Subterraneans
When I was a child, there was a period when we drew a considerable portion of our household water from a well. This well was just outside the wooden gate at the back of the garden. It was not the old-fashioned type where you drop a bucket down a dug shaft and haul it back up by hand, but the pump handle for drawing water by hand was heavy enough that it was difficult for a child to keep working it for long. Once you got some momentum going, though, the water would flow out in astonishing abundance, rushing ceaselessly over the stepping stones. And the clear, cold water—cold even in summer—felt wonderfully refreshing against your face. I don’t know who dug that well or when. It was already there by the time I was old enough to be aware of my surroundings, so I never got around to looking into its origins. But now, reflecting on it again, it strikes me as deeply strange: that there was no modern infrastructure like running water, no visible natural source like a river, yet somewhere in the darkness underground a vein of water ran, from which you could draw as much as you liked. We are accustomed to seeing water in the sunlight, which makes it hard to visualize concretely—visually—the abundant stores of water held invisibly beneath the ground. The water we know is clear and translucent, sparkling like a jewel when it catches the light. But what about water that has never seen daylight? Water in pitch darkness, massed into one enormous clump, is something I can only picture as viscous and uncanny, like coal tar. If we cannot even grasp the origin or appearance of the water we used every day of our lives, then the underground is truly an unknown realm. When we say “unknown realm,” we tend immediately to think of outer space—but compared to the underground, a great deal more is known about space. Humanity has struggled and strained to launch satellites, rockets, and space probes, conducting all manner of observations of the Earth, the Moon, and the solar system. Even where no artificial object can be sent, we have used telescopes and other instruments to investigate regions of stars that light takes ages to reach. And quite apart from all that, every night the sky fills with countless stars. In that sense, we gaze at space with our naked eyes every night. Indeed, the starry sky has served since ancient times as an invaluable guide for navigation and wayfinding. By comparison, the underground—even as far as the Earth’s core—is incomparably closer than the stars above, yet what we know about it is shockingly little. This is because between us and the underground there stands a physical barrier of soil, sand, stone, and rock. The ocean also places a physical barrier between us and what lies within it, but seawater is fluid and at least partly transparent, so with sufficiently specialized deep-sea submersibles it is possible to send people to the very bottom. The ocean holds many unknowns, but compared to the underground it is better understood. One rarely hears of underground exploration vehicles in the way one hears of space probes or deep-sea submersibles; and to begin with, there are no aircraft or submarines for the interior of the Earth. When I tried searching the term just now, what came up was something like a motorized tiller, with a maximum exploration depth of around six meters below the surface. There are specialized methods like core drilling, but these are entirely different in character from oceanic or space exploration. Even so, humanity has by various means inferred, verified where possible, and built hypothetical models of the Earth’s interior—arriving at the conclusion that at its very center lies solid iron. When I first heard this, I was astonished: I had vaguely imagined the Earth’s core as something molten and boiling-hot, like magma. The reason it is not liquid, apparently, is that the immense pressure prevents it from becoming so. So the Earth is something like a giant iron ball? That surpasses ordinary common sense by a wide margin. But perhaps that is not surprising. I had been using the well at home without really understanding it, after all. The underground is, first and foremost, that kind of territory. So when we speak of digging a hole, even the largest hole is—on the scale of the Earth—nothing more than a depression shaped like a hole. Nevertheless, people have dug holes in the ground since ancient times for various purposes. But it is an extremely rare occurrence for artists to make works by opening holes in the ground, as three of the four artists did in “Space Totsuka ’70”—the foundational premise of this exhibition, held in 1970. Why did they uniformly begin their practice by digging holes in the ground? Each must have had their own motives. Setting aside those individual reasons, and keeping in mind what I have written above, I would like to consider here what can be gleaned from the fact that these artists simultaneously opened holes in the Earth’s surface—in hopes that this will in turn help us think about the exhibition “Subterraneans.” But first: what, exactly, is a “hole”? There are countless shapes and natures that could be called holes. But is a pure hole not one in