"Subterraneans" (Part 1) and "Mirrorless Mirror" (Part 2) by the art project with the enigmatic name "My Hole: Hole in Art." This is a "critical essay" that developed with some freedom, inspired by two exhibitions curated by Akira Takaishi and Tomohito Ishii, which delved into the motif of the "hole."
I. What is a "Hole"?
"My Hole: Hole in Art" by Akira Takaishi and Tomohito Ishii began its activities in 2014, identifying the outdoor exhibition "SPACE TOTSUKA 70 (Wood. Wall. Grass. Earth. House. Stone. Sky. Land. Fire. Air. Water…)" held in 1970 on the premises of the apartment where Noboru Takayama lived, by Koji Enokura, Takayama, Hiroshi Fujii and others, as a turning point in art and society, and has been engaged in attempts to examine the "holes" that Fujii and others dug in the earth and reconnect them to the present (Takayama and the others were involved in the "Mono-ha" movement that developed around the 1970s, while also pursuing their own independent experiments). This project represents both the culmination of their activities over several years and a new challenge. Just as with the project’s name, the "hole" serves as a basso continuo in both "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror." So what is a hole? Looking back, there are holes everywhere in the world—physical, functional, conceptual. And most are difficult to see. But that is precisely what makes a hole a hole: it is only visualized when some kind of structure is presupposed. A hole is a concavity or a space with depth, a tube or tunnel; it is emptiness (kū) or vacancy, or some kind of place of stasis; it exists as another world or as an interface toward another world. To present the hole as a space of possibility that admits various things and interpretations would be an attempt to lift up what is suppressed in the world. At the same time, it is also a way of making visible the various forces that are operating unconsciously. Takaishi and Ishii each conceive of the "hole" respectively as something that penetrates downward (verticality) and something that communicates laterally (horizontality). The former grows darker and more uncertain the further one advances, receding from the real world. The latter will cause the world to emerge as multilayered through the process of continuously circling multiple different holes. The former hole indicates the immediate subterranean and underground world, while also tracing back to the unconscious and things and histories exiled to the past. It also connects to the other world—the realm of the dead and the spiritual and mysterious. The latter was conceived as a hole-shaped space that receives images, like the eye or a camera, but would also include the process by which images reflect and chain together. The two are contrasted as a continuum of darkness and light, depth and reflection. But apart from such contrasts, is it not the case that in the process of cutting into the material substrate and the depths of things, they in fact reveal a remarkable relationship?
II. Subterraneans: Entering the Underground and Returning
Akira Takaishi, whose work involves violating and imploding the extreme limits of what makes a painting a painting—through physical distortions and cuts in the paint and support—has been silently continuing to dig holes in the earth within "My Hole: Hole in Art." Whether with painting or the earth, one might say that Takaishi’s strength lies in a physical and centripetal inquiry that excavates from the surface into the depths. It goes without saying that Koji Enokura’s Humidity (1970), Hiroshi Fujii’s Wave B (1970), and Noboru Takayama’s Drama Underground Zoo 2 (1970) from "Space Totsuka ‘70" are among the references for the hole, but Haruki Murakami’s Pinball, 1973 (1980) is also cited as a reference. Coincidentally, there is a scene in which the protagonist digs a hole in a vacant lot, and the fact that the setting is also the winter of 1970—the same period as "Space Totsuka ‘70"—was the deciding factor. I have seen Takaishi’s holes twice before. A rectangular hole, an L-shaped hole with a staircase form constructed inside—both are vivid, and in the strata one can confirm traces of the natural and historical processes the land has undergone. For Takaishi, the earth is the foundation and origin of our lives, bodies, and world. And yet it has been driven underground by consciousness and territorialized by human beings. By cutting from the surface into the interior of the earth, Takaishi attempts to summon what is invisible, hidden, and forgotten. A hole is a fissure and a wound. By bringing out memories of the past together with pain, the hole becomes a catalyst that prompts reflection in the living and could ultimately heal the past and the human. The gallery is underground, and one descends the stairs. Upon entering the space, the presence of a structure made of jet-black railroad ties makes itself felt. This is Noboru Takayama’s Underground Zoo (1968/2022). The railroad ties are said to embody the meaning of the railways laid and the coal mine labor conducted by Japan in its colonies. From there, the contemplation deepens toward the negative history of the twentieth century, including Auschwitz (many people transported by railway were massacred and buried underground). Hiroki Azuma states in "On the Stupidity of Evil, or the Problem of the Concentration Camp and the Housing Estate" (Genron 10, 2019) that [the prosperity of mass life was built upon the mass death of the first half of the twentieth century]. *1 The "mass death" and "mass life" of the past hundred years encompass railroad ties and zoos (a modern apparatus for viewing) alike. The staircase-like structure that descends and ascends (Takaishi has also incorporated a similar form) seems to guide one toward an infinite cycle of descending into and returning from, and entering again into, the buried past and the underground and unconscious world. In the same essay, Azuma, referring to "the act of descending into a well" in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), writes that it may be possible to "continue to remember the stupidity of the act of perpetration itself, neither forgetting the perpetration nor entrusting oneself to the narrative of the victim." *2 It seems to the author that this is a passage that connects Takayama and Takaishi. In Takaishi’s work beyond Underground Zoo, the floor of the gallery opens in a square, exposing—revealing!