Sugimoto
(Sugimoto in
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Since
the belated arrival of colour photography as a (respectable and collectable)
art-form in the
In
a world where fashion has dictated that practitioners of classic black and
white photography have (with the honourable exception of those dedicated to
working in the documentary style) turned to the surreal detail in an attempt to
revive a received repertoire, Sugimoto has looked elsewhere for the elusive
dimension of depth, or sense of sublimity, that raises an image above its
fellows in the contest for our critical acclaim. So it is that despite (or
maybe we should say because) of his addiction to black and white photography,
the artist’s integration of the conceptual into his artwork at the most
fundamental level, both renders his images striking and thoughtful and
reaffirms his experimental credentials; all of which were evinced in this
retrospective collection of many of the images that have made him a ‘name’ in
his field, as well as his latest offerings.
Among
the more recent of which are: The Lightning
Fields series (2009), an essay in black and white in its most minimal
aspect; suggestive but ‘non-representational’ (or perhaps we should admit that
with the addition of the title to our perception of the images, that they are
‘almost’ representational, mimetic and imitative … suggestive of the content
the title prompts). What we see: (white) lines and blurs (on a black
background); the black and white image reduced to its essence. Offering a sense
of photography starting again, of returning to absolute basics,
minimalist-style, all the better to recommence the climb back up to seeing
afresh (with one eye turned toward the early experiments of the
Photo-succession and the Surrealists).
The
Conceptual Forms series (2004) offers
more figurative matter in two aspects: the first that of sculptural machines;
found objects made to look gigantic, with the grandiosity of monoliths - as
most notably in ‘Regulator’. The second aspect is found in a variety of made-up
geometrical forms, minimalist inventions, enigmatic, side-lit. In all cases the
medium of black and white is key to the envisioning of the matter presented;
never just the transparent means of presentation (should such a thing in fact
ever exist) but playing a fundamental part in the image-worthiness of the thing
presented.
Also
figurative, but this time, figurative/conceptual, are a sequence of works
questioning history. Portraits: Henry
VIII and his Wives (1999- ), employs figures from history, historical
personages. Yet the manner of presentation also exposes their posedness, their
nature as manikins (wax works from assorted Madame Tussaud’s), their nature as
artifice. Almost a recreation of biography as statue. But statues are memorials
to the importance of something… certainly not to Henry (or only in an ironic
sideswipe): so to a situation, the remains of which (in the poplar imagination)
are largely salacious and on a par with today’s scandals of celebrity. For in
this ‘Six Wives of (and including) Henry VIII,’ in this ‘history’,
the women (to this viewer at least…) all appear to be the same… as if modeled
by the same person; so foregrounding the constructedness of the sequence - as
well as indicating the point of view as a self-consciously ironised male
fantasy (it was Henry who did the choosing, but the artist has chosen too). The
resulting photographs are a subtle critique of this fantasy in its relation to,
or realisation in, specific relations of power… (fantasy is one thing; the
power relations to enact it quite another).
Historical
recreations are taken a step further in a selection of images that offer a
recreation of the Prehistoric; the recreation of (pre) history…. Images of
pre-historic people and their environment are presented as if photographed - as
if documentary. Again vision, the realm of the image is used to realise a
non-visual realm; a history of which no images remain. What use is such
pseudo-history; why image (pre) history? The question so posed is: when we see
pre-recordable, pre-documented -pre-documentable- history as if documented, as
if recorded: what do we feel, what do we think? Is it the very concept of
recordability that is as the issue here? What is documentary? What degree of
constructedness is present in our ‘documenting’, our ‘recordings’, our
representations of reality, of just how much ‘re‘ there is in re-presentation?
(As for example in the oft-posed question: How much Photoshop is justifiable…?)
In these images all is re-constructed, only information external to the image,
history reconstructed through remnants unearthed by archeology, inform the
image.
It
is to two, already classic, photographic sequences that we must now turn, and
with which I want to spend a little more time, to the vision of Seascapes and the interrogation of
vision in Theatres.
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A night whose lining is of silver; a sea of sable
lit by an ivory sky.
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The
Seascapes series (1980-2000s). A
haunting set of studies of the horizon line, the place where sea and sky touch,
the place where a particular kind of light is born. The range of these images
indicates a deliberate exploration of possibilities, from abstract evocations
of Rothko’s division of the picture plane (the ‘horizon’ bisecting the black
and white photographic image mirrors his division of the painting into two
colours) to a capturing of that special sense of a ‘place above water’ which
conjures a three-dimensional space with no obvious content apart from the light
that inhabits it, a habitation of which the ‘occupant’ is invisible (so echoing
our own occupation of the room of the self). Invisible; but luminous (as in
Turner’s watercolours, so placing Sugimoto in a long historical tradition of
painting ‘the place above water’). We have on offer a range of pictorial
possibilities from the presentation of an abstract flat surface to the
depiction of depth (still abstract) and from the assertion of a two-dimensional
picture plane (degree zero of illusionism) to the evocation of the space above
water as three-dimensional. This latter is most notable, offering a space
illuminated; a highlighted space above water, often including light’s
reflection on water. Evoking a presence through absence (an idea we will see
explored in a very different way in the section on Cinemas that follows). Various degrees of the presence of light and
the grouping of light, both on and above water, are sometimes dispersed,
sometimes centered in the image (both in the sky and on the sea, sometimes
providing a single centre, sometimes a double presence of light). To the
foregoing effects we must add a near infinite variety of shades of grey, a
mediating range of tones with which to soften the achromatic starkness of black
and white. A grey pallet to supplement the black and white imagining of the sea
horizon… so manifesting variety amongst an apparently minimalist approach (a
technique also in evidence in his other works).
