- Artist
- Tetsumi Kudo 1935 – 1990
- Original title
- Portrait d'artiste dans la crise
- Medium
- Metal cage, paint, wax, plastic, wood, paint brush, thermometer, wool, coins and other materials
- Dimensions
- Object: 345 × 400 × 265 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Edward Lee in memory of Agnès Lee 2021
- Reference
- T15834
Summary
Portrait of an Artist in Crisis 1980–1 is a sculptural assemblage that takes the form of a mass-produced animal cage painted a lurid green, inside which are the disembodied face and hands of a man rendered in wax. In the figure’s right hand are two paint brushes; the left hand grips a scatological form. Four smaller wire cages are suspended from the ceiling of the main structure. These contain, respectively, the small painted maquettes of a grey mouse, a yellow canary, a red heart and a yellow phallus. On top of the wax head and around the base of the cage is a tangle of multi-coloured wool and a number of smaller items including pills and coins. The original French title is written in cursive script on a small panel affixed to the front casing of the main cage; on the bottom right-hand side is inscribed the artist’s surname, each letter occupying a space between the thin wire bars
The work shares its name with at least one other cage assemblage by Kudo, a series of works that the artist commenced shortly after arriving in Paris in 1962. In each of these he brought into dialogue the organic and the mass-produced, often using paint that causes his sculptures to glow under ultra-violet light. The implication of radioactivity or ecological disaster is deliberate – Kudo not only had a long-standing interest in astrophysics and quantum mechanics, but he had spent his formative years in Japan, thereby experiencing the societal and environmental consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Though these cage assemblages are acknowledged as works in themselves, a description of a 1970 happening by Kudo reveals the related context of a performance:
During his 1970 retrospective ‘Tetsumi Kudo: Cultivation by Radioactivity’ at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, he sat in front of a birdcage smoking cigarettes while a wax face inside slowly melted. When the face had collapsed completely, he served champagne to the audience. Kudo’s Happenings were concurrent with those of Allan Kaprow, whose Fluids 1967 possess a similar temporal intensity.
(‘Tetsumi Kudo’s New Ecology’, Hauser & Wirth website, 22 April 2020, https://www.hauserwirth.com/stories/28399-tetsumi-kudos-new-ecology, accessed 18 September 2020.)
The wax visage is a cast of the face of French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), with whom Kudo collaborated on a film adaptation of Ionesco’s short story La Boue (The Mire) in 1971. Their work shares common themes of existential despair and alienation in the post-war period.
The title may be understood as a literal description of creative crisis, especially when seen alongside the dejected expression of the wax figure, with brush in hand but no canvas on which to paint. Since Ionesco was a writer rather than a painter, the ‘artist’ of the title may be understood as a generic archetype of creative struggle, with the smaller caged objects alluding to lingering preoccupations or desires. A further emphasis on artistic impotence is suggested by the form of the phallus, a motif that appears frequently in Kudo’s output. whether it be in cage assemblages such as this, or in performance-installations such as Philosophy of Impotence, or Distribution Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation 1963 (Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis), in which the artist appeared wrapped in a shroud tightly bound together with string and plastic phalli.
Though Kudo was not formally affiliated with any one artistic movement (participating in but not signing up to the Japanese neo-dada movement), his works share formal and conceptual concerns with artists from both Japan and the United States who practised within that conceptual and stylistic mode, such as Ushio Shinohara (born 1932), Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) and Paul Thek (1933–1988). Their works have in common the repurposing of quotidian objects, appropriating aspects of consumer culture, and referencing and depicting bodily elements.
Further reading
Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2008.
Tetsumi Kudo: Cultivation, exhibition catalogue, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark 2020.
Katy Wan
September 2020
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