- A Document of Freezing
The "underground" that serves as the leitmotif of Part 1 of this project is, as recorded in Nikolay Smirnov’s text piece Chthonopolitics (2022), a figurative image associated with death, the unconscious, and irrationality. This "bottom of the hole" constitutes a dynamic field that is concealed and repressed by overground secular life and the "ego," while at the same time conditioning and sometimes destroying them. The enigmatic concept "mirrorless mirror" advocated in Part 2 will be examined later. But it is at least apparently something to do with "mirrors." Let us first confirm here that the experience of a mirror is generally an experience of the "gaze," and that the self-negating rhetoric of "a mirror without a mirror (mirrorless mirror)" will likely cultivate a nuance of a ghost-like, directionless gaze—adrift, having lost its surface to fix upon. This is because the author had already witnessed, in the previous iteration of "My Hole: Hole in Art" held in 2019, a figure in which this isolated "gaze" had crystallized into the underground. In that project, Akira Takaishi had sculpted an object in the depths of a deeply dug hole, with a perspectival convergence applied to it. If pictorial perspective is properly set by accounting for the viewpoint and the relational distances between multiple objects, then Takaishi’s object appeared as if cut out from a picture plane with distorted perspective still applied—and since it could only be viewed from above, looking down into the hole rather than facing the picture plane, it presented the aspect of a gaze that had lost the conditions of a "gaze"—a solitary gaze incapable of being positioned within relationships. It was, so to speak, a gaze left behind in permafrost. In the current "Subterraneans" part, Smirnov develops an "exhibition project" titled "Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World" (a reassembly of content presented at the 2019 Ural Industrial Biennial). We should pay attention to this form itself. For "My Hole: Hole in Art" has consistently attempted curatorial operations concerning the frame of "exhibition" itself—including verificatory approaches to and recreations of exhibitions by preceding generations, and structures comprising multiple exhibition venues. "Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror" likewise follows the previous project’s method of artists curating their own and others’ works, and the project as a whole is composed of two separate exhibitions. Smirnov’s "exhibition project" further nests curation in a recursive, mise-en-abîme structure as an "exhibition within an exhibition." In "Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World," viewers walk into a plural arrangement of tablet-type terminals and look around at displays placed directly on the floor. The function of "exhibition"—of "exposing" to the gaze of others—is foregrounded there. Furthermore, what is shown on these screens are works and activity records by other artists and researchers, and between "production/activity" and "exhibition," multiple parties are involved as intermediaries. Boris Groys, taking into account the shift from the self-governing concept of the author to a multiple authorship constituted by the various selections, evaluations, and decisions aimed at exhibition—in which responsibility is shared among multiple factors including not only artists but also curators, committees, foundations, and public institutions—analyzes a situation in which creativity is recognized in the very act of "exhibiting" objects. In relation to this new definition of authorship, works that are not exhibited are not art as something that retains life, but become "documentation" of art instead. Conversely, such "documentation" recovers art-as-life precisely when it is "exhibited." Within the art institution, it is possible to give life to documentation simply by exhibiting it, so the art archive would be particularly well-suited to archiving this kind of project—projects that were realized at some point in the past, or will be realized in the future. And it would be especially suitable for archiving utopian projects, projects that will never be fully realized. These utopian projects are destined to fail within the present economic and political realities, but they can survive in art. Within it, the documentation of these projects is continuously handed down, changing its author. (Note 1) All of the images constituting Smirnov’s "exhibition project" refer to the underground as a topos related to the cycle of "life"—death, immortality/preservation, and regeneration. For example, Irina Filatova’s video installation Eternal Underground Museum, which deals with a utopian project from the 1920s Soviet Union that planned to build a museum in the permafrost underground to enable eternal preservation (material immortality). Or the autopsy record of a mammoth body found in good condition. The latter footage was shot by researchers obsessed with mammoth cloning and captures the scene of bodily fluid flowing from the mammoth out of the permafrost.
