of art and the common goldfish

Every room is black. Black carpets, black ceilings. Huge geometric aquariums punctuate the darkness. Each one is illuminated from within and can be walked around on all sides, free­standing glowing and glittering prisms. Most are taller and larger than the spectators. Some have curved walls, others sharp and erratic corners. Sometimes, the light subtly changes from one color to the next. Slowly, fluidly. It is a futuristic and alien series of prisons, all beautiful, calm, and terribly boring.

It takes a certain person to seek out aquariums. The aquarium in Monterey Bay in California is a tranquil and echo-y place where the animals at least look like they feel at home, each tank a healthy, albeit smaller, interpretation of the natural habitat. The aquarium in Osaka in Japan was less like that, heavier on exhibits where the animal can be witnessed at all times. There, I met the gaze of a seal that I’m almost positive would have killed itself if it had the means. It dove to the bottom of the exhibit windows repeatedly, shaking its head erratically and snapping its jaws over and over, locked in eye contact with me, occasionally freezing mid­ head-shake with its toothy mouth open before beginning again. It was eerie and funny, so I laughed, as I do in tragic situations, because I knew the seal was probably insane due to zoo psychosis, that mixture of tiny confinement and lack of stimulation. It would go up to the surface for a brief moment before returning to the bottom to whip into a solitary frenzy again. Across from the seal exhibit, the whale sharks, gargantuan in comparison to all the other species in their tank, would swim for about thirty seconds before they met a corner, which forced them to turn and make their way back along a path traveled hundreds of times a day. That aquarium visit was also during a particularly dull blind date, the whole experience making me feel like human beings are shitty creatures and life is ultimately hopeless.

But back to this other aquarium, this blackened room filled with modern and angular fish tanks. It is marketed as an art exhibit, which it very much feels like. Each room is a gallery presentation, each tank a spectacle of color, light and movement. The freestanding exhibits are filled with a different species of goldfish­: telescope, pearlscale, ryukin, veiltail, fantail. Each tank shimmers with the slow pace of goldfish life, a delayed turn of a spherical body, a blob­like lava lamp bubbly bulbous existence. And we are all mesmerized, all the families and couples and solo spectators such as myself. The body of each fish picks up the light and reflects it, throwing the bright of each tank around the water and onto our faces and clothes. It is gorgeous and surreal. I think about how it would be to live as a goldfish in this environment. There is nothing in the tanks with the fish besides other fish and the blinding light. What do goldfish need? Do goldfish need anything else? How aware are they of their surroundings? What is the quality of goldfish consciousness? Does the light stress them out? Is the social experience to them exciting? Do goldfish feel excitement? Do they crave the alternative company of greenery or weird water bugs? What kind of diet are they being sustained upon in this art exhibit? I imagine it to be some soilent green freeze dried and flaked goldfish body recomposition. What happens to the fish at the end of the show? What happens if a fish dies in the exhibit? Do the other fish nibble at it until a black polo-shirted gallery employee notices and grabs the little green net?

I am plagued with these questions as I amble from tank to tank. This also happened to me when I visited Okunoshima, an island currently famous for its super high population of rabbits dwelling in the bushes. As soon as I saw all the bunnies, I immediately turned to thoughts of what happens to all the dead bunnies. I imagined a large population of seahawks full and brooding atop the highest point of the island, fat on the sea’s bounty and the bodies of old rabbits. I imagined an overgrown bed of snakes resting content in some dark valley, untrodden by visiting animal tourism. I imagine a fox den full of foxy babies and foxy mamas, each lustrous and smiling and so damn happy for the unimaginable fortune of sweet life on an island of prey with no predator. I dream up stacks and clinking pits of bunny bones, for some reason in an imaginary bunny graveyard ditch, all grouped together as opposed to scattered realistically. I feel these morbid and pleasant thoughts and the day after my visit I spend the entire afternoon creating a needlepoint of a bunny skeleton suspended in a yellow threaded body. After the art is finished, I don’t think about the bunnies anymore.

But here I am in the middle of the art. Every thought is created by and in contrast to the beautiful illumination all around me. Seriously, what happens to these goldfish once the exhibit is over? I am unable to interrogate the employees, with my Japanese language ability still unpar. I kick my toes against the ground behind each foot as I take steps to meander slowly from cornery­squarish­shaped yellow tank to octogonal­roundish­shaped purple tank to oval­and­so­smooth orange tank. I picture them being scooped one by one into transportation insulated bags to be sent to an in­home goldfish rescue where a middle­aged woman who never had children sprinkles flakes over a variety of different shaped plastic kiddie pools filled with slippery orange speckled bodies. I picture them being prioritized by physical beauty and all the ugly ones used as aquarium food at an established, permanent aquarium exhibit, with the rest, of course, auctioned off to collectors with nice hair and other sorts of future responsible pet owners. I see them being dumped from old white bleach buckets into a moat surrounding a castle park not too far from here. I think of that artist that offered to let people blend the goldfish, invited them to take a life and to evaluate the moral cost. What are the ethics of goldfish?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I wander past exhibits of bubble eyes and lionheads, of beautiful scatterings of tamasaba, of comet and telescope and orandas. It is pleasant and terrible, like most things I am attracted to most, and I spend the whole day wandering around glowing monuments of power. We can collect and keep life purely for beauty and art. We can observe and interact and even blend, in certain circumstance. I once had pet goldfish. I won them in a carnival game at the county fair when I was young. Their home was a small bowl in the kitchen, not educated in any way with what goldfish need. With the temperature of my hometown, I should have had a tank, under the air conditioning, with filters and rocks and plants and surface area to dissolve oxygen for a good life. But I had none of these things. I changed their water rarely. I watched them blob around in a tiny environment and felt happiness, weird misguided happiness. It was torture, looking back, and how many other things in my life do I continue to derive pleasure from that originate in a kind of mindless, culturally normalized and ritual torture? Most things, now that I think of it, besides matters of my body and love.

The exhibit will close soon, so I decide to descend and join the rungs of people on the street. I weave between masses of people, the street fresh from a summer rain shimmering with the reflection of the streetlights and the moving legs of all the people, businessmen, students, old mothers still clasping umbrellas although the rain has paused. In this city with all of its edges and corners, I only go so far before I am forced to turn and walk a path I have walked hundreds of times before. I miss the greenery of a country life, but the neon city has its beauty, sometimes. I wonder what it is that I really need, what things I need in this tank I inhabit. I kick my toes against the ground behind my feet as I wait for the pedestrian light to turn. And when it finally changes, the dozens of others and I cross the illuminated street in all directions.