, now 80, impishly explained his inspiration for these works by noting that he managed Gutai, arranging exhibitions and travel details; when he came home exhausted, he found himself wishing that his paintings could somehow make themselves automatically, because he didn't have the time or energy.