Tetsumi Kudo

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, USA

Tetsumi Kudo’s work has influenced artists including Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, though, outside of Europe and Japan, his work remains more influential than it is widely known.  The current exhibition at Andrea Rosen – which precedes a major retrospective at the Walker Art Center this autumn – is part of what appears to be an organized initiative to introduce Kudo’s work to an American audience.

Kudo, who died in 1990, fashioned a world of DayGlo horror that counters chaos with control. Accordingly, this exhibition (adroitly curated by Joshua Mack in collaboration with Hiroko Kudo) transforms the gallery into a hellish hothouse: thermometers take the temperature of protuberances rising out of the soil; penis-faced parakeets sit in a cage like unhappy products of genetic experimentation (Your Portrait, 1965-66). 

These sculptures, in which genitalia and dismembered body parts appear with mind-numbing regularity, depict a rapidly unraveling psyche.  Indeed, unraveling skeins of thread are the dominant motif of The Survival of the Avant-Garde (1985), which reduces the human figure to just a skull, genitalia and a mess of coloured threads. 

At the core of Kudo’s contemporary appeal is this explosive sense of disorder and disintegration.  But for all the grim and often unexpected humour of his work – penises sprout from plants and a loose collection of eyeballs rattle around at the bottom of a pail – the work arises out of a firmly considered political and ideological position.

Kudo’s early work is often explicitly political, staging itself in response to Western capitalism and in particular the American post-war occupation of Japan – Philosophy of Impotence (1961) was made in direct response to the 1960 signing of the United States Japan Security Treaty.  His later work is perhaps less obviously ideological, but it retains (and also transforms) some of the same themes of occupation, resistance and control.

In this current exhibition, these key ideas are applied to the relentless paradoxes of sexual drive.  On one level, Kudo presents human sexuality as a matter of all-consuming drive – senseless, tormented, and essentially removed from the self.  But what is crucial here are the two primary settings that occupy Kudo’s sculpture, and through which he considers the quandary of sexual drive: the garden and the cage.  These are both symbols of the domestication of the natural, and the degree to which the resulting sculptures are at once rampant and contained suggests a confrontation between drive and its social suppression.  Ultimately, both drive and the fabric of the life it disrupts are irrevocably compromised; the consideration of that mutual state of uneasy concession is what makes Kudo’s work cohere beyond pure drive, in a realm of complex emotion. 

Katie Kitamura