—what cannot normally be seen, an invisible phase, namely the underground space. Looking in, a sloping terrain spreads out: truly another world. The surprise of encountering nature spreading just beneath the world superficially controlled by humans, as if glimpsed through a gap in the white cube. Learning that flat cityscapes had been constructed on undulating ground, the city begins to surface bearing a pre-human aspect. Takaishi has entered the underground and sculpted the soil there—piling it high in one place and lower in another—and left it as is. The upper part of the former presents a clear rectangle, and that of the latter is a flat surface with a round hole at its center (a hole within a hole that opens in the floor…). The details of the underground space and the sculptural forms are relayed via camera onto displays on the floor. The floor panel was apparently already there, but the fact that Takaishi has opened it up and connected the gallery to the underground world is noteworthy. In Takaishi’s work, in addition to the descent and ascent into the underground, the nested structure of a hole within a hole invites the viewer into infinite movement. From the material depth of Takayama’s work and the imaginary underground space it induces, passing through Takaishi’s connection to an actual underground space, one arrives at Nikolay Smirnov’s Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World (2019) and Chthonopolitics (2022). Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World is a reconstruction of the exhibition shown at the 2019 Ural Industrial Biennial; on multiple displays on the floor, footage is screened ranging from the plan for an eternal underground museum deep in the permafrost city of Yakutsk in the Sakha Republic of Russia (originating in the 1920s), to scenes from a painting exhibition in a frozen underground space, to an ancient foal *3 excavated frozen due to the effects of global warming. Blood has been collected from the foal and mammoths, and research into cloning is said to be advancing in Japan as well. Around the turn of the twentieth century in Russia, "Cosmism" was fashionable, including extreme utopian thinking—represented by Tsiolkovsky (a pioneer of rocket engineering)—that advocated immortality and the advance into space, and sought to control nature through science and technology. In the 1920s, a nationalist Eurasianism emerged. Both of these are based on non-Western identities. According to Takaishi, Smirnov evaluates mystical utopian thinking of the former kind, along with contemporary "techno-animism," as alternatives to the present situation. And Smirnov criticizes "neo-Eurasianism," represented by Putin, as a reactionary recurrence of the latter in the present day. He seeks to save the "underground world"—where national borders change artificially and resource extraction and pollution do not cease—by drawing it not only back toward animism and mysticism, but by directing it toward the pre-human origin. The author maintains a distance from both mystical utopian thinking and "techno-animism," but feels sympathy with Smirnov’s gaze toward and from the underground. Across the entire wall of the gallery, Smirnov’s Chthonopolitics text is displayed in Russian, like an incantation. In front of the floor displays, several stones are placed, and on close inspection, holes, labyrinths, and line engravings resembling human heads are carved on their surfaces. These are things that Takaishi has quietly inserted into Smirnov’s work area. The fact that line engravings have been discovered in caves on both sides of the Sea of Japan—in the Russian Far East and in Hokkaido (Yoichi and Otaru)—likely prompted the connection between Russia and Japan. In "Subterraneans," what was supposed not to exist, and what had been forgotten, is thrust upon the viewer. At the same time, it also gives rise to the question "Who is looking?" Is it not the case that beings other than humans, on the other side of the hole or in the underground, are looking at us…? But in fact, we ourselves are included there too. In this exhibition, each visitor becomes a "subterranean" and ends up looking back at the world from underground. In the dark underground world, moreover, the very act and system of "viewing" is suspended, and further questions beget questions: "For whose sake is this exhibition?" "Who is the viewer?"… And it is precisely that moment when the "hole" rises up as a space of possibility. After descending into the underground world, one heads to the other side of the gallery. There, in a bright space, is Takaishi’s small painting Inner Surface (Stairway) (2021). On the surface with an inexplicable distortion, wrinkles, and texture—leaving a slimy impression—something like stairs can be seen, as the title suggests. And in front of it, a ladder is set against an existing bookshelf that reaches to the ceiling. The viewer, by looking upward, will be imaginatively led toward the overground or the sky. And so (like a pilgrimage through the interior of the womb), having traversed the darkness of the underground, one climbs the stairs and returns to the overground world.
