Out of the verge of the gauged wood.
Takami Akihiko, Art Critic
SamazamanaME114
2001. IBM-Kawasaki City Gallery, Catalog
What is a human desire? Appetite, sexual and earthly desires…from those physical desires to self-sacrifice or religious passion, which is easily depreciated by ‘the theory of selfish gene’ these days. It describes a wide range. Regarding creativity or expression, the motivations are the spirit of inquiry of making invisible visible and the desire to preserve what’s being lost.
There are two ways in what’s invisible. One is about physically being far or small. Thus it is the event relating to the distance and scale between past and future or from light year unit to nano millimeter. The other is the issue of your inner self. Deeper consideration also reveals that there are variable events, which are expressed by various units as time, distance, direction, speed or temperature that is close to you, yet hard to see directly.
They are esteemed and measured, while many other events exist, because they affect human lives and actions so much. The ancient list includes instruments, sundials, scales, compasses or balances, which people invented to protect human lives from chaos. They are practical items, which were the
result of the desire of making invisible visible. They are the practical tools, as long as you continue desiring to make invisible visible. On the other hand, today’s simulacrum world, where everything becomes digital and numerical in the end of culturalization. The relationship and partnership between Shigeru Moroizumi and thermometers reflect the reversed world.
Moroizumi used to be a sculptor working on the motif of a tower. The tower could be a prototype of a sculpture due to the architecture that is similar to a pedestal, which has perpendicularity and low center of gravity. The materialization of the image, which was consisted of elemental factors of lead, iron, plaster, wax and water, wore the atmosphere of postmodern age of 70’s to 80’s with the metaphor of an alchemist.
Thermometers were necessary in the process of dissolving and welding of many materials and also in the process of coagulation to forming. One day he tried to put two of the thermometers on the top of the metal tower. He heated them to weld, when the red liquid rushed up to the top end of the heat-resisting glass stick. It was a vivid moment as if the lifeless sculpture got back to life again thanks to the supply of blood.
Revelation fell down on the thermometer. The birth of ‘sculpture alive’, which gets along with the environment of living and changing, impresses us as a grave post with the death of today’s sculpture and the building up of the desires of violent culture hiding the destruction from the Tower of Babel to skyscrapers in it.
A thermometer, which was supposed to be a practical tool for work, is transformed into a medium of expression. This is a case study that sacrament of contemporary art of ‘Readymade’ by Marcel Duchamp is revived in the thermometer. It meets the principle of evolutionary theory saying ‘Phylogeny repeats ontogeny.’
What is important in the relationship between Moroizumi and thermometers is that a thermometer, an instrument for measurement, becomes the autonomous media, once the scales were gone off the thermometers. It is known that ‘the thermometer’, which might have been the invention by Galileo Galilee in the early 17th century, bore no scale marks. It was the device run by air or water swollen by temperature, while the weak was the characteristics of being easily affected by air pressure. The liquid thermometer called ‘Thermometer’ was known to be the development in mid 17th century. The
container was sealed up and had scales.
One of his early works of thermometers with no scale marks was that they were built up in the form of a tower to be enclosed in the flat panel (1991). His works of the time were summarized in the form of an object derived from the image of tower or sculpture. As they were put on the iron table or enclosed in the box filled with wax.
‘℃、4000=1’(1994) is the work by 4000 pieces of temperatures, which were installed on the wall side by side, so that one red line was drawn up in the space changing the shape as the temperature changed. Another version of this series shows the emerging red line of thermometers, whose content
size was differed accordingly, based on the gallery space. It was a work of one step up by getting the best of the media of thermometer in a minimal way. There is also a work of readymade thermometers being put side by side on the edge of a disk to revolve. It submits the relationship among temperature, centrifugal force and gravity on earth.
A cooperation by a manufacturer helped to materialize the idea of the liquid thermometers. Thermometers of a size of a human height were hanged in the air at a same interval, which assumes the interference of a body temperature of a moving man. As for another work, liquid moves back and
forth from both ends of a long sized thermometer. Another is the form of the Mebius ring where liquid circulated along. Blue is the new color for the liquid other than red.
Another type of analogue thermometer is a graphic one, which records the change of temperature by time. The line drawn automatically and fractionally on the paper could be a drawing achieved by environment itself. Moroizumi tries to invite both of the temperatures that expand beyond real time and space through putting the liquid and graphic thermometers parallel in the same air.
One of the works done by a graphic thermometer is that the drawing oftemperature erases the text already printed on the paper.
What makes his recent works by temperature further interesting is an experiment utilizing a new material of liquid crystal as medium. When the surface of an object is coated with liquid crystal or applied directly, which changes its color by temperature, it becomes ‘a thermometer’. When an object, that wears liquid crystal, gets artificial or natural light, it becomes visible to your eyes that light is heat through the changing colors.
Dr. Hideki Shirakawa, who was honored with the last Nobel Prize for chemistry in the 20th century for the invention of plastic that conducts electricity, revealed a secret that his invention was thanked to a failure that a student made. He writes in his note how important it is to observe things as they are without any prejudice. His belief was grown naturally through his interest in the nature or through helping his mother with cooking rice or heating a bath by firewood. When he took care of the fire, the furnace was his laboratory to learn about flame reaction. Fire reminds me of ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’ by a self-studied philosopher, Faraday. Dr. Shirakawa also mentions the closeness to Faraday he felt which made him pursue the way of chemistry for the first time.
It was an unexpected honor for Dr. Shirakawa who was thinking about taking care of vegetable or cactus after retirement. The fact makes his words more impressive. He rings the bell on how our society underestimates basic study and creativity and on how much school children are getting less
interest in science.
Ecological environment, which has survived as the wood of creation since half a century ago, is forced to transform into a system rapidly measured and continue ‘being paradoxically blind’ to the global deluge of information. The amplitude and depth of a world which opens only by the attitude of ‘observing as it is’….A thermometer with no scale is useless for heating a bath. However it silently tells us that there is a borderline between human beings and environment which constantly come and go each other. Translation Ayumi Kudo
ⒸSHIGERU MOROIZUMI