Panasonic Pavilion


--- The Myth and Aestheticism of New Bodies5/3

Ito: The present situation is not going to undergo a sudden change just because we enter the 21st century. Thinking about it in the long term, these experiments in human thought have been going on for a hundred, two hundred years, and our ways of feeling are changing as a result. I feel that the reason you are not very enthusiastic about writing prose today, Mr. Ueshima, is that you are vivdly aware of this transformation, and your feeling now is that the act of writing is, for you, meaningless. I see a great, basic transformation in my own sensibility, which is serving as an important springboard from the 20th to the 21st century, and I feel that what lies ahead is the creation of a new framework. And one more thing, we were speaking about the Olympics in the 1930s earlier, and this of course brings us to Leni Riefenstahl. Watching the trajectory of her work, from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, The Festival of Beauty and The Festival of Race to her photographs of the Nuba and underwater life, you sense a kind of ecstasy among new bodies of the 20th century, you see the approach to rapture from a variety of angles. Ecstasy, by the way, derives from the Greek Äkstasis, or


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