Deliverance from the horizontal axis / Shigeru Moroizumi
Yumi Yamaguchi
２００6 Mac POWER/VOL.17 NO.2 ISSUE 194
Deliverance from the horizontal axis / Shigeru Moroizumi
An installation with a row of thermometers, all of them without any calibrations, when we look at it carefully, we discover a subtle difference in the indicator lines. When I first encountered the work of Shigeru Moroizumi I discovered that the calibrations on a thermometer were handmade, each of them with subtle differences in the calibration width. I felt a mundane object such as a thermometer had suddenly gained a personality. His latest work ‘Fluttering Heart-100 days’ is a motion picture piece features the temperature changes in a heart shaped thermometer with wings, over a hundred day period. A picture every 30 minutes, 48pictures a day, adding up to 4800 frames over 100 days. At 30 frames a second, the picture reduces a day to 1.6 seconds and the total length comes in at 2minutes 40 seconds. Temperature changes arise from the earth’s spin and orbit around the sun. Watching a heart shaped object portraying these changes makes us feel we can almost hear the silent voice.
It is possible to analyze his work as modernism or to make up critical position using art history. Yet I feel unless one stands in front of his work and experiences the delicate the overpowering sense of existence and its beauty, it is pointless to argue about his work. From his small heart-shaped objects to the larger works standing at 3 meters covering entire walls, His work show the typical fragility of glass and the translucent red and blue liquid contained within the glass tubes pleads to our vision. The deepest appreciation of the tension and pleasure can only be gained though seeing, touching and experiencing the works.
“In my latest series I turned the scenery I can see from my atelier into a work. From my point of view, I haven’t strayed from my earliest three-dimensional work. I feel I’m approaching my work now with the most stable feel.”
Shigeru Moroizumi has a long career. However, I wouldn’t want to confine the interest of his work to that of the Baby-boomer generation. The category of Contemporary Art itself is turning its focus towards younger artist and younger talent. Yet it is such preconception using age or alma mater factions that is the most distant notion from art. There are interesting artist overseas and I have seen many of them. There are many wonderful artist in Japan too, like Shigeru Moroizumi who keeps producing good work. In his latest series of works, apart from his thermometer works that stretch vertically, he has begun working in planes like in a mosaic. It seems Shigeru Moroizumi is delivered from the horizontal axis.
Yumi Yamaguchi Translation Arthur Tanaka
ⒸSHIGERU MOROIZUMI