There is a stupendous philosophical vision of Hegel's, according to which the goal of history, globally considered, is a state of total self-consciousness, in which all the spiritual processes ascend to a sort of philosophical self-awareness, no longer alienated from themselves by a kind of internal ignorance of their true natures. This vision is perhaps nowhere more precociously realized than in the history of art, where art itself has become more and more its own subject, so that the boundary between the practice of art and the philosophy of art has virtually become erased and transcended. From this perspective it is possible to regard Arakawa as the most philosophical of living artists, and to appreciate The Mechanism of Meaning—not just the book but that enormous and still evolving suite of panels at which he, in collaboration with Madeline Gins, has been working since 1963—as a sustained effort to elevate itself into a reflection on its own artistic reality.
Neither the individual components of this work, nor the work itself in its aggregate form, can be understood simply as occasions for aesthetic contemplation and response. One must engage with any given panel in a way that first provokes to thought, and then provokes to reflection on the thought provoked, and on the mechanism of such provocation. Because it is the nature of thought—internally realized by the individual in whom the thinking is elicited—at which Arakawa's work aims, the work goes beyond even an exercise in the applied philosophy of art, and ascends, or at least strives to ascend, to the level almost of pure philosophy, conceived of as thought concerned with thought. The individual panels are engines designed to generate a certain abstract intellectual energy on whomever the work works. What makes them—or it—art and not just philosophy is their—or its—resistance to absorption into any philosophical formulate: The Mechanism of Meaning refuses to be vaporized into sheer cogitation.
Often, indeed typically, the individual panels have the form of jokes, as though The Mechanism of Meaning were a kind of visual text exemplifying a thought of Wittgenstein on the nature of philosophy: that a philosophical work could be composed consisting solely of jokes. The point of a philosophical joke is not, of course, merely to entertain or to amuse, but to induce in the hearer that sort of tension and release in which theorists of wit have supposed the effect of wit to consist, yielding some insight into conceptual structure that regular discourse could not achieve. Here the joke is the mechanism of meaning, as though nonsense were the veil that meaning must be seen through, and the point of the joke brings, or is meant to bring, a kind of abrupt enlightenment. So a purpose of the work is to transform its audience, and it is even possible to suppose that the transformed mind is the work, and the panels but means to the transformation: vivid devices of intellectual prosthesis to be cast away, like the skiff of Buddha or the ladder of Wittgenstein, once the relevant state is attained. The Mechanism of Meaning is an intelligence test for the civilized mind, with the difference that it is meant to instill what intelligence tests ordinarily simply measure. In fact, the individual panels engage the viewer as a kind of examinee. They assert their own authority by issuing commands and imperatives, setting certain tasks we are supposed to perform. One does not simply look at an imperative if one understands it: one complies or refuses to comply: one is engaged. But often it is impossible to comply with the commands, and reflection on why this is so illuminates the imperative, namely the set of marks through which it seems to be issued. These, after all, are signs, and there is a very good philosophical joke on the nature of signs to be found in a text of Kierkegaard:
What the philosophers say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads: Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes to be pressed, you would be fooled, for the sign is only for sale.In the end, the paintings are what one would have taken them to be at the beginning—displays of signs. But one realizes their signhood only by treating them as something more: one return to the starting point, but through an atmosphere of enlightenment. An Arakawa imperative may at first be seen as some letters and words, then be seen as an action that calls for an action, and in the end it reverts to its status as an inscription: word-shaped marks stenciled on (or painted to look as though they were stenciled, the freedom of the act of painting disguised as something mechanical). For there is no special reason, internal to the nature of imperatives, why they have to be written. They can be issued orally. Or Arakawa could have made tapes of the instructions, and had them come from an amplifier next to the work. Or from one of those headphones visitors to museum have grown used to. Or Ronald Feldman himself could stand next to a painting and issue an instruction, demanding that the visitor answer, or choose, or determine, or watch out ("This may suddenly explode"). Or remember, forget, connect, expand. . . . The list of orders goes on. The visitor could carry with him, like a price list, a paper with the tasks he is being set. But this is to think of the imperatives as logically separable from the works they in fact form an inseparable part of. They cannot be transduced into sounds unless the works were to become audiovisual. It is essential to their artistic purpose that they be printed or painted or drawn on the surfaces they refer to, referring among other things to themselves. Hence it is as complex verbal/painted entities that they exist: imperatives and inscriptions at once—paint/words, or paintings of words, or wordingthings. Like everything else in the Arakawa oeuvre, they enjoy a double reality, sign and substance at once.
