Mieko Shiomi
Endless Box
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964
8 x 15 x 15.5 cm.
Open Edition, signed and unnumbered
A fully hand-made edition that began in 1964, with about 30 copies produced subsequently. The work consists of a wooden box containing 34 paper boxes of smaller and smaller sizes, wrapped in purple silk fabric. Two large sheets of Japanese paper (approximately 78 x 109 cm) are used to make the entire thirty-four-box ensemble, and each sheet is folded in the same manner.
When the artist first read about Fluxus in a magazine she reached out to George Maciunas, sending him some of her Event Piece scores and a copy of the Endless Box. He reportedly ordered several more and invited her to New York to join the art community there.
“I was thinking about transparent music, music in which nothing could be heard but the ceaseless passage of time. And I thought, perhaps this could be presented to the senses not necessarily through sound, but by some other method. . . . I emptied my mind, and what came into it was an image of the origami boxes I used to make as a child. No matter how many boxes you opened, there would always be a slightly smaller one inside, and each time you opened a box, it was as if you were entering yet another, deeper layer of time. A white object that acts as a kind of visual diminuendo, focusing a person’s awareness and conveying the endless passage of time with a sort of sensuousness, beckoning the person onward.
I decided to try to re-create these boxes. I calculated the sizes so that one set could be made with two sheets of 78.8 x 109.1cm sheets of paper and selected paper with the pliability, tension, and strength required for folding, in a white that sometimes appeared tinged with violet, depending on how the light struck it.”
- Mieko Shiomi
No comments:
Post a Comment