I paid a visit to a giant artwork made by contemporary artist Shusaku Arakawa, along with Madeline Gins, in Yoro, Gifu Prefecture: Site of Reversible Destiny. I slowly ascended the slope. I had a strange premonition, and I put all the more strength into stepping firmly on the ground. It was a disquieting sign, as if my senses were somehow being disturbed.
Presently I reached the slope’s crest. With the various peaks of the Yoro Mountains in the background, an astonishing view opened before one’s eyes. It looked like an ancient amphitheater, or the outer rim of the large mouth of a volcano, or a crater formed by the impact of an enormous meteorite. Or perhaps that futuristic spectacle of the flying saucer that appears in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” quietly landing on the ground. At first I was entranced by that enormous sense of scale, but gradually as my eye became accustomed to the structure of the details, the notion that floated up within my heart was not volcano or crater or spacecraft, but an entirely different word: “This is precisely and exactly a cell.”
The curved line of the cellular wall runs around the circumference. In this line are embedded receptors and channels, in the form of apparatus that exchange information with the extracellular world, penetrating the cellular wall. Within the cell the maze-like endoplasmic reticulum, the nested mitochondria, the centrosome that appears like a bundle of branches, the golgi apparatus with its piled up round lamella, the nucleus that housed the fine strings of DNA, all those sorts of cell organelles are arranged in a scattered formation.
Strangely shaped structures are placed all around here, as if precisely corresponding to each organelle. Had Arakawa seen cells under a microscope before? Or is the thing expressed here perhaps the concept of everything in the real cosmos projected like a mirror reflection into the microcosm of a cell? This was the moment I first felt the ‘life’ at the center of Arakawa’s thought.
Shūsaku Arakawa was born in Nagoya in 1936. Looking to pursue art, he not only progressed through art school, but in his mid-twenties he went to the US and settled in New York. Here he meets the poet five years his junior who will become his life partner, Madeline Gins, and from that point they begin to work collaboratively.
What catapulted Arakawa+Madeline to fame was a conceptual art series called The Mechanism of Meaning. On a big picture plane, plus and dot symbols, or else diagrams that include color, are scattered all over. Under these, instructions are written: “Please think only of the dot not of the x’s.” In other words, forbidding the viewer from simply look at the artwork, participation or some sort of action becomes required here. In this prohibition, the process of human perception arises. The world was surprised by this mechanism. Werner Heisenberg, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, showed considerable interest in Arakawa’s work, and it issaid that he had long chats with Arakawa. Not simply looking, but provoking participation and action. Arakawa’s intentionality was already emerging at this time. The scale of his intentionality was then enlarged and concretized as a more active force moving forward. The result was the magnificent monument completed in 1995: Site of Reversible Destiny. In the circular space of this basin a structure that seemed tobewitch the senses was arranged: a house standing slantwise, with dead-end hallways, maze-like rooms, and furniture embedded in walls. I tried challenging one amongst these features. There is one rectangular entryway bored into a sloping face. A narrow passageway continues inside. When I tried entering, I could see the dimly lit walls for a while from the slight bit of light that came through the entrance, but as I continued down the winding passageway, I was enclosed by a complete darkness. At that moment, a bottomless dread stealthily drew near. And at the same time, a voice in my heart told me to calm down. I closed my eyes and turned my attention to the sensation of the walls I could touch with my two hands. I perceived the direction that the hallway bent in and soon I could see a faint light at the other end of the passage, at which point I came to understand the passageway I had entered into. I realized the dark hole into which I entered was not really all that deep.
What is darkness? What happens in the darkness? If I were to describe the intention of Arakawa’s work in one phrase, I would say that losing our sight in the darkness was not a loss, rather it was an opportunity to open new doors in our brains. A rich technique that more than made up for the loss; our senses aside from vision rise up, and we try to view the world via a new method. In other words, the darkness becomes the impetus by which we sense, bodily, the flexibility and mutability of life. In that moment, life exceeded our own bodies and spreads outward. That sensation is something that continues, even after leaving from the darkness.
Arakawa came to speak increasingly peculiar words. His characteristic phrasing was declarative and at times aggressive. It confused most people, but on the other hand, it attracted not just a few people. Arakawa would say, “I am a new scientist. If one is trying to become an artist, one at least becomes a scientist,” and “European philosophy is made up purely of lies.” Arakawa’s way of speaking was, rather than speaking to someone, more like a constan monologue. It could also be heard as a sort of agitation, or like a curse: “Science has not accomplished one thing, in regards to life,” and “Science doesn’t know what is living and what might be dead!”
And then Arakawa proclaims, “Humans don’t die. I’m saying that they can’t die. I’ve discovered this. What we call humans can surely live forever.” It is true that he continued pondering the question of life. However, he did so using a completely different methodology than us biologists.