- A Topos of Survival
Let us here confirm two points. First, the four works/records constituting "Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World" (including those mentioned above) all share the same format of outputting images to tablets, making it difficult at first glance to distinguish whether each image is a "work" or a "record." At least during the author’s own viewing, every tablet appeared to be playing images monotonously, like a slideshow, and the whole presented the aspect of an archival accumulation of records, each bearing some mutual relevance. Second, these images themselves, as already noted, are related to schemes of granting immortality or life. The "blood" shed by the mammoth is a symbolic figure of a living being awakened and re-generated from a long sleep of freezing, and the technology of cloning also realizes a kind of "survival." Based on Groys’s argument, one can say that Smirnov’s "exhibition project," fittingly for its theme of re-generation from the underground, makes use of the method of art documentation that activates "life" through the "exhibition" of records. According to Groys, it is mortal life that requires documentation, and "there is no need to document what is immortal." (Note 2) Filatova’s video—which "exhibits" and exposes to the overground gaze the record of the model of an "eternal museum"—a subterranean laboratory in Yakutsk, lined with portrait paintings of the founders of permafrost science who schemed to attain immortality—is in that sense an inverted endeavor. It corroborates the complex definition of the "underground" as a dimension where neither death nor immortality is ever determined as a permanent attribute, and where immortality/preservation is seen not as "eternal life" but as a quasi-death state of waiting for "re-generation." In this exhibition, the underground is not merely a closed domain, but a dynamic terrain that calls out to overground secular life through the "hole." Takaishi’s underground formation from the previous project also appears (in a different form) in this exhibition’s Subterranean Surface (2021–22). But the object, which previously presented the aspect of a "solitary gaze," is now equipped with a mechanism that actively intersects with the gazes of others. Images of the object made in the gallery’s underground space are relayed in real time and output to floor-placed monitors. Just as with Smirnov, the subterranean object is documentarily mediated and exposed to the viewer’s gaze. "My Hole: Hole in Art," since its founding in 2015, has consistently read into the outdoor exhibition "Space Totsuka ’70"—held in 1970 in the vacant lot of Noboru Takayama’s lodgings, "Totsuka Space"—and especially into the "holes" that appeared there, a historical, social, and psychological "laceration," and has continued to traumatically return that wound to the present/⟨self⟩. (Note 3) In this exhibition, a recreation of Takayama’s Underground Zoo (1968) is on display. Whereas Drama Underground Zoo 2 (1970), which Takayama made at "Space Totsuka ’70," involved physically excavating a "hole," the work in this exhibition—consisting of a staircase-like part and a stage-like horizontal frame part—is an object placed without intervening in the ground. Nevertheless, the horizontal surface, much like a landing, is shown as a blank area enclosed by a frame, generating a shallow vertical space between it and the floor. This shallow depression will surely be sufficient to virtually indicate the "hole" continuing beneath. The railroad ties that Takayama uses as material are found objects associated with modern state policies such as railway construction and coal mine development. One can almost sense the many bodies that labored under oppression in these policies layered in the underground of Underground Zoo—because, it is said, the image of the "thirteen steps" leading to the gallows was projected onto this work. The framed opening, this bottomless stage, even looks like a cavity about to emit something. The voice that might be heard there is also a substance bearing a ghost-like "survival." In the performance at the exhibition where the work was first presented, there is a record of Takayama buried in the ground, with only his head protruding, holding something in his mouth.
