Hiroshi Sugimoto at the de Young, Part II

<this is a continuation of a previous post>

Mathematical Form: Surface 0002, 2004, Hiroshi Sugimoto

From photography’s earliest days there has been a lot of overlap between science and art, especially when images are removed from their original context. Images originally taken for scientific purposes can be aesthetically pleasing and images taken for artistic reasons can help describe the world in which we live. Between these two poles of photography, the descriptive and the expressive, there are myriad permutations. In Conceptual Forms Sugimoto is making images for artistic purposes, but the subjects are models of mathematical functions that originally served another purpose. In the Hirshhorn catalog he writes…

While not wholly subscribing to the post-Renaissance rational scientific view of the natural world, I do appreciate those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optical devices and experimental implementations that gave visible form to unseen hypotheses … The mathematical models are sculptural renderings of trigonometric functions; the mechanical models were teaching aids for showing the dynamics of Industrial Revolution-age machinery. Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

At the de Young eight Conceptual Forms were shown on the front and back of four panels in a hall where the entire end wall was a mirror. Why the mirror? I liked the effect, but other than optically doubling the panels and length of the hall what was its purpose? Was it another reference to the camera? I don’t know. At the opposite end was Sugimoto’s sculpture Dini’s Surface, a repeating metallic spiral about eight feet tall.

Up until this point in the show the framing of the photos had been subdued, black frames for Dioramas and natural frames for Portraits, but with Conceptual Forms the frames were a silvery metal. Most likely a nod to the machined quality of the forms. There were a number of people who commented to me that they thought that the show felt over produced and that the framing of the images was one of the things that bothered them. The first time I walked through the show I took no notice of the framing (except when there was no frame) and even on later viewings it didn’t bother me.

One thing that did bother me a little was how the next (and last) room was set up. You entered the room looking at a wall with three images from Theaters, to the left was a little alcove with one image form Mechanical Forms and La Boite en Bois (The Wooden Box), and to the right a room with five images from Architecture. After the Architecture images there were four more Theater images as you exited the exhibition. To me, it seemed a bit disjointed, like they ran out of room.

That said, the Theaters series (along with Seascapes) are my favorite Sugimoto images both conceptually and visually. I find the idea of compressing an entire movie into a single frame and the resulting white screen blankness very compelling. It could be that, as with Seascapes, I feel a more personal connection with the subject matter, but I also like the formal qualities of the images. I also wonder if these two bodies of work are the ones Sugimoto himself feels closest. The seed for each was planted early in his life. For Theaters it was sitting in a dark theater as a high school student trying to capture an image of Audrey Hepburn with his Minolta SR7 and Seascapes from a train journey as a child.

My first view of the ocean came as an awakening. Of course I must have seen the ocean before, but this is my earliest and most vivid recollection of it. I spied it from a Tokaido Line train, the seascape passing from left to right. It must have been autumn, because the sky had such vast, eye-opening clarity. We were riding high on a cliff, and the sea flickered far below like frames of a motion picture, only to disappear suddenly behind the rocks. The horizon line where the azure sea met the brilliant sky was razor sharp, like a samurai sword’s blade. Captivated by this startling yet oddly familiar scene, I felt I was gazing on a primordial landscape. Perhaps it is strange that a child should have prelife memories, much less words to express them. The experience left an indelible mark on me.*

Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Thomas Kellein, in his essay in the book Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed has the following to say about Theaters:

The white rectangle in the Theaters obliterates the stream of images and captures in a blaze of light the whole time factor of moviegoing. Only thus, as the trace of an illumination, does the cinematic experience have duration for Sugimoto. Light assumes the place of a story, whatever its title, and of the arbitrary, constantly shifting positions of the camera. Not only are individual films transitory; the film medium itself, photography’s great rival, seems to have lost its capacity to survive.

Film has “lost its capacity to survive?” That seems a bit much, doesn’t it? I don’t know if he is writing from any special knowledge he has from Sugimoto, but that’s not what I get from these images. For me, the white square holds all the potential of a blank piece of paper. It can hold anything, be anything. I love that by capturing one movie, Sugimoto is talking about all movies. If anything has “lost its capacity to survive” it is the great old movie palaces and drive-ins that Sugimoto has photographed. In the age of the megaplex and Netflix I wonder how many of these theaters are still functioning as theaters? It’s not the medium of film that is changing, but how we experience it.

Finally, two thoughts. First it’s interesting that there weren’t any examples of Sugimoto’s Colors of Shadow, work from 2004 and 2005 that was included in the Hirshhorn show. Was it a space issue? And second, we’re not done with Sugimoto yet. Beginning on October 12th the Asian Art Museum will be showing Sugimoto’s History of History as well as Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Costume Institute.

* Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kerry Brougher and David Elliott

Rinko Kawauchi, Part II

I have to say that the Rinko Kawauchi talk last night was a bit of a let down. I don’t know what I was expecting, but she talked mostly about how she got into photography (most of which is covered in the interview link I posted yesterday) and the photography that she showed was all from the Foil website.

On the up side she did show some video work. The work consisted of two five minute sections of a larger twenty minute piece that she will be showing in New York. Ultimately she is planning to do an hour long piece. The video consists of short snippets, anywhere from two to ten or fifteen seconds, of a lot of the stuff you would expect her to be interested in, light sparkling on water, carp, fireworks, a butterfly flapping its wings, etc. Some of the clips have ambient sound, some do not. The reason she gave for her experiments in video is that when she photographs things she feels a lot of “stress” and wanted to be able to capture the motion of things as well.

