ABSTRACT
The inquiry begins with Tsuruoka Masao’s famous statement about the difference between mono (matter) and koto (event). Unearthing the theoretical implications of that opposition reveals that mono is a process of moving into the outermost edges of human cognition. The artists of the early 1950s constructed monstrous bodies to imagine the sensation beyond what human faculty can adequately register. The chapter concludes with the discussion of Kawara On’s early work that most spectacularly dramatized this thinking by depicting the transformation of human bodies into pieces of inorganic matter.