which the space passes all the way through, from opening to opening? The most concrete example would be the hole in a doughnut. In such a pure hole, there is no directionality—no “entrance” and “exit” in any fixed sense. Whichever side you enter from is the entrance; whichever side you exit from is the exit. On a slightly larger scale, a tunnel works the same way: the entrance and exit of a tunnel are relative. Thinking along these lines, the holes dug in “Space Totsuka ’70” are not pure holes in this sense. It might be more accurate to call them shapes that resemble holes, or forms that look like holes. That said, it is certainly true that we commonly call something a “hole” even when it does not pass all the way through. When we say there is a hole in the road, we are not imagining something like a manhole—a depression in the shape of a hole is enough for us to call it a hole. But when a person deliberately digs a hole by hand, as opposed to a subsidence that has collapsed into a hole-like shape, there must be a different motivation at work. Setting aside cases where the reason is clearly to bury something, what next becomes significant is the depth of the hole. When there is no specific purpose, how deep one must dig before the hole becomes what one has in mind is a matter for each occasion. This question of depth seems to harbor something deeply rooted. For when there is no particular concrete purpose such as burying something, the deeper the hole the better. The deeper the hole, the closer it comes physically to passing all the way through. Even if we know perfectly well that penetrating the Earth is impossible, a deep hole is undeniably closer to the ideal, purer kind of hole than a shallow one—and a deep hole simply looks more like a hole. In that case, the act of digging a hole is, in principle, endless. If one could keep digging indefinitely, one would, for that is the nature of holes. But in practice, an end always comes: the resistance of the ground, the limits of physical strength, the limits of time, the limits of the spirit. Every hole, therefore—apart from the formally abstract, infinitely idealised doughnut hole—is nothing more than a work in progress. If that is so, then when we look at a concrete hole not as a means to an end but as a pure hole in itself, there is a psychological habit in us to set aside the fact that it is a work in progress and imagine it as though it passes through to somewhere. In other words, we superimpose onto that particular concrete hole the image of a pure hole. This fantasy, however, carries with it—depending on the depth of the hole—a considerable sense of reality. For, as I have repeatedly noted, we understand so little about the underground. If we cannot even picture the water flowing just beneath the surface, then imagining what a hole opened in the ground looks like underground is an act given a great deal of freedom from the start. To imagine the hole penetrating the Earth’s center and emerging on the other side, however, would be going too far in the other direction—an impossible fantasy. So what, then, does this hole before us appear to be? Simply put, it becomes “bottomless.” The hole that the exhibition “Subterraneans” calls to mind most closely is, I think, this bottomless hole. The exhibition featured three artists and their differently natured orientations toward holes, but none of them were the formal, doughnut-type hole. Yet all of them seemed to be trying to pass through to somewhere. Whether it was something like a mineshaft carrying the weight of a history of oppression, an underground world underwritten by imagination, or the slight gap below the floor of the exhibition building, none of these were contained within their physical scale as displayed. And in practice, they broke through toward history, toward imaginative power, toward urban infrastructure—making visible their state as works in progress, disrupting the physical dimensions of the exhibition space, striving to be bottomless all the way down. At this point, these three bottomless holes clarify, at last, their difference from the formally pure doughnut hole. Illuminated inversely from the doughnut’s side: the doughnut’s hole could also be called bottomless, in a sense. But it is impossible to actually describe the doughnut’s hole as bottomless. The doughnut’s shape is too formal, too sign-like; one cannot imagine the kind of “depth” that bottomlessness implies. But the holes in the exhibition “Subterraneans,” though not passing through, are limitlessly deep—and for that reason become bottomless from the other side. And unlike the doughnut’s hole, bottomlessness has a direction. There is an entrance, but no exit. To enter such a place requires considerable resolve. But is this not precisely what the dwelling of the “Subterraneans” was always like? The vaguely unsettling ambience that pervades the entire exhibition “Subterraneans” probably arises from this, and because it is psychological rather than physical, it is extremely difficult to dispel. And yet around any hole, whatever its scale, such unease always hovers. Just as every well is without exception unsettling—and bottomless in appearance.
