Research: Non-musical sound in Japanese art 1955-1979
Excerpts from "Stasis Interruptus: Tanaka Atsuko’s Work (Bell)"
Lou Mallozzi 2024
In 1954 at the age of 22, the Osaka-born artist Tanaka Atsuko joined the small avant-garde collective Zero Society (Zero-kai) at the invitation of fellow artists Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburō, and Shiraga Kazuo. They merged with the recently formed Gutai group in 1955 and remained among the most conceptually adventurous members of Gutai.
...Under the Gutai umbrella of radical experimentation during these formative years, she created a number of remarkable performances and installations. She became particularly well known for her astonishingly precocious landmark work Electric Dress from 1956. Less well-known but perhaps even more astonishingly precocious is her work from one year earlier, 1955, Work (Bell), one of the earliest examples of a gallery artwork based in sound.
...With no apparent training or experience in electrical fabrication or circuit design, the 23-year-old designed and built an electro-mechanical device consisting of a motorized turntable with a heart-shaped arrangement of metal contacts attached by long wires to a series of twenty electric bells. The bells were arranged in a long line along the baseboard of an exhibition space, placed two meters apart. When a visitor pushed and held a button as instructed by a small sign, the turntable would rotate, causing the contacts to trigger the bells. The first bell, closest to the button-pusher, would ring for about one second, go off, then the second bell would ring, and so on in a sequence that moved away from the button-pusher until reaching the twentieth bell, then reversing and coming back.
Work (Bell) is a kinetic drawing in sound, an architectonic sound installation, a loud invader in the space, a tactile circuit, an interactive technological artwork, and, according to Tanaka herself, a painting. It is also one of the earliest examples of what we now call sound installation, remarkable not only for that genealogical fact, but also for the fact that a young artist, arguably one of the most radical of her generation, chose sound as one of her provocative media, which at the time also included performance, electronics, outdoor fabric installation, found-object construction, and other event-based approaches... Her installations and performances during the early phase of Gutai explored time, ephemerality, transformation, spectacle, and the articulation of the relationships of spaces to individual and public bodies. Work (Bell) was among the first of these situational works, so we can ruminate on why, or at least how, sound was a fitting vehicle for her “post-pictorial” explorations, even if she explored other media and methods.
...In 1955, it must have been truly surprising, impressive, and upsetting on several levels to encounter Work (Bell), as ear-witness accounts testify. Of the accounts I have read, one of the earliest of these remains to me the most potent: a short text by Tanaka’s fellow artist Shiraga Fujiko, one of the other very few female members of Gutai, published in the Gutai Journal in 1956. In this acutely perceptive and highly personal piece, Shiraga articulates the emotional and ethical ramifications of Work (Bell) as well as its formal and situational dimensions. Shiraga captures the encounter itself through the embodied feelings of bafflement, astonishment, fear, agency, power, pleasure, and respect that she felt upon experiencing this unprecedented artwork...