III. A Call from the Depths of the Earth
Speaking of underground, Suwa in Nagano Prefecture has what is said to be Japan’s only subterranean legend. Koga Saburo descends through the great hole of Mt. Tateshina to tour the "underground country" in search of a princess who has disappeared, spending some happy days there, but one day he grows homesick for the overground world; when he finally returns, however, looking at his own reflection in the surface of a pond, he finds that he has become a serpent. A film made with this tale as a basso continuo, A Story about a Story (Ei Yoshii, 2022), centering on footage shot in Suwa together with images of Rikuzentakata, a disaster-stricken area of the Great East Japan Earthquake, scatters words about the Japanese natural and climatic environment. The earth, land, the underground world, and the transformation of landscapes through soil extraction for development and reconstruction… the film raises the issue of confronting nature and the natural environment anew, against the harms of modernization and the environmental destruction we face. The underground world has been used by humans for the purposes of storage, preservation, concealment, and burial. Things that are unneeded, things one wants to forget, and bodies have been buried there. At the same time, humans have excavated from the earth crops and resources, relics and ruins. Strata are an archive that narrates the history of the earth. They are traces of past changes in the earth’s crust and climate, and also a resource in which the compositions and fossils of plants and animals form layers. The geological epoch of the "Anthropocene," coined in geology in the early twenty-first century, has now spread through society over the course of several years, but the gaze of Takaishi and Ishii toward the "hole" must be something each sensed for themselves early on, in step with the movements of the age. The accident at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which occurred with the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, still has not come to an end, burdened with the problem of processing and long-term management of radioactive waste and contaminated water. What is more, an unimaginably long time of 100,000 years is said to be required for all radiation to disappear. Contamination transcends national borders and spreads on a global scale. There, the gaze of the non-human—from plants and animals and things as non-humans—becomes necessary. "Space Totsuka ‘70" was, in an era of rapid globalization and high economic growth (also an era when nuclear power plants began operating), an extreme practice of intuitively heading toward the root that is the earth, out of a sense of crisis toward society and art. About half a century later, in an era of climate change and digitalization and post-Fukushima, "My Hole: Hole in Art" seems to grasp the underground simultaneously as another world and as a gaze toward the soil and earth, and toward microscopic beings such as microorganisms. The COVID-19 pandemic that swept the entire world in 2020 is said to have environmental destruction as a cause, in which soil and earth are intimately involved. And on top of that, in 2022, a shocking event that would greatly alter world history occurred: the war in Ukraine, which broke out twelve days after "Subterraneans" ended (on February 24). Smirnov, living in Moscow, expressed concern and issued a statement, beginning with "Like imagination, the power of the underground world is a double-edged sword," summoning the depths of the underground world as an antiwar and anti-imperialist imagination, and calling for the cessation of the war. Receiving this, Takaishi published his own statement along with his own words on March 29. Takaishi stated that the exhibition "Subterraneans" "reaffirmed its position on the side of those suppressed by state violence, and expressed its opposition to the war," and described Smirnov’s underground world as one that resists colonialist violence. Takaishi also processed photographs of Chthonopolitics, which had been deployed in Russian on the gallery walls, with Smirnov’s consent, and sent them out as a message saying "No to War." Ukraine, blessed with rich soil and coal resources, is a region that Russia has long valued. Many wars have been fought over energy and resources in the past, and this is no exception. Humanity has repeatedly fought over the seizure of land and contested borders. To enter a hole, to venture deep into the earth, is nothing other than to distance oneself from the human world and reconsider the world from the perspective of what is buried and accumulated everywhere—roots, microorganisms, bones—of what has died. "Subterraneans" continues to call out to us from the profound depths (the hole) of the earth, surpassing human history.
