Art Hag

"No matter how, it is important to think about the relationship of polluted nature to the proliferation of electronics...the decomposition of humanity (humanism) and the old traditional hierachy of values"—this prophetic statement was made in 1971 by Testsumi Kudo (1935-1990), "one of the most innovative artists in Japan in the 1950s and in France in the '60s and '70s" (from the Andrea Rosen Gallery press release). Tetsumi Kudo, Cubes and Gardens currently at Andrea Rosen, focuses on "two key groups of works" from the artist's oeuvre - cubes and gardens - created after Kudo relocated to Paris. The works were a continuation of Kudo's exploration of "existential possibilities for humanity in an increasingly polluted and consumption-driven world."

Kudo's dioramic cubes, created between 1962-1968, open up to scenes filled with found and bought items including "alarm clocks and egg cartons connected to, and often fusing with, plastic dolls and papier mache body parts." The tiny worlds depict "cocoons" people settle in to withdraw from the outside world and lose themselves in "mass produced" electronics and "mediated entertainment" where they'll eventually become "one with technology." Kudo's larger, Manhattan studio apartment-sized cube, Garden of the Metamorphosis in the Space Capsule, 1968, is "equipped with UV light and designed as an environment for works which flouresce in black light." Peeking into the giant, baby blue cube, viewers see tall, trippy, day-glo flowers and hanging sculptures enclosed in a dark, surreal setting - Kudo's vision of "man, nature, and technology as coequal and mutually dependent."

Kudo's gardens, created in the 1970s, are freakish, terrarium-like, mini-landscapes created with articial flowers and soil, eerily embellished with various body parts, hair, chains, and wire. Wilting flowers droop side-to-side with flaccid penises in dry patches of earth. If Kudo's dark examinations of "pollution, technology, and Western Humanism" were so dreary and unsettling in the 1960s and 1970s, I wonder how much more apocalyptic his cubes and gardens would have looked had they been based on current times. Learn more at Rosengallery.com. Through October 16th.

Human Bonsai--Freedom of Deformity-Deformity of Freedom, 1979