What comes to mind when I look at one of Arakawa's paintings? The mind itself. The mind takes the form of many forms, but not all forms fit it. An Arakawa painting seems precisely cut out to contain the mind, or to be contained in it. I speak of my own mind, because it is the only one that I can have in mind, and I speak of Arakawa's mind, which is certainly the one he has in mind. But I am also thinking of the universal mind, which, according to the 12th-century Arabic philosopher Averroes, is one and the same for all of us. That may be the one we all think of when we say "mind," because we all need to think that our own minds work in a universal way, while conversely we do not succeed in imagining a universal mind except through our own. I am not saying that Arakawa's pictures are "like" a mind, in the sense that first a mind exists and then a picture is painted that represents it, as a landscape represents a place. Instead, afterystudying one of Arakawa's paintings it is I who begin to feel that my mind is "like" the picture. Not only that, but I no longer remember what other image I might have ascribed to my mind before.
Arakawa's pictures are full of arrows--so is my mind. Where are the arrows going? Whether their flights is straight or curved, as seems more frequent, sooner of later they must all reach the edges of the picture and disappear; their place, however, will certainly be taken by other arrows--where will these have come from? Or maybe the arrows do not move, but show the direction that would be taken by anything that happened to pass by --including arrows themselves, if they didn't have to stay still to indicate their own movement. In my mind, the circuits along which ideas flow have always to be kept free, because any little notion might obstruct and block them. I therefore try not to think of any idea other than that of being traversed, as by a dense, swift swarm of arrows, by a current of ideas, or by many currents running in different directions. I manage this very well if my ideas take the form of signposts or pointers for ideas.
It should also be said that the currents of arrows intersect, interpenetrate, or overtake each other in certain areas. This can happen as much in Arakawa's paintings as in my mind while I am looking at the works, and feeling myself traversed by trajectories that move at random but do not clash with or stop each other. And all these arrows in flight make a buzzing sound like that heard at the bottom of silence, like that of the channels of lines of communication, the buzzing of waiting for silence waiting for the line waiting for the sound waiting for the waiting.
In Arakawa's pictures are many lines. Some people think that lines stay still, but in fact they are always traveling from one place to another, or else they go on and on indefinitely, perhaps to infinity. In Arakawa's paintings we see that the lines belong to bundles of lines which may have a common point of departure or else may converge in a point, in which case they create perspectives. This is very useful for the mind, which is enabled to contain anything whatever, independently of the space at its disposal.
The lines also revolve on themselves, and if they are accompanied by a point outside themselves, this point describes arcs around them, and as the line flows on these form a spiral round it. In short, it is wrong to say that a line simply "lies there" on a two-dimensional plane; a line is an active presence which refuses to "lie down," but creates distances, dimensions, and discontinuities through its urge toward movement, action, and communication.
In Arakawa's paintings are words--words as rarefied as those that ring in the mind without anyone having said them; compact words that are there like things, like pieces of mental furniture; words that avail themselves of their authority as bearers of meaning, or of any authority that imposes itself quite independently of any meaning whatever. Sometimes they detach themselves sharply from the surrounding electronic hum, while at other times they slow down to the point of being unintelligible, allowing themselves to be spaced out by long, long silences, while still refusing to be dispersed into entropy and continuing to affirm their standing as written words. Even if the word disintegrates into alphabetical signs that signify nothing by themselves, as on an optometrist's chart, the surface that contains them is endowed with the special authority of any written space.
Arakawa's pictures are full of focal points, at which lines, planes, volumes, colors, forms, and universes converge. His canvases are almost always large, but the space they project cannot be measured. The space is never homogenous: here it is dense, there it is rarefied, here is a flat surface, there a stratification of the universes. How many lines intersect at a point? How many planes in a line? How many volumes in a plane? These paintings contain no lines or planes or volumes but only their intersections, projections, and focusing, vibrating and welling and overflowing in the pictures.
Where do the arrows and lines and words go when they leave the confines of the picture? They go into other paintings by Arakawa. It is certain that his works communicate with one another, that lines pass from one canvas to another, that maps of cities in different paintings are either the same city or communicating cities. This communication happens through an interruption, a gap, an empty interval beyond which nothing is like what it is on this side, beyond which time and space are no longer that same. If we look carefully, however, these interruptions take place not only between the pictures but more often within them, where a line will separate two similar but independent universes, while on occasion a mere segment is sufficient to open up a distance that could be a matter of light-years. Then there is "the blank," the spots of nonpicture, which break the texture of the universe-cum-painting and give us the feeling that the meaning and form of all the rest go billowing around these gaps in existence. We need not assume that the confines of a thing are only those that limit it on the outside; Arakawa's works have confines that pass through their interiors, at the points where the paintings border on the infinite continent of nonspace and nontime, sometimes hidden behind a thin line, at other times buried deep in a blank on the canvas. The edges that run all round the pictures are not so decisive, because they could well move further over, the picture could expand in all directions, could become infinite--I mean, infinitely expandable, though limited by its inner discontinuities. The same goes for the mind, which hides abysses in its folds.
Arakawa's paintings are full of light, light composed of all colors and also of the absence of color, light that comes before and after every other color, light that is at the same time undulatory and cellular, consisting of pulsations, of photons, of flying arrows. The color of the fields of energy is a virtual, transparent, hovering color. It is the color of matter when its compactness dissolves into a fine dust of particles, impulses, and elisions.
Is the blank also a color? The blank is the color of the mind. The mind has a color that we never see because some other color always passes through our minds and superimposes itself on our gaze. Only Arakawa's glance is so swift that it succeeds in catching the right color and communicating it. Then we recognize it without a shadow of doubt, as if we had always seen it. The mind can have no other color but that of Arakawa's paintings.
© Artforum, September 1985, "The Arrow in the Mind," by Italo Calvino.