[℃, 4000=1]

Takami Akihiko, Art Critic

For the exhibition by Shigeru Moroizumi

This is the tale of a man possessed – by thermometers. Until his sudden obsession with thermometers, the protagonist, a sculptor named Shigeru Moroizumi, had been dealing with the motif of towers. With his intuition and his hands, the artist had aimed at release from the perspectivist hierarchy in the spatiality of vertical axes. As demonstrated in the repetition of the story of the tower of Babel, towers built in defiance of gravity are a metaphor for the collapse and death inherent in civilization itself. While the image of towers then changed into a negative of grave markers and got sealed into a plane, thermometers as a ‘tower of life’ then changed the position of human life from the measure into the measured.

 Towers created by power, desire and capital are grave markers destined for death and cessation because they seek the absolute, while the thermometer is a medium which relates with the environment while breathing life and change. Even though it is an instrument produced to function in a specific way for the sake of humanity, it also resembles a new variety of life from with blood and body temperature which responds to its environment with utmost sensitivity. It is an alternative existence which is at once heteronomous and autonomous, dwelling on the border between man and substance or man nature. Moroizumi is attracted by analog instruments as a medium between man and the chaotically changing world, a medium far removed from the dualistic, digital ones confined to yes/no, dark/light polarities.

  This concern with thermometers, meters and magnetic compasses is not without precedent. Indeed, Joseph Beuys and Eric Snell, among others, have provided prominent ones. However, Moroizumi erases graduations on thermometers to release their lives from subordination to man, thus perfecting them. In ℃, 4000=1, 4,000 thermometers of subtly different sizes are set close to each other with the result that one consecutive line appears, just as there is one lifeline in the world which stretches beyond time and space, even if man as an individual or a species lives with the sense of being separated from an environment where, in fact, a variety of organic and inorganic matter is intertwined and moves as one body.

  As we are forced to deal with and process an ever-growing flood of information, we are coming to lose that information which is most essential. In tthemidst of such a paradox of civilization, Moroizumi’s ℃, 4000=1, which begins with communication with a familiar thermometer, can be seen as a work which realizes, in a minimalist and understated way, the potential for a mind ecology art from created by Beuy’s 7,000 oak trees. It is difficult to avoid the observation that, rather than being an act of Moroizumi though him to our reason, which hangs dangling in midair at the boundary of the chaos and nomos of the cosmos.

Akihiko Takami, (Art Critic)

(Translated by Eko Ogawa)

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