At the end of the 1950s, there was a movement in Japan that sought to destroy existing art forms and replace them with new types of expression. After participating in this movement, which was known as Anti-Art, Arakawa Shusaku relocated permanently to New York, in late 1961. From around 1964, he began making arrangements of symbols such as dots, lines, and arrows with corresponding words, creating “diagram paintings” formed through association with the meanings of particular imagery and language.
In this painting, English words relating to optics, such as “POINT BLANK,” “DISTANCE OF FOCUS,” “MODULATING,” and “DISTANCE” are written over a monochrome semicircle that contains a gradation from black to white. The work’s title, which suggests the bending or refraction of light, serves to connect the words with the shapes depicted, and perhaps also poses a kind of poetic riddle about the meaning of the act of seeing.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)
At the end of the 1950s, there was a movement in Japan that sought to destroy existing art forms and replace them with new types of expression. After participating in this movement, which was known as Anti-Art, Arakawa Shusaku relocated permanently to New York, in late 1961. From around 1964, he began making arrangements of symbols such as dots, lines, and arrows with corresponding words, creating “diagram paintings” formed through association with the meanings of particular imagery and language.
In this painting, English words relating to optics, such as “POINT BLANK,” “DISTANCE OF FOCUS,” “MODULATING,” and “DISTANCE” are written over a monochrome semicircle that contains a gradation from black to white. The work’s title, which suggests the bending or refraction of light, serves to connect the words with the shapes depicted, and perhaps also poses a kind of poetic riddle about the meaning of the act of seeing.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)