- The Swallowing of the Subject
If Takayama’s opening can be read as a "mouth," this metaphor pushes the "hole" as a "passage" further into signification. That is, the overwhelming subsumption that "swallows" the entire surface area it targets. In the darkness of a hole, one who has been swallowed would be unable to grasp objectively the shape or scale of the hole, or one’s own position, or the presence of other beings. In other words, this "subsumption" is not a mere intake into the interior, but an experience accompanied by the elimination of coordinates that makes the very distinction between interior and exterior difficult from the outset. Part 2 of this project, "Mirrorless Mirror," is precisely concerned with such "swallowing." Ordinarily, the literal body of a mirror is a single physical plate, and however much the image reflected on its surface resembles ourselves, it is not the "real" us, for our organic bodies are not inorganic plates. The smooth reflective surface of the mirror functions fully by concealing this otherness. Indeed, we perceive in the mirror not a plate, but an image that is nothing other than "ourselves." But at the same time, the mirror also asserts its otherness at a certain level. For the mirror image alienates the living body "here" into a spatially isolated "there" (the mirror). In order to possess "our own" image (in the mirror)—in order to become ⟨self⟩—we cannot but be expelled from the original and direct "here." The originary body—that of a newborn child—would be in a state akin to the darkness of a "hole." Unable to recognize its own appearance, the child cannot align itself with the human body image we know so well. What exists is only a collection of fragmented sensations passing "here." Jacques Lacan, in his "mirror stage" theory, explains the action of the mirror in "orthopedically" assembling this "fragmented body" and bringing it together into the gestalt of a "form of totality." (Note 4) The body image with organically integrated limbs that we acquire in the mirror is at once the form of a stable "self"—⟨self⟩—and the form of similarly-shaped "others." The phantom reflected in the mirror, at a distance from "here," "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, while prefiguring its alienating destination." (Note 5, emphasis in original) We pass through the alienation initiated by the mirror’s action, ask "Who is ⟨I⟩?", position ourselves as "I am so-and-so," and assign ourselves social coordinates. In other words, in the process of maturation, we come to position ourselves among "others," as one of "others" ourselves. If the action of the mirror (miroir) is what separates us from the original "literal" directness—the "raw" sensation, literally neither more nor less than that, the uninterpreted, unmeaningful lump of satisfied flesh—and establishes ⟨self⟩ as ego, then the "mirrorless mirror" is apparently a strategy that strokes this the wrong way. In this context, resistance to the mirror is the destruction of ⟨self⟩, and "My Hole" can be understood in this sense. Rock and Man (rock, stone powder, etc.) (1972) by Hiroshi Fujii, also known for works using literal "raw meat," records his own body covered in stone powder, as if reducing the human to an elemental material. The waterfall of material flowing close by would obstruct the performer’s vision and bring that overwhelming subsumption that "swallows" into the darkness of the "hole."
- The Self-Destroying Mirror
This overwhelming subsumption was something that eliminated the objective coordinate system that gives the subject a "position." Yet what the photographs of Fujii finally preserve is the "footprints" left in the stone powder after the performer has departed—the very imprint of a "position," so to speak. As the binary expression "rock and man" in the work’s title plainly indicates, this is a trace of the "human" that remained until the very end even after the influx of dust. But since it is indicated only as a "trace," this human is fixed in the image as "something mortal." Taking into account the earlier argument that the act of "documentation" is directed precisely at mortal beings, here it is the human who is directed toward the "hole" that makes itself equal to matter. What the expression "My Hole" takes upon itself is this dimension of human existence that cannot be overlooked—which, even if not recognized as a supreme being, cannot be ignored as "something mortal." The negative of the "hole" should be perceived not through itself alone, but through the fullness that borders it. Just as a "hole in a shoji screen" is also a "torn shoji screen," "My Hole" is also a "torn self." ⟨Self⟩ as a subject/noun that has been perforated and destroyed should have disappeared by virtue of that very fact of destruction, and yet it remains ghost-like as the possessive (My) of the "hole." The mirror (miroir) was, as noted above, also another name for ⟨self⟩. Hence "mirrorless mirror" (a mirror without a mirror) will present the self-negating figure of a mirror that destroys itself. If ⟨self⟩ becomes a ghost, so does the mirror—perhaps in the aspect of what might be called "pure reflection," having lost the physical plate that supports the reflective surface. In contrast to To the Inside / To the Outside, in which the disappearance of ⟨self⟩ was prompted by the literal material of stone powder, the ghost of the disappeared mirror has instead lost its literal support (the plate). As already seen, the mirror will render its literal support transparent in order to alienate a person from the original "here" to ⟨self⟩. But that support had not disappeared. It must have been required, rather, to separate the body and its mirror image by a certain distance, and to anchor the image to a place (which is precisely why it also had to be made transparent). But in the space unfolded by "Mirrorless Mirror," as shown by Tatsuya Okawa’s optical device of the same name, Mirrorless Mirror (2017/2022), the distance between the body and its mirror image becomes indeterminate. It was through the guarantee of a stable distance that we were able to perceive through the mirror the integrated whole-image of ⟨self⟩. If so, the dissolution or disturbance of this distance must be the mode on which this exhibition focuses.