A few other random points of interest;

To use Alec Soth’s differentiation between book photographers and wall photographers, she is definitely a book photographer. This is probably obvious to anyone who has looked at one of her books and marveled at their exquisite pairings and lyrical sequencing, but it was nice to hear her say (albeit through a translator) that she felt that books were “the most complete form of my photography”.

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Kawauchi credits three people for her development as an artist; Katsumi Asaba, an art directior who encouraged her early in her career as a photographer and gave her some commercial assignments, the publisher Masakazu Takei (who was at the lecture and seems to be quite a character, see here), and Martin Parr, who invited her to show at Photo Arles in 2004 and introduced her work to a wider audience.

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I also thought the way she talked about her first book, Utatane, was interesting. Usually the title is translated as “catnap”, but Kawauchi thought of it more as the place between waking and sleep, or between life and death and that she was “standing in the midst of this divide.” Utatane is also the work that most closely relates to her new video work in that the relation from image to image is less apparent than in her other work. In all her work, images are captured without thinking (無心) and she likes to complete projects while they still have life/freshness (いきがいい). Deciding what she is going to shoot beforehand makes it uninteresting.

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After the lecture I had the opportunity to ask her if she felt any kinship to the other young women photographers she’s often lumped together with (specifically Yurie Nagashima, Miwa Nanigawa and Hiromix who won the Ihei Kimura Award the year before she did). Her response was that she didn’t because she felt she came to be known slightly later than they did.

Rinko Kawauchi

Untitled, 2007, Rinko Kawauchi

I’m looking forward to a presentation Rinko Kawauchi will be giving as part of PhotoAlliance’s lecture series on Friday (10.05.07). Since producing three photo books simultaneously in 2001 (Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako) and winning the prestigious Ihei Kimura Photography Award Kawauchi has been considered one of the great young photographers in Japan.

Links:
Info and work | More Work | Interview

If you are in NYC in the next few weeks, you can see her work in person at Cohan and Leslie, 1o.11.07-11.10.07

Also check out Ferdinand Brueggemann’s excellent post on Kawauchi (and Japanese photography in general here)

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the de Young, Part I

I’m sure there have been plenty of opinions voiced concerning the Hiroshi Sugimoto show that recently closed at the de Young museum. In fact, it was some of those opinions that made me want to take a closer look at the exhibition as a whole, rather than making this post just about what I liked or didn’t like about it. I have to say though that, on the whole, I found it quite impressive.

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The image that opens the show is The Music Lesson, a photograph of Madame Tussauds’ recreation of Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson). It is an interesting choice for an opening image because it is the only color image in the show. Is it meant to show Sugimoto’s presence (his tripod is visible in the mirror)?

The Music Lesson, Hiroshi Sugimoto

Kerry Brougher in an essay from the catalog for the Hirshhorn show (which shared a lot of the same work) suggests another reason, that Sugimoto is suggesting with this image that the entire exhibition space is “an extension of the camera obscura,” a dark space onto which images of the outside world are projected. The metaphor of the camera is one of the consistent themes of Sugimoto’s work along with time and the internal vision of the artist.

Earliest Human Relatives 1994, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The first room of the exhibit holds work from Sugimoto’s Diorama series. Here the monocular vision of the camera compresses the scene into a more realistic image. Included were Earliest Human Relatives, 1994 and Neanderthal, 1994 in which Sugimoto shows us what it might have been like to photograph pre-history.

The theme of photography in pre-photographic times continues in the next room with Sugimoto’s portraits of Henry VIII and his wives. Again he is working with wax figures which only really becomes evident when you examine the joints between the fingers and other such minute details. But, for all its polish, Sugimoto’s work isn’t just about cool conceptualism. In a wry commentary on the issue of royal succession, he places a lone portrait of Hirohito, the deceased emperor of Japan, on the wall opposite Henry and his many wives. The issue being that until last year there was no male heir to the throne causing many to speculate whether the laws would have to be changed to allow for the current emperor’s daughter to take the throne.

Is there a way to show this idea of pre-history by photographing something other than dioramas and wax figures?

Baltic Sea, Rügen, 1996, Hiroshi Sugimoto

As you approach the darkened room you can see one glowing seascape, no frame, illuminated by a square of light just the size of the photograph. The lighting is a reminder that the whole exhibition makes reference to different aspects of the camera. Once in the room you see nine more on the slightly concave wall that stretches down the long hall. The overall feeling is one of a point of land stretching out into a bay. The curved wall was apparently an artifact of the Hirshhorn exhibit where Sugimoto was faced with curved gallery walls and ended up liking the effect. Sugimoto began photographing this series as another way to show a kind of pre-history, but he also had a very specific point in mind. In a podcast from the Hirshhorn show (here) he says it is the point where people gained consciousness and language and began naming things. He would choose which sea to photograph based on whether or not he found the name interesting. My immediate thought was, which name? Their English name? Japanese name? Which made me think, are the projects conceptualized in Japanese? Are there Japanese titles to the work that differ in some way from the English titles, like some movie titles?

Sea of Buddha, 1995, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The first part of the show also included Pine Trees, Sugimoto’s riff on traditional Japanese screen painting, and Sea of Buddha, an image of the 1001 statues at Sanjusangendo (a temple in Kyoto). Pine Trees is the inverse of his Seascapes series. Rather than finding something unchanging like the sea, Sugimoto had to track down something that is vanishing. He searched all over Japan for these prototypical Japanese pines and found them only on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, a place largely untouched by the development of the rest of Japan. Sea of Buddha is a result of Sugimoto’s desire to show the statues as they were meant to be seen during the Heian Period (794-1185). Or at least how he imagined they were meant to be seen. Another example of the representation on the artist’s inner vision. Sugimoto isn’t showing us the world in a different way, he is showing us his internal vision and using the world as his materials.

<to be continued>