IV. Mirrorless Mirror: Works and Perceptions in Multiple Reflection
Even before entering the exhibition of "Mirrorless Mirror," something is already extraordinary. Even going underground, one cannot enter. Beyond a chain stretched across and a glass door blocking the way, a work gouged by an extraordinary number of axe blows can be seen (Keisuke Tada’s Heaven’s Door #4 (2022)) *4, but one is compelled to turn one’s back on it, return to the overground, and descend again from a service entrance at the back of the building. The viewer is already shifted, body and mind together, into a different mode. In the venue, one first wanders into Michiko Tsuda’s Shakkei Trilogue: Looking Back (2020/2022), in which mirrors, cameras, and projections connect different times and spaces in a nested structure. The Hiroshi Fujii works one next encounters are, on the front wall, the photograph Rock and Man (rock, stone powder, etc.) (1972/2022)—a documentary photograph of a performance in which stone ground into powder is poured from overhead (i.e., entering into the interior of the stone)—and, leaning against a towering large pane of glass (a reflective transmissive body), wood with the surface sand scraped off, bearing vivid traces (To the Inside / To the Outside (1978/2022)). The latter overwhelms the viewer as an interface that physically blocks the space beyond (along with sand adhering like noise) while transmitting and reflecting. Beyond the glass, one can see wall projections, display images, and paintings and flat works. In the space with an introduction and atmosphere completely different from "Subterraneans," works by nine artists including Ishii are exhibited in a carefully considered spatial arrangement. And upon that, the multilayered nature and nested structures contained within each work will give rise to diverse "mirror"-like experiences. With Fujii’s work as a kind of barrier, taking "mirror" as a "hole" and entering a world that extends from reflective surfaces such as glass and mirrors into displays and virtual space. At the very front, Akihiko Taniguchi’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (2018) and Parallax (2021) are placed left and right. The former, referencing Mallarmé’s poem "Un coup de dés" (1897), attempts to connect past, present, and future through the physical output (stationery and stones including dice) of a 3D model of a landscape in which a die has fallen, and a simulation in video (where some landscape is superimposed on a thrown die). In the latter, visitors will experience the parallax between actual space and virtual space, and the meta-structure of the world, by shooting with a virtual iPhone. On the left and right walls that follow, Saori Miyake’s Garden (Potsdam) (2019) and Garden (Wadakura) (2022) are projected. Both are videos of fountains in parks filmed by Miyake, edited on her computer with black and white inverted (a negative-positive [monochrome] reversal). The former references a photograph taken at a fountain in Potsdam by a person related to Miyake who participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a gymnast (a symbol of human technology defying gravity), and the latter is a fountain near Wadakura Moat in the outer garden of the Imperial Palace, filmed in 2021 when the Tokyo Olympics were held. The juxtaposition of these two evokes reflection from the private and public history of Germany and Japan. The display of Taniguchi’s and Miyake’s videos side by side on the walls, with the contrast of color/monochrome, virtual/photographic negative, and era, evokes the transformation of social suppression (from the national to the everyday unconscious). Looking back from there, Taniguchi’s 3D-printed stones and Fujii’s stones seem to resonate. Heading deeper, one finds Osamu Shikichi’s burning dots spring remix 2022 (2022). In addition to the video on a suspended display (three types), it is intended to experience something akin to the recently popular ASMR *5 via an iPhone photo application. Shikichi also held a performance during the exhibition period, in collaboration with Yuri Sakai, conceived with the bodily sensations of daily life overlapping with the situation in Ukraine: blooming dots for Ukraine + 31 eyescream. *6 Beyond Shikichi’s display is Ishii’s painting Sub Anaglyph (pachira) (2022), and the two appear to resonate with each other in the indescribable tactility and sensuality of the motifs of circles and holes. Ishii’s work is installed on the wall of the reception counter at the regular gallery entrance. Made from raw hemp, modeling paste, oil and acrylic paint, and UV print, it bears abstract forms in red and blue that evoke jars and vessels. The multilayered image is said to incorporate the reflection and transmission of glass by photographing a houseplant from inside and outside the building. Amid the strange texture and three-dimensionality