Infinity and a Wooden Cross Two churches by Tadao Ando
Tadao Ando, Church of the Light (1989)
Jin Baek
t he presence of the regularly distributed points on the front wall in Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light is not clearly apparent, for a resplendent cross of light casts the surround- ing surface into darkness (above); the front wall of his Church in Tarumi allows their strong presence (right). In order for a canvas to begin to evoke a sense of infinity, it should liberate itself from becoming the simple background for the repre- sentational depictions of any finite entities.Yet, Concrete . . . serves to produce light, homogenous surfaces.The traces of regularly attached shuttering and separators are finished to produce smooth surfaces and sharp edges. Tadao Ando
it should not be merely left blank, which would simply indicate the utter void of no-things. It accepts points precisely in order to transform its emptiness into yohaku , or the ‘constitutive emptiness’ which ‘upholds the pretended posi- tivity’ of the points. The front wall of the Church in Tarumi becomes a sheer surface of infinite expansive - ness, not by rejecting the traces of its con- struction process, but by showing them.These points, in their geometrically regulated collec- tivity, transform the thick, reinforced concrete wall into a zero-depth pure surface.The light infiltrating through the slits around the front wall blurs the real material boundary of the surface and expands the points beyond the margin.This infinite surface could be said to be imaginary, rather than illusionary, because it is the points, not the real flat surface of the concrete wall, which create the presence of an infinitely expansive surface.
In this fashion, the points on the wall first replace any representational figures in accor - dance with the Judaic prohibition of images and the Protestant ideal of the return to the Word.They further cancel a first level of sub - jective vision tamed to find the focal perspec - tival point and decentralize the subject into the perceptual horizon of the multi-centered infinity.Again, the subject is re-centered at the moment the central presence of the modest wooden cross is superimposed over the multi- centered horizon of infinity. The fundamental symbolic power of the other- wise mundane cross emerges in this dialectic between the multi-centered infinity of the back - ground and the centrality of the cross as the universal Christian symbol.The perceptual hori- zon of infinity unfolding itself before the subject glorifies and perpetuates the one and only his - torical incident of the sacrificial love of Jesus on the lost wooden cross of Golgotha.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 9 2003
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