Mirrorless Mirror
As a child, I was afraid of mirrors. The house where I grew up—a single-story home, dim even in daytime—had a Japanese-style room where my mother would do her makeup before commuting to work, and in that room stood a triple mirror. I already knew that the world reflected in facing mirrors was endless, but one day, when I happened to peer into that mirror, I felt as though a face other than my own was looking back at me from deep within its infinite recesses. I can no longer readily believe that such a thing actually happened, so it may be that something from a dream was unconsciously absorbed into memory over the years. In any case, from then on—even in a single mirror, not a facing pair—whenever I looked into a mirror I could not shake the feeling that somewhere within it, the infinite, and by virtue of that infinity, something alien, had secretly slipped inside. Yet surely that was not mere fantasy. For reflected in the background of my own image in the mirror, the door of the room was reflected simultaneously—and even if I did not actually open the door on my side, if I could open the door reflected in the depths of the mirror, there would surely be a room with exactly the same layout and furniture arrangement as this one. What’s more: even if it was not visible in the mirror’s surface, if I shifted my gaze slightly to one edge, there would be the entrance hall, and passing through it, the outside world, with streets and shopping arcades. Extending this idea further, there must be a train station and an airport inside the mirror too, which could take you to distant countries and even outer space. In that case, as many versions of myself would exist as there are mirrors, and the order of the world would be thrown into chaos. I understood that this was utterly absurd. But at the time, I would imagine such things and feel frightened. Some who hear this might think of virtual reality as it exists today—but it was a little different from that. Because the world inside the mirror was, for some reason, laterally reversed. Not being able to understand why only deepened my anxiety. Now, the exhibition I am writing about here is called “Mirrorless Mirror,” and the exhibition that preceded it was called “Subterraneans.” Both are projects by the artist collective “My Hole: Hole in Art,” both inspired by the peculiar mode of existence called a “hole,” yet there is a range to how individual artists conceive of holes, and that range is reflected directly in “Subterraneans” and “Mirrorless Mirror.” But just as “My Hole: Hole in Art” is one, the exhibitions “Subterraneans” and “Mirrorless Mirror,” though separate projects, should not be seen as entirely different things—there must be reason to view them, through the single double-holed aperture of “My Hole: Hole in Art,” as a single world-presentation called “Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror.” Before getting to that, however, I would like first to revisit the nature of the multiple holes found by the artists in “Space Totsuka ’70”—the shared point of departure for both exhibitions. In my first text on the exhibition “Subterraneans,” I wrote that, in contrast to the formally pure hole that presupposes penetration, a concrete hole dug by human hands is always a work in progress, and that it is potentially oriented toward bottomlessness and in fact appears that way. The same was true of the holes dug in Totsuka long ago: even if not particularly deep, they invariably functioned as a kind of entrance leading to the underground world. What I most want to emphasize in the text I am writing right now, though, is precisely the shallowness of those holes. The reason I began thinking about this is that, in a conversation with Hiroshi Fujii—which I had requested as I took on the writing of this essay—I felt I had confirmed, in my own way, what the holes actually dug in Totsuka in 1970 were like. I know nothing at all about the site that served as the venue in Totsuka at the time. But in talking with Fujii, I learned that a considerable amount of labor had been expended on leveling the ground before the holes were dug. This struck me as oddly significant. For if the sole aim were simply to dig holes, then even if the site were rough ground, there would be no impediment to the digging itself. So why did they insist on leveling the ground to that extent? The first thought that comes to mind is the simple motivation of wanting the surroundings to be neat and tidy, just as one wants the wall to be clean before hanging a painting—even for an act like digging holes in the ground. That is the most intelligible motive, but would one really go to the trouble of leveling the ground so carefully and thoroughly just for neatness, when you’re not even hanging a painting? What gradually occurred to me was that it was not neatness but levelness that was needed—what one might call a degree