in which the tip faces toward light and underground while the houseplant remains under human management, images created by Ishii’s bodily movements and UV prints intersect, the hole-like form at the center seems to lure one toward another dimension. From there, on the left wall, is Tada’s Heaven’s Door #4, which one had faced across the chain from outside. The viewer knows that the extraordinary traces on the door’s surface are the result of the violence of the axe swung down by the artist. At the same time, it also looks as if the light of grace were being emitted from the door. As if the only way to obtain (externalize) the light shut inside the door (or on the other side of the door) were to destroy and gouge the surface. A support or object as a fake (ese) door—made by casting an actual door and pouring paint into it. An axe instead of a paintbrush. The vivid trace of force, contained within neither painting nor sculpture, and the emission of "light." While the media differ, in the dynamism of intervening in the self-evidence of the surface, Tada’s and Fujii’s works connect. At the innermost part of the exhibition space is Tatsuya Okawa’s Mirrorless Mirror (2017/2022), which also gives this exhibition its title. As one approaches, one’s own figure is reflected on the jet-black surface of the darkness—and yet the mirror is immaterial and one’s hand passes through its interior. The experience of reflecting yet passing through momentarily suspends the viewer’s consciousness. Upon that, the self-evidence of the world and perception will begin to be questioned. One more work is exhibited in this show: Yosuke Amemiya’s Hand Mirror in the Wall (2022). As the title suggests, this work is inside the wall; specifically, the base of the wall surface is carved convexly in the shape of a hand mirror, with a mirror embedded in it (in other words, it has become part of the wall). The hand mirror is in a contradictory situation of existing yet being unable to be seen. That is to say, the work exists by believing it "exists" and imagining it, and through being sealed in darkness and "harboring the reflection of a latent mirror" (Ishii), it connects to Takaishi’s "underground space." Ishii has been making paintings, with multilayered images woven in, as the non-self/non-human realm of the human—the ⟨jouissance⟩—without boundaries between self and other, while contemplating the relationship between a daily life overflowing with images and the body. And here, the works of Ishii, Okawa, and Amemiya—each a solitary, singular presence—begin (it seems to the author) to resonate with one another. In "Mirrorless Mirror," the usually integrated perception and sensation is not a given, but continues to slide laterally. Glass, displays, projections, paintings, flat works, dark reflections and sealed reflections… each, in its materiality, displayed content, or void-like mode, harbors multiple frames and worlds, reflecting on one another and sometimes creaking, as one derivation chains to another. Yet this is not a chain of simulacra; it is always the "thing" and the conceptual "hole" that serve as the starting point. In this exhibition, while dealing with the mirroring of vision, in the process of continually deviating from visual coherence, other senses are rather evoked and swell up. Amid all this, a thought suddenly strikes one. Is not Ishii’s painting surveying the entire exhibition space it faces (everything except Okawa’s and Amemiya’s works), while simultaneously absorbing the visible and invisible images and reflections in the space, and metaphysically representing the works and perceptions in multiple reflection? Is the exhibition of "Mirrorless Mirror" not in fact conceptually woven into Ishii’s painting?
V. The Mirror Extended into the Digital, and Soil
When one thinks of a "mirror," one generally imagines a glass plate with silver applied to its back. However, such a mirror with few distortions was invented and became widespread only from the first half of the nineteenth century onward (Western modernity); before that, glass, and before that, metal materials such as bronze mirrors were used to reflect the face and figure. Going further back, obsidian and other stones; the mirror surface that humanity has used for the longest time is the surface of water, as the myth of Narcissus attests. Before modernity, the frequency of mirror use and the people who used them were quite limited. In other words, one can say that as mirrors came into circulation in modernity, simultaneously with the grasp of the self-image, the concepts of "reflection" and "reflection/introspection" began to permeate (this also synchronizes with the period when self-portraits increased). At the first World’s Fair of 1851 (London), the Crystal Palace, made of glass and iron frames, appeared; architecture woven of transmission and reflection was the