In 2020, Alan Longino (1987-2024) joined the Department of Art History as a doctoral student studying postwar Japanese conceptual art. One year prior, he had co-curated with Reiko Tomii the first U.S. solo exhibition of the work of Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922-2006). In the show, Alan presented Matsuzawa’s gradual move away from the manipulation of matter, to text, and eventually toward psychic, or quantum, communication as a path suffused with contemplation of death and dying.
My Own Death (1970), a text panel hanging at the entrance of an empty room, reads:
When you go calmly across this room, go my own death across your mind in
a flash of lightning, that is my future death and is similar
not only to your own future death but to past hundred hundred millions of
human beings’ deaths and also to future thousand trillions of human beings’
In Alan's interpretation, for Matsuzawa, death was not a state of separation and longing,
but one of reunion, connection, and expanded—even telepathic—consciousness. Death completes the circle. Matsuzawa's late work, Alan wrote, demands of the viewer the “sensing of a spiritual connection to that which has moved on from the world and meditating on the essence it leaves behind.” (1)
In honor of Alan, this exhibition brings together work from his personal collection, from current students and alumni of the Department of Visual Arts, and from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection, a repository largely formed from gifts and requests from the community for the enrichment of teaching with, about, and in art. As you go calmly across these rooms, we invite you to celebrate and meditate on how artistic creation expresses, indexes, or advances quantum realities.
Text by curatorial
a flash of lightning, that is my future death and is similar
not only to your own future death but to past hundred hundred millions of
human beings’ deaths and also to future thousand trillions of human beings’