of horizontality. But if so, why was such horizontality necessary? My thinking is this: when I look back on the shapes of those holes, they seem to be not only holes but also square, neatly formed—something like doors. If they are doors, they are also entrances leading somewhere, and such an entrance must be clearly demarcated from its surroundings. And if they are doors, then even if physically they are holes with a bottom, with all the limitations of a work in progress, they take on a symbolic meaning as passages to the depths beyond. For a symbolic meaning of leading to the depths to hold, there is no physical standard for how deep such a hole must be—so at this stage these holes acquire a bottomless depth. But since they are not formally penetrating, they are in practice single doors set into holes with only an entrance and no exit. And it is in this sense—as doors set into holes with only an entrance—that these holes struck me as mirrors set into the ground. A mirror, whether hung vertically on a wall or laid horizontally on the ground, retains its properties as a mirror: it reverses left and right and swallows the entire world into its surface. In that sense, each mirror harbors a bottomless infinity within itself. No—placed horizontally on the ground, the mirror throws into relief what is perhaps the only truly strange property it possesses in all the world. The mirror is that strange an object, yet having been exposed to daily use, it has become so utterly ordinary that we rarely notice. But just as one sometimes encounters a frozen moment at the surface of a perfectly still pond or lake—that water-mirror strangeness—a mirror laid on a horizontal plane makes its peculiar nature more apparent than usual. Am I being too careless about the fact that the exhibition “Mirrorless Mirror” is emphasizing its “mirrorless” quality? In truth, I have spoken of nothing but mirrors so far. Yet I also think: is not the quality of being mirrorless something already inherent in the mirror itself? To read this exhibition literally, one might think the appropriate approach is to consider what meaning the classical form of the mirror holds in the digital age, or how it might be renewed. But the mirror already exceeds such appropriateness from the outset. That its very nature harbors infinity is what generates such disruption. Without even pushing it that far, the mirror is in itself sufficiently mirrorless. Even if the optical devices that once represented cameras are no longer optical but replaced by representations of symbols accumulated in zeros and ones, this does not mean that mirrors cease to exist. More than that: the world of accumulated data converted into the immaterial by mirrorless devices is not entirely new—stripped down, it is nothing other than a precise simulation of the mirror-world. Indeed, the mirror is still more than sufficiently bottomless. As I showed earlier, the world of the mirror is not complete in simply reflecting what fits within its physical surface area; its one thin surface swallows the world itself, and its potential extent reaches, in principle, all the way to the cosmos. Of the mirror’s strange properties as I understand them, the most salient are its bottomlessness and its lateral reversal. And when these two are distilled to bottomlessness and reversal, they connect sufficiently to the exhibition “Subterraneans.” Or perhaps “Mirrorless Mirror” is “Subterraneans” as underground—as a bottomless depth—reversed. If so, then “Subterraneans” takes as its axis the vertical excavation of the hole, and “Mirrorless Mirror” the horizontal transposition of the hole, making them contrasting exhibitions that can no longer be meaningfully distinguished. For—and this is hypothetical—if the left and right walls of the exhibition “Subterraneans” were swapped with top and bottom, and the actual top and bottom swapped with the walkable depth of left and right, then both in terms of exhibition scenography and the rumination of experience, it would feel extremely close to that of “Mirrorless Mirror.” And conversely, when the left and right walls of “Mirrorless Mirror” are likewise swapped with top and bottom, and the actual top and bottom with the walkable depth of left and right, it begins to feel like “Subterraneans”—and I realized that, in fact, the mirror embedded in the wall by Yosuke Amemiya becomes, through this operation, a mirror buried underground. At the same time, this may correspond to the difference between seeing the three holes in “Space Totsuka ’70” as holes opened in the ground, or as holes opened in a wall—and depending on which, whether the hole in question appears as “a bottomless underground” or “a bottomless mirror.” And I now think again that this interplay of the infinity of the underground world and the surface of the mirror is precisely what is meant by “Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror.”