essence of the science and technology of the time. Glass has a hard, fixed feel to the touch, but is in fact liquid in terms of molecular structure. A "crystal" is a solid in which molecules are arranged in an orderly structure, while glass, with molecules randomly packed inside, is said to be a "liquid with motion frozen." *7 Glass is recognized as a "solid" by human perception, yet is a "liquid" at the molecular level. The same object is recognized and positioned differently depending on the observing subject, the scale, and the method of analysis. What appears contradictory from one viewpoint is not a contradiction given multiple viewpoints as a premise. Rather, it is as multiple viewpoints as a whole that things and phenomena exist. The very worldview and method of grasping the world that serves as the premise for feeling a "contradiction" is being questioned right now. The singularity of glass can perhaps imaginatively connect to the singularity of "Mirrorless Mirror" itself—the exhibition title and Okawa’s work. Returning to the mirror: its widespread use overlaps with the era in which silver gelatin photography was invented. In photography, people came to encounter the world and themselves after the fact, as images fixed on glass plates. Film, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, introduced a time axis by rotating images continuously burned onto film through a reel for projection (this technology synchronizes with railway technology, and also connects from the aspect of imaging apparatus). From the 1960s onward, a new mirror-image action of real-time feedback by video camera was created (Dan Graham, who paid attention to its phenomenological aspects, presented numerous experimental works through the 1970s, and later created works using half-mirrors both indoors and outdoors). In the present day, when digital technology has become widespread, the "mirror" or mirror-like effect has undergone new developments. From "mirroring" on a PC and the camera’s "mirrorless," to using a smartphone as a substitute for a hand mirror, to avatars in metaverse space and "digital twins," the concept of the "mirror" is expanding into an increasingly multilayered thing. The "hole" here can be understood not only as a shape or system, but as an interface that moves back and forth between actual space and virtual space. Passing again through the hole and the underground world, I would like to arrive at "Mirrorless Mirror" once more. First, to restate something that is difficult to even bring to consciousness: almost everything that constitutes our world, including our own bodies, derives from soil. *8 The same applies to the reflective materials and imaging equipment that are important themes of this exhibition. Glass is made of silica sand, which has silica as its main component, with soda and lime added; displays, projectors, iPhones and other devices, 3D and UV print materials, and the equipment used in their production processes are all made from resources from the earth (wood and stone are more directly derived from soil and the underground). The fact that the various materials and devices that cause reflection, mirroring, and transcription in the exhibition and production process—including digital ones—derive from the underground connects "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror" in a relationship of raw material and product, origin and derivation, exploitation and enjoyment. It was modern science and technology that drove the transformation from the former to the latter. Takaishi and Ishii, while making use of the technological developments that modernity made possible from soil and the earth as material and subject, summon from the past and the present that which overflows from modernity and those phenomena (reflection, virtual images, multiple reflections… hybrid "ghosts"…?). Furthermore, from "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror"—though abruptly—the author is reminded of Lake Suwa in Nagano Prefecture. Beneath Lake Suwa, two great faults intersect: the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line of the Fossa Magna, which spans north to south, and the Median Tectonic Line, which spans east to west. Indeed, Lake Suwa is said to have been born from the confrontation of these faults—a cross-shaped crack running deep in the earth, a "hole." The tranquil water surface reflects the surrounding landscape like a "mirror," but in winter it freezes (solidifies), and—though not every year—the ice rises and runs linearly across the lake surface in an undulating form, a natural phenomenon called "Omiwatari" (the divine crossing). Its form is as if a serpent. *9 Whether the shape of the Omiwatari ice is related to the fault deep in the lake is unknown, but it is certainly an extremely distinctive phenomenon produced by special topography, water currents, and climate.
