TETSUMI KUDO: RETROSPECTIVE by Tetsumi Kudo

日本人アーティスト、工藤哲巳(Tetsumi Kudo)の作品集。2016年から2017年にかけてドイツ・カッセルの「フリデリチアヌム美術館(Fridericianum, Kassel)」で開催された回顧展に伴い刊行された。1950年代半ばから1980年代後半までの30年間、作者はポスト・ヒューマニズムやニュー・マテリアリズムといった現代における概念的アプローチのモデルとなる一貫した作品を作り続けた。人間や自然、テクノロジーの間に生じるイデオロギー的境界線を、感情に走らない観察者として、俯瞰し考察する。瓶詰めにされた人形、汚れた色とりどりのネオン、ボロボロの肌、ぐったりした陰茎 – そんな作品群は、ヒューマニストの自信をへし折っているように見える。本書には、展示風景のほか、アーカイブや、マイク・ケリー(Mike Kelley)らによる寄稿文が収録されている。

Bottled humanism, coloured neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being.

Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990) created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The artist reflects upon the ideological boundaries between mankind, nature, and technology from the distanced perspective of an unsentimental observer.

In Japan, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced a caesura; their devastating effects revealed the vulnerability of the human organism. Nuclear disaster is equivalent to a demonstration of both absolute power and loss of control, exposing the paradox inherent in Humanism. Consequently, it becomes necessary to transform the human being. Kudo demonstrates how body parts, plants, and electrical devices converge to form post-human structures.

This catalogue brings together contributions by artists (such as Mike Kelley) and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective.

Published after the 2016/17 retrospective exhibition at Fridericianum, Kassel.

by Tetsumi Kudo

REGULAR PRICE ¥7,150  (tax incl.)

softcover
356 pages
195 x 260 mm
color
2021

published by WALTHER KÖNIG