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Beyond good and evil, make way toward the wasteland.

2018, Sculpture, Installation, Ceramic, iron, wood, glass, ash, other, 8900×3200×4200mm<

Materialization of a fiction / To make the image of technology the foreground–

“Beyond good and evil, make way toward the wasteland.” is a sculpture work made for the exhibition “1/2 Century later”. The work reproduced a pure white room in the final scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” and made it go through the process of destruction.
Within a large glass case are dust-covered chairs, a bed, cabinets, chipped marble pillars, oil painting, and other weathered items which appear to be from an old forgotten room.

“This room has been depicted as having mimicked the movie set from the final scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and if we are to follow the critique of the period, “Beyond good and evil, make way toward the wasteland” would be, so to speak, “made-to-order debris” = the “Black Painting” of the modern day, and in a sense, we might say the monolith is not absent, but in union with the room. This is not by any means a wild idea; the presentation of the state of compatible coexistence of opposites in the work is an important perspective which also relates to the entirety of the exhibition.

Oldenburg intentionally chose the bedroom, which is softest room in the house and the furthest from conscious thought processes. In this work, he incorporates various geometric shapes into the two-dimensional design of the bedroom in advance, then attempts a three-dimensional rendering with meticulous awareness of the laws of perspective, and the person who gave this work the highest praise at the time was Donald Judd during his art critic days. It is worth emphasizing that Judd had astutely perceived the intent to have the compatible coexistence of the two polarities, soft sculpture and geometry.”

By Arata Hasegawa in “‘1/2 Century Later.’ – In the case of conceptual art”

 

“This final room appears within the movie as a room prepared by the monolith (an advanced computer which guides humans) for the next step in human evolution.… In this installation, we cannot see the monolith which occupied the center of the space in the movie. In this exhibition, the space originally occupied by the monolith – what Commander Bowman was looking at after being transformed into the Starchild – is occupied by the White Painting.”

(Expert from handout of “THE EUGENE Studio 1/2 Century later.”(Shiseido Gallery))