- Landscapes with ⟨Self⟩, Landscapes without ⟨Self⟩
Externalizing the body from "here" to "there," and positioning ⟨self⟩ within the society of others: this was the separating action initiated by the mirror. It is through this process that ⟨self⟩ comes to compare itself with others, discover its "selfhood," and desire the recognition of this identity. The competitive space of social media that craves the number of "likes" is a practical example that corroborates this. In the creation of web novels, for instance, it becomes possible to post works that anticipate readers’ desires, guided by high-ranking popular works searchable on browsing sites, or by narrative genres and keywords (such as "isekai reincarnation") provided in advance by operating platforms. In other words, representational acts are conducted while anticipating and expecting evaluation from others (here, readers). Akihiko Taniguchi’s Parallax (2021) can be understood as dealing with this kind of anticipation in the production and circulation of photographic images. In the bleak interior that could be the starting point of a VR space, multiple search keywords float. The first-person viewpoint implemented in this game-like screen—a hand holding a smartphone camera—is held in front of these words and the landscapes that subsequently unfold. As symbolized by search keywords/images linked to the searcher’s interests, the act of taking photographs today with a smartphone—in which shooting function (camera) and posting function (social media application) are bundled—is more than ever excessively connected to the network of desire. There lies the unceasing effort of a ⟨self⟩ striving to fulfill its own desire by responding to others’ desires. Photographers point their cameras at landscapes without being able to grasp a decisive clue as to who desires—whether they are shooting motivated by their own will, or shooting in response to others’ desires. Symbolically, Taniguchi’s own avatar, dressed in orange, who is the subject/photographer in the space of Parallax, also repeatedly appears within the landscape the camera captures, becoming a subject of photography. It presents the aspect of a situation in which the subject and object of photography have become assimilated. The distinction between here and there, between the front camera and the back camera—whether one is taking a selfie or photographing the landscape in front of one—becomes difficult. This is, so to speak, the assimilation of self and landscape. Roger Caillois, while examining mimicry in insects that assimilate to their environment, links this mimicry—the dissolution of the distinction between organism and environment—to "depersonalization by assimilation to space." (Note 6) According to Caillois, in this condition "the body feels it is gradually losing its limits, becoming de-localized, spread out in space, dark space into which things cannot be put. The body then feels like space itself, like dark space into which things cannot be put." (Note 7, emphasis in original) It is suggestive that the body that has become space itself—unable to specify the object of resemblance as an "object," experiencing assimilation with the environment as what might be called "pure resemblance" ("simply resembling")—is defined as "dark space." First, this will indicate Taniguchi’s procedure, which assimilates self and landscape, photographer and subject, as mimetic. Second, that "pure resemblance" should overlap with the "pure reflection" of a mirror that has lost its literal body—the experience of "mirrorless mirror" in which the distance from the object has disappeared. Therefore, third, it is permissible to read the experience of "mirrorless mirror" as a metaphor for the experience of the "hole"—which is nothing other than "dark space." Social media that appeals to the individual ⟨self⟩ through avatars and accounts, and opens a foothold for social recognition, simultaneously exposes the subject to the threat of the "darkness" of dedifferentiation between self and other through its excessive connectivity. Anyone who diligently posts endlessly is adjacent to a fall into emptiness—"Who on earth have I been doing this for, and what for?" one will suddenly be struck down. At the end of exposing one’s individuality, the moment when that very ⟨self⟩ paradoxically can no longer be taken as one’s own possession, one is swallowed by the "hole." This "swallowing" might be compared to a situation in which multiple mirrors are excessively connected and one’s self-image is diffusely reflected like a kaleidoscope. The mirror that is supposed to establish the ego instead tears apart the stable image of ⟨self⟩. Such division is also an experience that Michiko Tsuda’s Shakkei Trilogue: Looking Back (2020/2022) forces upon viewers. The suspended rectangular plate has a mirror on one face and a screen on the other. Behind the mirror face, a camera is set up facing the plate. The footage shot by this camera is transferred to a projector and projected on the back of the mirror, i.e., the screen. Due to this structure, the image of the viewer standing before the mirror comes to be divided: into the mirror image on one side, and the video image on the other. Since viewers cannot see both faces at once, they cannot take in the divided self-image as a whole. Furthermore, because a long distance separates the plate from the camera, the size of the viewer’s body image will be inversely proportional between mirror image and video image (when one stands close to the mirror and is reflected large, what the camera captures is a small image in the distance, and vice versa). The non-synchronicity between the body and its image is brought about not only through such spatial conditions but also through temporal ones. For the video projected on the screen is output with a delay, not in real-time relay. The viewer before the mirror, who turns their thoughts to the other half of the self transported to the reverse face beyond their gaze, is in fact trying to retrieve something that is no longer there. The integrated ⟨self⟩ irrecoverably slips through the palm that tries to gather it together again.
