Analog Thermometers with No Scale
- Shigeru Moroizumi Exhibition -
Text by Hideki Nakazawa
GEKKAN TAIYO No.427 October 1996
Honestly speaking, I did not know this artist. I happened to hop into a gallery where he had his solo show, and I got impressed as there was something about his works. The more I saw them, the more I felt the delicacy of well-considered purpose and creative accuracy. This is an ideal way to meet art, but unfortunately it does not happen so often.
On the wall are displayed analog thermometers with no scales. In one room, 30 thermometers longer than my height are hung from the ceiling vertically to form a beautiful arc in the space. The bottom of all the thermometers is perfectly aligned to be a few centimeters higher from the floor, and the pinpoint precision makes me sit up straight. Simultaneously, the graphic temperature recorder sitting in the room keeps accurately and constantly drawing the change of the room temperature on a piece of paper with no scales, exactly when I entered the room.
At the center of the other room, hundreds of thermometers are arranged to be kept spinning around by the power of a motor. The vertical vector shown in the other work is beautifully centrifuged instead. On the wall is exhibited thermometers arranged in the shape of Y. A thermometer is a linear thing that expresses the expansion of the liquid volume by a single vector, however, this work decomposes it into a Y shape, which is not linear any longer. The artist seems to prepare well in order to visualize ‘modernism’ prevailed in the idea of vector, and give fluctuation to it.
Another series on the wall is ‘20℃ inside the box’. Like the graphic temperature recorder in the first room, the theme of this series work is a quantum mechanical consequence that we cannot observe without affecting its system. In other words, the world is invisible. Speaking from the perspective of ‘modernism’, it refers to the impossibility of ‘describing’ in a strict sense, which is the basis of modernism, or it is about not being possible to measure temperature of the room or inside the box in reality. Further on, it results in the impossibility of ‘naming’. Measuring temperature is about describing, and describing is about possessing and naming it. ‘Temperature’ might sound peculiar, but, you can see things because you have eyes, and you can understand that everything has temperature, because there is a thermometer that shows it. Likewise, you can describe numerical value, because we know numbers, and you can name things, because you have speech. Therefore, the system of temperature is the system of naming. Then, this is my inspiration that Shigeru Moroizumi must be deeply into ‘modernism’. In other words, he must be attracted to vertical towers which is the materialization of vertical vector, and he must love to give a name to even a little thing. However, it seems that his love for ‘modernism’ is too strong to work on it easily. This state of his mind seems resulted in his works. Looking at the files of his past works, I find a work of a tower as a motif. I guess that he would want to fill any space available with digital thermometers someday. On the other hand, he must know well that it would not work as expected, once he actually starts it. The tension of staying on the horizon of ‘not naming’ is reflected in the analog thermometers that he has committed for the last five to six years.
In that context, Moroizumi is a contemporary artist who has inherited the mainstream questions of Mono-ha. Pulling himself respectfully out of the violence of ‘naming’, all he does is to face the length of the red liquid, but never be quantified. Even if he takes radical attitude of ‘not naming’ or he pays attention to temperature, his attitude of being opposed to subjective art that directly brings in heating elements or cooled substances is decently backed by his works’ sensitive precision of the purpose.
ⒸSHIGERU MOROIZUMI