“To be prepared for events of one
billion years from now, enter here.„The work Ubiquitous Site/Nagi's Ryoanji/Architectural
Body inhabits the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in the form of a large
cylindrical structure. When viewed from its exterior, the diagonal form does
little to evoke the karesansui of Kyoto’s Ryoanji, yet ascending into the space
of its interior, one finds that the contours of the dry landscape are not only
indeed present, but that they are clinging symmetrically to its circumference.
Arakawa and Gins have put into words the experience of a gesture that reaches
far beyond disorientation: “As if magnetized, the body, moving in a veering,
unbalanced balance, loses all sense of identity, or casts the little that
remains of its identity as a person, outside itself. The person who entered the
cylinder on her own volition ceases now to be the initiator of her own actions.
There is no single initiator of actions to be found. Symmetry should be able to
supplant identity, and, sure enough, it can and does do this.”
Nagi
Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan
Interior
space measuring 70 feet in length and 30 feet in diameter.