- Hole in Art
In this essay, tracing the thinking around the "hole" deployed in "Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror," and referring to several works, I have discerned its strategy of disturbing the ego called ⟨self⟩. Now, ego is ⟨self⟩ as it exists for me, and ⟨self⟩ as it exists for another—for example, the "you" before me—is called alter ego. "What is like me" and "what is like you" are no different in being norms of identity in ego and alter ego respectively. That is to say, ⟨self⟩ is also a closed domain that imprisons the subject in the norm of "—-ness." The value concept of "distinctive work" would in fact readily connect to the consumption of "individuality" in post-Fordist small-lot production of multiple varieties. As embodied by variations in T-shirts or the desire of a Pokémon trainer, owning "one’s own color" or a "color variant" is supposed to lead to the sense of being "like oneself"—of being able to be unique as a player in this world. But just as equating the number of "likes" with one’s raison d’être, in most cases this kind of "-ness" is nothing but a compliant response to the community of "others" who prepare and approve in advance the value of that "-ness." "Selfhood" and "individuality" are already alienated representations. To be sure, the works mentioned above each possess their own unique characteristics. But that is not in the sense of constituting a mirror-like closed domain that narcissistically reflects the self-portrait of the artist as ⟨self⟩. The intensity of these works lies rather in their range that undermines the very foundation of the individual called ⟨self⟩. Not reinforcing the familiar ⟨self⟩, nor substituting it with a different ⟨self⟩, but taking in something that cannot be digested within the closed domain called ⟨self⟩ from the outset, and being taken in by it. If "individuality" has been uncritically justified precisely in the field of "art," then the scene in which the myth of "individuality" has broken down—that is, "My Hole"—is to that extent also "Hole in Art," is it not? "I am doing art." When one speaks thus, for instance, the tense in which the "I" "is doing art" is implicitly the "now." This collusion of ⟨self⟩ and ⟨now⟩ will again expose "contemporary art" to the consumption of a transient contemporaneity. If so, a project that examines contemporary art from a "laceration" going back more than fifty years must also be a resistance to such contemporaneity. To reference the past not as something already "dead" and unrelated to the present, but as something waiting in a quasi-dead state to survive into our present—while remaining wary of historicist application. To listen to the "hole," to hear its call. ⟨Self⟩ becomes not-⟨self⟩.
Notes (Note 1) Boris Groys, "Multiple Authorship," in Art Power, trans. (Japanese) Keiko Ishida, Katsuhiro Saiki et al. (Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 2017), pp. 162–163. [English original: Art Power, MIT Press, 2008, "Multiple Authorship," p. 93ff.] (Note 2) Ibid., p. 159. (Note 3) See: Tomohito Ishii, "My Hole: Scab of the 21st Century," in My Hole: Scab of the 21st Century — Hiroshi Fujii (My Hole: Hole in Art production team, 2019); Akira Takaishi, "The Crustcore of Japanese Contemporary Art," in the same volume. (Note 4) Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in Écrits, trans. (Japanese) Tadao Miyamoto, Michiya Takeuchi et al. (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1972), p. 129. [English: Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1977.] (Note 5) Ibid., p. 127. (Note 6) Roger Caillois, Myth and Man, trans. (Japanese) Hiroshi Kume (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 1994), p. 116. [English: The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish, Gollancz, 1964.] (Note 7) Ibid., p. 117.