My Hole: Hole in Art
Finally, having confirmed that these two exhibitions are like asymmetrical twins, I will consider what the relationship between “My Hole” and “Hole in Art” might be. Through all that has been said so far, it can be inferred that “My Hole” and “Hole in Art” are, though they appear to be two holes, in fact one. So what, first, is My Hole? Simply put, My Hole refers to the countless holes opened in the body that is “me.” There is the mouth, the nostrils, the ear canals; the single tubular hole that passes from the mouth through the esophagus, stomach, and intestines to exit at the anus; the hole that opens to the outside world through the genitals; and, one might add, the countless pores opened across the entire body. In other words, we are not primarily a lump in which exterior and interior are separated by something like a wall, but rather a crossroads formed by an almost unthinkably porous world, in which exterior and interior are only provisionally distinguished by an enormous number of holes. Even so—or rather, because of this—the beyond and the near side of a hole cannot simply be swapped; they cannot be turned inside out; to turn them inside out would be immediately fatal. So the near side and beyond of these holes are treated in practice as something like the surface-depression holes discussed in the exhibition “Subterraneans,” and conversely, it is for this reason that depth becomes invisible and becomes bottomless. In other words, through My Hole, our bodies harbor something like an underground world and become dwelling places for unknowable Subterraneans. Just as the underground water flowing through the earth was invisible yet was serving daily life, the internal functions—whose workings we do not understand—become indispensable to us by performing tasks essential to the maintenance of life day and night. In this way, My Hole transcends being a physical hole pierced in the body, and takes on an allegorical function as hole. A hole must not exist, yet one cannot live without holes—this is the ambivalent and difficult inquiry that presses itself upon us. Then what of Hole in Art? Art is not a living thing, so no physical holes open in it. Even so, when we speak of Hole in Art, it is from the outset allegorical, and paradoxically brings with it the association of regarding art as a single body. If art is conceived as a single organism, it will naturally take on the form of art history, and by becoming art history it can harbor an orientation toward beginning and end, and begin to live in time. But this idea of regarding art as a part that constitutes art history actually contains from the outset what one might well call a hole—a great impossibility. To repeat once more, now in a different sense: art is not a life like “me.” Therefore the hole is not in fact like a mouth, nose, ear, or genitals. Simply put, what is pierced into the body of art history is literally a fatal reflection that returns art history to art, dragging into the time and space that tries to integrate art a letter-for-letter reversal. Conversely, that is precisely why it is a hole—and it will naturally lead the hole in art toward a single thin surface like a mirror. If art is like a single mirror, it becomes impossible for it to have the temporal and spatial coherence of something like art history. What I called a fatal reflection is that—it is as though it transforms the representation of history as a systematic and unified life-like entity into something like a ghost, by laterally reversing art history. Because it is so similar, yet the crucial left and right are reversed. And if something exists that is so similar yet laterally reversed, both the image taken as original and the reversed image instantly die in terms of legitimacy. Because the very fact that such a ghost can so easily be made of something legitimate introduces a kind of diabolical wickedness. When it comes to this, what happens to “me” and “art”? “My Hole” was first and foremost a physical hole. “Hole in Art,” on the other hand, was inevitably an allegorical hole by nature. And because of this, the former hole gave “me” the distinction between underground and above ground, while the latter hole abolished the distinction between underground and above ground in “art,” returned the human to the non-human, and opened in “art” a mirror-hole that brings a ghost-like reversibility to everything. When this mirror-hole is opened in “me,” and conversely when the physical hole is opened in “art,” “My Hole” and “Hole in Art” exchange each other’s hole-nature—just as the exhibitions “Subterraneans” and “Mirrorless Mirror” did. And at that moment, I become, like “Mirrorless Mirror,” a “bottomless surface”—that is, I become a single horizontal mirror—and art, like “Subterraneans,” harbors something like a “well-like unconscious”—that is, I myself become a single underground. This must also be the way in which “My Hole” and “Hole in Art,” through the shared word “hole,” bind the two bottomlessly together, and continually exchange their inner contents on the mirror-like surface. As they always have. As they do right now. As they will continue to do.