In "Do Not go Gentle Into That Good Night," the 20th-century Welsh poet Dylan Thomas famously defied death with the words, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." In a more conceptual art way, the Japanese-born New York-based Shusaku Arakawa (b.1936) is similarly indignant. He wants to make dying illegal, thinks it old fashioned and views it as an illness that may one day be cured. His partner and longtime collaborator Madeline Gins has claimed that death is immoral. Their contemporary work develops ideals of reversing destiny and escaping the inevitability of death in odd architectural projects.
An example is the "Site of Reversible Destiny — Yoru Park" (1995) in Gifu Prefecture. Visitors to the park are guided through various unusual cognitive and perceptual experiences, while being cryptically instructed to make a note of their landing sites if accidentally thrown off balance. Arakawa believes that losing a sense of balance in his disorienting architecture is good for the immune system and it is part of his campaign against mortality. It is the aversion of a near-death experience, however, that is on display in "Funeral for Bioengineering to Not to Die — Early Works by Arakawa Shusaku" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
The exhibition concerns 20 boxes that the artist created between 1958-61 after he dropped out of Musashino Art School and before he escaped to New York where he established himself as an artist, filmmaker and performer. The works were shown in the Muramatsu and Mudo galleries in Tokyo in 1960-61 and subsequently entrusted to friends, acquired by a few galleries, or seemingly lost to oblivion. Three were recently rediscovered and restored in 2007 and another, "Container of Sand" (1958-59), has been rejuvenated for the present exhibition. Exactly what was shown at the original exhibitions, in what quantities and under what titles, remains partly elusive; though the present exhibition is a fundamental resuscitation of the artists early oeuvre.