The imperative nevertheless cannot simply be taken as forms with adventitious letter-shapes, as in certain paintings of Malevich. They have to be understood and must then be read. These are not works for illiterates. Indeed they are not for those without English, for English is the language they are in. A Japanese interviewer once asked me, when he was making a film on Arakawa for Japanese television, whether I thought Arakawa's works had much to say to the Japanese people. I answered that they had very little to say to them because they were not in Japanese. Pictures may be translinguistic, but language is not, which shows that not all paintings are pictures, so these are not after all pictures of words. Perhaps the Japanese can appreciate them as we appreciate calligraphy. Arakawa occupies an ironic stance between two artistic cultures, and there is a special irony in the fact that his work is so admired in other countries, such as Germany, for one wonders what an unenglished audience can derive from them. Not even translations always help, for so many of the jokes turn on puns, and puns themselves demand the acoustic dimension of spoken language, even though they are written. Puns belong to the substance of a language, and cannot be translated, only recreated with other sounds and meanings—which would mean, I suppose, another set of paintings altogether, in German of Japanese or whatever. It is a double irony that the book first appeared as Mechanism der Beduetung in 1971, in Munich. This volume is not, on the other hand, a translation back into English of that: it is a distranslation, since we do not need the lexical apparatus so considerately furnished by the German publishers. We have also gained by losing a portentous introduction by Lawrence Alloway in favor of a new preface by Arakawa and Gins, dotty and serious at once, like everything else they do, and with exactly the same conceptual textures as the plates it is intended to introduce. Perhaps it is just another plate, with the work "Preface" printed at the top. Arakawa I know to be obsessed with surfaces, with what they are: and pre-faces have enough face to be near of kin to those. The distinction between what belongs to the work and what does not is, as in the case of the imperatives, always a delicate matter to decide and a persistent Arakawian perplexity. His works almost survive by cannibalizing their own boundaries, incorporating what would usually set them off from the world, leaking into reality or allowing reality to leak back into art.
Returning to the imperatives themselves, they are, as remarked, never easy to obey. "Please think only of the dot, not of the x's," we are politely asked by a panel that almost addresses us with a Japanese accent. The field of compliance is a rectangle containing a single dot and a scattering of x's. What are we to think when we think of the dot (and, please, not the x's)? How are we to think of just it? What is there save its solitary occurrence in a field of alien x's, of which we have been instructed not to think, so we cannot think of the dot in these term either? Just below, we are asked to think of the dot but not the circles. The circles occur in a rectangle we scan restlessly, looking for the dot—The Dot—which, as nearly as I can tell is as oppressively absent from the rectangle as Pierre is from the café Sartre describes to us in a discussion on the experiencing of nothingness. Perhaps we can think of a dot without there being a dot to think of: we can, after all, think of unicorns, of which there are none. Unless one of the circles is a dot, in which case they all are and we cannot think of the dot without thinking of the circles, as they are identical. Or is it after all the dot in the first rectangle (that very dot) we were to be thinking of in not thinking of the circles? So then what are we to think of it, or have we been all along thinking of it? Then what of the x's and the circles we have been trying so hard to disengage from in order to give full attention to the dot? Imagine we somehow succeeded! Dots give us very little to think about in themselves. Usually we use dots to stand for other things we may wish to think about, like New York indicated on a map. But dots are logically plain. There cannot be, I think, an elegant dot. The x's are somehow elegant, and the circles themselves are in red and yellow and black and blue, and very prettily swagged. The eye distracts the mind. It reminds us: We are dealing with art.
The labors are endless with these panels. I have been discussing the riches of two sub-areas in a panel whose name (if the name printed on it is its name) is "Neutralization of Subjectivity." Has subjectivity been neutralized? Has the work succeeded? How would we even know? We have been playing a game with the panel, with the panel always slightly ahead. Or is the game the work, and we and panel have been neutralized together? We pass to the next panel, haunted by a dot we find we cannot stop thinking about. Will we be referred back to it? Here is a panel that commands us to count the lines in a ragged grid. We are not to point. But counting is successive pointing, associating the set of number with the set of things. There is no counting without pointing. But then there, in the next area, is a single line. If it made sense to count a single thing, we could count this easily, there being nothing else to count. But is this counting? If there is one person in the audience, does the discouraged manager inform his actors of the fact and expect them to ask him to count "them" again? Do we see there is one or do we have to count if we are to use the word "one" in its cardinal sense? If there is only one item, is it a list? How many items are then needed before it is a list? Two, three, four, five? So the game continues—or it is a new game, silly and serious, dumb and sharp, inane and profound, at once playful and lethal, a samurai slash at the throat of Reason.
Beyond the differences I noted, The Mechanism of Meaning is not simply Mechanismus der Bedeutung all over again. It is a handsomer book, as suits the fact that Arakawa's paintings and prints have begun to be quite beautiful, as though they were sinking back into art as art. The imperatives are subtler, and have to be sought out. There is a prodding sense of logical sobriety in the most enchanting of them, as though the woman who in fact is Miss America is really concerned with transfinite arithmetic and the semantical paradoxes, existing herself as another kind of paradox. The mind is always prodded and allowed no rest. Section 16—"Review and Self-Criticism"—is a good example of what I mean. I shudder to think of embarking on its analysis. You do that, if I may allow myself an imperative. Work at your own pace. At both ends of the enterprise are some very handsome plates: but the essence lies between the ends, and it takes great diligence to extract it.
Arthur Danto is a Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is currently writing a book on art, titled The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.