Tetsumi Kudo Artist and His Artwork “Your Portrait” Research Paper

Art is an essential part of our life. Artists express their feelings and emotions, their points of view on different events in the past, their views of the future with the help of art. It is difficult in most cases for the viewer to get to know the real purpose or idea of this or that work of art. So, people get their own point of view about what they see, about what they perceive. That is why there is no one exact point of view about one artwork; different people perceive one and the same piece of art in different ways.

We are going to analyze an artwork: Your Portrait (Votre portrait), which was made in 1966, by an artist Tetsumi Kudo in our Research Paper. Tetsumi Kudo was born in Japan in 1935. In 1958 he graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts where he studied oil painting. In 1962 Tetsumi Kudo left for Paris and stayed there for 25 years, but he remained Japanese. But even staying in France he continued to create his artworks. After his return to Japan in 1987, he began to study at Tokyo Art University. He did not graduate from that University, because he died in 1990. Mullarkey in his article writes, “his outlook was shaped by destruction and deprivation endured during the War and the subsequent rise of mass consumerism on the ruins of a tradition-minded order.” (July 2008) Kudo’s works include many different tendencies in themselves.

Tetsumi Kudo was a rare artist who bridged many disparate artistic tendencies in the latter half of the 20^th century – including French Nouveau Realisme, international Fluxus, Pop art, 1960s anti-art tendencies, and 1980s Japanese postmodernism – without specifically belonging to any of them (Mullarkey July 2008).

“Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis” was his first personal exhibition which was organized after his death by Hiroko Kudo, his widow. The exhibition shows the works of an artist from the late 50^th till the 80^th. As it was said above, Kudo’s works impress by their creativity and novelty. The human body plays the main part in his works of art.

Kudo asserted “the illusion of human dignity” with incoherent jumbles of body parts — brains, hands, toes, hairy faces, and male organs — stuffed in cages or emerging from slime. History-minded viewers might be reminded of the gruesome experiments, including vivisection, performed on POWs at Kyushu University. To Kudo, these are “visual maquettes” of the effects of Western technology and industry, which — against the evidence of his own national history — are the root of racism and colonialism no less than environmental squalor (Mullarkey July 2008).

There was one more his creation called “Philosophy of Impotence,” (1961) which, by words of Mullarkey Maureen, “hanging phalluses sculpted from tape and tipped with flashbulbs, to protest the 1960 renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty. Kudo resented the accord because it maintained Japan’s status as an occupied nation against the nationwide protest.” (Mullarkey July 2008).

All his works of art are devoted to human beings and his/her place in this world. Much attention is paid to threatens which can be dangerous to people. It is very important to say that all those threats are made by mankind. He tries to tell people about the dangerous circumstances which wait for them in case if they do not stop their destroying actions.

Tetsumi Kudo tries to show people that most of their activities are so miserable, that there are a lot of different other interests which are more useful. Tetsumi Kudo’s work of art “Your Portrait (Votre portrait)”, 1966 is a painted wood case with the help of cages, cotton, plastic, polyester, chains, receipts, and tram tickets. The sizes of this work of art are 17.9 x 23.7 cm. We see a person in a cage, an unhappy result of products of genetic experimentation.

Tetsumi Kudo is a forgettable footnote to more recent forgettable footnotes. Nevertheless, his works offer a window into the kind of willed ignorance that passes for cognitive activity among art minds. Since conceptual art values the artist’s mental labors over the concrete artwork, we start with his thinking (Mullarkey July 2008).

People should perceive his works of art more seriously, not how a way of entertainment, but also as how warning, especially taking into consideration his series of works which belong to radioactivity and environment. All his works are unique and maybe called grotesque. They bear a lot of warning to the people who live in modern society.

To sum it up, it should be mentioned that all artists with their works of art deserve respect. They create all that for us; they want their efforts to be appreciated as the true value. Every artist makes a contribution to the development of our world. Some of them entertain us, the others tell us something about our past, no matter whether it was good or bad, and there are a number of artists who threaten us about the dangers in the future. Art is so mysterious and unpredictable, and its beauty is in this magic and unpredictability.

Works Cited

Mullarkey, Maureen. “A Feast of Loathings: Tetsumi Kudo.” The Sun. 2008.