VI. A New Practice of Surrealism
Lewis Carroll acquired a camera early in the mid-nineteenth century and was absorbed in photographing girls. The camera is a development of the camera obscura (a box in which a pinhole inverts the outside world and forms an image inside), and the camera obscura derives from Renaissance perspective. The camera, which fixes space statically based on X and Y axes, can truly be called a product of the modern system. In the same era, entertainment devices that induced visual illusions based on photographs and paintings—such as the zoetrope and the panorama—developed, but these can also be interpreted as aiming to exceed modernity by working on the perception of each individual. Film subsequently appeared and permeated the twentieth century as a collective, immersive entertainment apparatus. Currently this has been extended into VR, AR, projection mapping, and virtual space. The camera as an apparatus representing modernity, as well as the visual apparatus described above, however, presuppose control of perception by the system and subordination to the meaning of content, and are in that sense bound to modernity. Both "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror" are attempts to deviate from such control of perception and lead one into the midst of the darkness and unconscious of the underground (whose bottom is unknowable) and a labyrinthine chain including reflection, transmission, and the virtual (which has no end). Furthermore, "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror" can even be seen to signify the two Alice stories that Carroll wrote: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)—the former corresponding to the hole of "Subterraneans" and the latter to the world of "Mirrorless Mirror." In the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the March Hare carrying a pocket watch rushes into a hole (Wonderland). The "Wonderland" on the other side of the hole is—unlike the inversion of the camera obscura—a nonsensical and surreal world where words and logic frequently slide laterally, with time and spatial scale continuously changing. Carroll, who was a mathematician, lived in a world that deviated from modernity through the camera’s hole, the hole of Wonderland, and the world of the mirror, in an era when social discipline was advancing alongside the Industrial Revolution. This seems to inadvertently connect to Surrealism. He also left experimental visual poems, and one might consider Carroll a forerunner of the Surrealists who made use of various media. If the camera obscura is a modern apparatus, then what the author considers an apparatus that transcends modernity is the projector. Both are box-shaped devices, but whereas the former projects a landscape outside onto the interior through a hole, the projector radiates light from the interior outward. Including the magic lantern of the seventeenth century and the film projector of the nineteenth century, these are devices for forming a coherent image, but since the projector is projected onto space, an image can be disrupted when a person or object enters between the light source and the projection surface—in other words, it forms dynamic phenomena within a space. Moholy-Nagy’s Light–Space Modulator (1922) is an a priori attempt at this, but what is important is the act of projecting (project: in addition to the emission of light, as a concept or method, an "undertaking/projection"). It is a throwing of questions toward different, heterogeneous and dynamic spaces and societies, and it is also for each recipient to receive it and take on the responsibility (response) / responsibility/possibility of response. Art is a continuum of such throwings, and it is the impossibility of a pre-established harmonious image or a single answer that becomes possibility. Around 1970, what resonates with "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror," and with the unconscious and Surrealism, is the "Monolith" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and the "Solaris Ocean" in Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), released as science fiction films. The former is an American and the latter a Soviet film, rooted in different systems, yet connected in their view of the cosmos and the world. They question the existence of humanity, which has developed science and technology, and maintain an attitude of communicating with the mysteries of the cosmos or the unconscious as the origin of humanity. This is almost the same period as "Space Totsuka ‘70," and also overlaps with the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene era. The Monolith, a linear rectangular solid, is a mysterious black being—material or immaterial, unclear—that warps through space transcending place and time, and can be interpreted as a kind of "hole," an inexhaustible interface. The white Solaris Ocean is a liquid resource that interactively reflects and materializes the memories and thoughts of the viewer, evoking "Mirrorless Mirror." While black and white, geometric being and fluid appear contrastive, each can be said to be a protean potentiality that transcends modern classification. Among past media art installations I have worked on is polar (2000), *10 which takes the Solaris Ocean as its starting point. Ten years later, the same artist and curator created polar m [mirrored] (2010), *11 in which the semi-transparent space (7×7m) into which experiencers enter in the former becomes doubled like a mirror: one allows entry (internally observational) and the other does not (externally observational). Topologically, the former has a hole, and since both are semi-transparent, the boundary between interior and exterior (and between internal and external observation) becomes ambiguous. In modern science, the world has been grasped and described statically by separating the observing subject and the object. However, from the early twentieth century onward, a transition was made to an era in which the world is grasped through the dynamic relationship between observer and object, which cannot be separated. At the micro and macro scales of time and space, the unified worldview (centered on humans) that modern science has grasped is betrayed at every turn. In the world, organization and dispersion constantly occur, and what were considered opposites—matter and non-matter, solid and liquid—are revealed to be connected in a dynamic process. Surrealism in the first half of the twentieth century, by confronting time and the unconscious, questioned modernity and anthropocentrism. It was also an actual and critical provocation rooted in a sense of crisis toward society and the age. Is it not possible to understand the "Monolith," "Solaris," and "Space Totsuka ‘70" as belonging to the lineage of Surrealism in the era around 1970? In recent years in the field of anthropology, "multi-species anthropology"—which, with the Anthropocene in mind, orients toward "more-than-human"—is being examined traversing various fields of natural science and the humanities. Art and performance are included there as important elements. "My Hole: Hole in Art" can also be said to be a practice that extends Surrealism into the present, in step with such trends.
