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Supple structure-Hitoshi Idehara (curator of Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art)

 

Supple structure The "dissipative structure" that Toshikazu Masukawa has been interested in in recent years. The concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning Belgian physicist and scientist Ilya Prigogine seems to be paradoxical.   This world is in the process of irreversibly increasing entropy (randomness), that is, energy is "dissipating", but despite being in it, substances and energy such as ecology and life are exposed from the outside. In the supplied open system, there is a "structure" that orders and maintains itself. It can be said to be a scientific expression of life or the mechanism of life-like things that resist death and collapse.

  This interest is, first and foremost, because Masukawa himself gradually shifted the theme from the problem of sculpture to that of death and life. Then, what is Masukawa's artistic expression as opposed to the "dissipative structure" which is a scientific expression about death (collapse) and life (order)? Is there something like a "dissipative structure" built in? Is the above-mentioned paradoxical nature contained?


  For the past decade or so, the media handled by Masukawa has increased the degree of freedom in photography, video, equipment, ready-made raw materials, etc., probably because it deals with this big theme, and there are multiple approaches in parallel. Seems to be letting. For example, an attempt to replace something that shows life more directly, such as heat and sound, with vision. Alternatively, a method of combining materials that are ambivalent to death and life (salt and hair separated from the body this time) with others. And, just like using a human image as a motif. From these works that encourage our gaze, we cannot help feeling open to the world at the same time.


  Now, if we are guided by the word "dissipative structure" and look at the structure of the work itself, we can say that it is a skeletal sculpture like it used to be, and in recent years it is supple, flexible, and in some cases almost a mechanism. It can be said that it is a development that can include even nuances. It is as if it corresponds to the "dissipative structure" that is elastic with temporality, dynamics, and fluctuations. However, if the sculptural structure was denied, it was never the case, and I think that it has changed but somehow persisted in him. The dignified way of symmetry may be one of them. When it is inherent in the work, one may feel something similar to the surprise that a person can stand on two legs (just symmetry).
There are miracles everywhere. Despite being everywhere, it's still a miracle.
[2014.1 Kyokusho Museum Text]

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