For Example (A Critique of Never)

Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) started his career in 1957 as a visual artist. He was one of the founding members of “Neo-dada Organizers”, formed by artists engaged in anti-art movement “Neo-dada” 1960. However, while the Neo-dada’s trend were performance of the happenings, which implied an anti-authoritarian attitude, Arakawa’s interest was closer to destruct logic and meaning of Dada, the inspirational source of “Neo-dada” originated in Zurich, early 20^th century.

Kicked-out from the group, Arakawa flew into New York in 1961 and met Marcel Duchamp, who eventually became Arakawa’s mental and financial supporter. Duchamp’s anti-art attitude, questioning the concept of art itself, strongly influenced young Arakawa.

From 1963, Arakawa started to work on a project called “Mechanism of Meaning” with a poet, as well as his crucial partner Madeline Gins and co-published a book with her in 1971. “Mechanism of Meaning” focused on “deconstruct meaning and construct non-meaning,” which challenged ones’ thought process. Being universal experiment, not only the people with art background but also scientists, such as German theoretical physician Heisenberg, were fascinated by the project.

Arakawa’s work later expanded to architecture that questioned existing values and experimentation of providing new way of perceiving. He, together with Gins, created an enormous, (18000 square meters) on-site project called The Site of Reversible Destiny YORO Park in 1995 and a housing project called Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka– in Memory of Helen Keller in 2005. Arakawa and Gins declared, “death is old-fashioned,” reversing the idea “death is unavoidable,” which we tend to think, and built a place where people could put their body into and explore a completely new free world. For example, if you put yourself in the building, you will find that the floor has tilts and are forced to balance yourself to stand still. Then, you start to question your sense of balance.  The relationship between your body and surroundings gets into your thought, which you usually never thought of, and you will discover new self-image.

Arakawa’s focus was altering the “common sense.” If community one belongs to forms common sense and values, we need to change the community itself to change the common sense. Then, Arakawa’s interest shifted towards architecture and claiming himself as “coordenologist,” who synthesize psychology, philosophy, architecture, bio-mechanism etc.

For Example (1971) is one of the two films made by Arakawa. In this film, we see a young homeless boy, drunk and dazzling with a bottle of booze in his hand on the street of urban New York. At first, it appears to be a documentary, but you will soon realize that the boy’s moves repetitively in a strange manner. It looks like a confused, vulnerable body suddenly put into a maze or a mouse put in to a clear plastic case for experimentation. The observation of the camera continues for 95 minutes, and a male voice reading a series of texts, sounding like an instruction to the boy, is dubbed on the film. But as we focus on the relationship between the text and the boy’s action, it starts to sound differently and sounds like the instruction to the audience. The film could be a dance/performance film, but its obsessive repetition and the strange relationship between demanding text and the image, gives powerful impression and overwhelms the audience.

It is noticeable that the film was made during Arakawa’s exploration to develop “Mechanism of Meaning,” which “deconstruct meaning and construct non-meaning.” We can understand that the shift to architecture from the film. Using the vulnerable body, the boy is trying to discover the world.

Arakawa explains about this film “ I was wondering how I could say good bye to the spirit, the soul and the mind. (…) I wanted to know, how a body, which is a piece of meat, changes the sensation, in which condition, environment and atmosphere. And I wanted to know what the newborn sensation is like by those changes.”

As most of the Arakawa’s works are usually shown as texts, diagrams or some kind of structural form, the film, on the other hand, expresses both Gins’ Mechanism of Meaning and the later architectural works narratively within the flow of time. Also, the film can be used as a sub-text of Mechanism of Meaning, which could be a complicated theory. It is interesting to note that later in his life, Arakawa stated, “all we could do was film to prove the Mechanism of Meaning when we made For Example.”