VII. In the Midst of Reflection and Mirroring
The "hole" can also be grasped as another dimension—such as a "black hole" or "wormhole" in the cosmos—in which spacetime is warped by enormous gravity. Current cosmological science also holds that most of the cosmos consists not of atoms but of "dark matter," and that even the gravity that holds the solar system in place is dark matter. Dark matter, though different from atoms, behaves like "matter," and its density decreases as the cosmos expands. The cosmos is said to contain "antimatter." Hitoshi Murayama states that "every particle has a ‘antiparticle’ with the same properties but opposite charge, and therefore every form of matter has ‘antimatter.’ At the moment of the Big Bang, the same amount as matter should have been born, but antimatter that exists in a natural state cannot be found in the present cosmos. This is also a great mystery." *12 "Antimatter" makes one realize that the cosmos structurally requires a kind of "mirror," and that the word called "matter" does not necessarily represent "things" at the human scale. Even so, matter actually exists in the world, and matter has mass. And it is said that it is the Higgs boson that generates that "mass." Proposed by British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, it was finally found in 2013 at the experimental facility at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) dedicated to discovering the Higgs boson—verified at last about half a century later. The Higgs boson decays at the moment of its creation and splits into other particles, which also split into multiple particles, and so on through multiple further splits, making it extremely difficult to confirm its existence. It is a bold leap of imagination, but the forlornness of the Higgs boson’s characteristic—that one can only trace back from what was born afterwards—seems to overlap with the nature of "Mirrorless Mirror." From the various events that occurred in the overall exhibition and the production processes of individual works—the process of their reflection and mirroring—something that itself exists and becomes the origin of things and images present here, yet is difficult to reach… In the exhibition (not in reaching truth as in the observation of the Higgs boson), in the midst of phenomenal and imaginary reflection and mirroring, it would be important to search for that origin while ultimately drifting away from it and continuing to wander. The two exhibitions have ended… yet the exhibition continues. The work sculpted by Akira Takaishi still exists beneath the floor (there is also the possibility that it will collapse in heavy rain or the like, and return to soil). Inside the wall, Yosuke Amemiya’s hand mirror quietly stands in the darkness. From these existences, one thinks of humans, the gallery, Tokyo, and the world. But not only from these works. We are being watched from the darkness, the unconscious, the invisible depths, even now, and at the same time are entrusted with the act of continuing to watch. The world opened by "Subterraneans" and "Mirrorless Mirror" exists in memory and imagination and in daily life, and continues to shake us without ceasing.
Notes *1 Hiroki Azuma, "On the Stupidity of Evil, or the Problem of the Concentration Camp and the Housing Estate," Genron 10 (Genron, 2019). [Author’s translation] *2 Ibid. *3 "‘The Mammoth Exhibition’ Is Not Just About Mammoths! World Premiere of the Complete Frozen Specimen of the ‘Ancient Foal’ Whose Blood and Urine Were Collected Decided!" IT Life Hack (April 19, 2019). itlifehack.jp/archives/1002942… *4 At the bottom of the stairs in front of the entrance, a video of Keisuke Tada’s Heaven’s Door #4 (2022) with axe blows is playing on a display. *5 ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response): perceptual stimulation is transmitted to the brain, producing a sensation as if another person’s senses have taken over one’s own. *6 Performance blooming dots for Ukraine + 31 eyescream, included in this volume, M-22–23. *7 Editorial Committee, "Is Glass a Solid? A Liquid?" The Physical Society of Japan (2016). www.jps.or.jp/books/gakkaishi/… *8 Masaki Koike, "Smartphones and Food Are Both Made from Soil. A Soil Scientist Talks about the Future of ‘Non’-Renewable Soil," Yahoo! Japan SDGs (October 11, 2022). sdgs.yahoo.co.jp/originals/132… *9 Speaking of serpents, although not at Lake Suwa, Koga Saburo, who encountered his serpent-self at a pond in this region, also comes to mind. *10 Carsten Nicolai + Marco Peljhan, polar (Curators: Kazunao Abe, Yukiko Shikata; Canon ARTLAB, 2000). yukikoshikata.com/artlab10-pol… *11 Carsten Nicolai + Marco Peljhan, polar m [mirrored] (Curators: Kazunao Abe, Yukiko Shikata; Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], 2010). www.ycam.jp/archive/works/pola… *12 Hitoshi Murayama, What Is the Universe Made Of? Solving the Mysteries of the Universe through Elementary Particle Physics (Gentosha Shinsho, 2010). [Author’s translation]