Walls
of coal and granite, and then the all too pristine whiteness of the blank page.
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What
do we see when we look at the sequence of photographs entitled, Theatres (1978- )? Do we see the
interiors of cinemas themselves or do we see cinema screens? What is the topic
here? Our focus is divided. The choice offers radically different perceptions;
radically different modes of perception. But perhaps that is the point… If the
topic is the screen, then the image is of a blank, so imageless, screen, a
screen framed by a detailed frame…so doubly framed, by the picture frame and
the surround of the cinema screen; so twice fore-grounded, doubly
significant…an exacerbation either sacral or conceptual, of intensity of
feeling or of thought. This is the result (sublime) of the absence of image. Of
placing absence at the core of the image. The image, in this way, is the image
within, with the residual or surplus aspects of the image as the frame that
further focus our attention. In this case the topic is image, its nature, its
time and its projection - conceptual fare. Furthermore there is the additional
aspect of the sense of self as before a screen (a question addressed to the
viewer, to the pragmatic moment of language and image appropriation: what is it
to look at an image…). Or the lurking question as to what is that is behind the
blank screen – what lies behind (expanded into a question addressed to the
nature of cinema as an institution, as a privileged and so symbolic place of
symbol presentation). If we are in doubt as to the appositeness of this
question we might note that these questions would not be asked by us if the
screen were full, when the plenitude of the image and its accompanying
narrative would be playing, or excerpted, before us... It is the ‘white light’,
the ‘blank’ screen (in actuality the totality of the film shown, as the
photograph’s exposure encompasses this time) that promotes these reflections.
The totality of the film as light is stated, is revealed… the nature of the
frame and our reflection upon such (rather than its materiality) is what is
fore-grounded – prompted…. Our reflection, therefore: the cinema as
institution, the image as institution…
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If
the topic is (read as) the cinema as place, the cinema as interior, as material
presence (albeit one step removed by the blacking/bleaching out of colour),
then the image = the image content. The inner frame of the image (the image
within the image) has become just another part of the image in total; it has
its own value, over and above being a frame for another place, another voice…
So it is left to sing with its own voice, the grain of which reveals (which
revels in) its own texture… So what we have (what we see) is the texture of,
and so finally the materiality of the image. ‘…of the image’; but not of
materiality as such. We are talking about the photographic texture, the black
and white rendition of the place, the grain of the voice of a photographic
event (I want to repeat: it is not natural to use black and white as a
recording medium, it is always a question of code; in the case of documentary,
for example, gritty unvarnishedness signals authenticity, despite the
inaccuracy of the tonal realization…). Moreover, if black and white is untruth,
as an always already changed image, changed by a recording medium that is counterintuitive regarding
representation (we see in colour), then we are beyond a pure imitation of
nature (beyond that kind of illusionism). This level, or veil, has been
removed, and the image as a product of human culture, as a received ‘code’, as
an ‘artificiality’, an ‘artifact’, or just ‘art’, is left. An image, for the
viewer in real time, an event, has been created - based upon recording
technology, to be sure. Unapologetically so. A version of reality is presented…
as such; with its versionality foregrounded. Jubilant. Ecstatic. So it is that
in the process of mis-taking a piece of reality, in the course of its rendition
by an inadequate technology (in human terms, we are the measure of all, it does
not see as we do…), that this polarisation of light values and concomitant
re-texualisation (or perhaps re-contextualisation), that this emphasis on the
photographic text, reveals a set of quite remarkable interiors; most notably in
the older theatres, which feature detailed stucco alongside other forms of
décor. Fold and shadow, foreground and highlight. Black and white. Here we
behold: cinema as detail, as sculpture, but of a sculpture that is transformed…
created, by means of the photograph (as we have seen, other works by Sugimoto
also do this). The photograph as sculpture.
The
divided image; mis-en-abime. Offering
a double theme; the abstract and conceptual blank screen … and the detailed
texture of the cinema interior (tellingly brought out by the black and white
photography). The absent and the solid. The plenitude or presence of the
surround versus the poverty (provocative) of the central -reframed- absence;
two orders of visual experience; a double event happening, two types of visual
space, sensuous and puritan, representational and abstract… or sublime. Indeed
the beautiful as frame for the sublime…Like a landscape; an interior landscape;
an interior space and the interiority of thought. What is seen and what is not
seen, but implied, pointed to: (yet again) the sublime aspects of the sky and
attendant symbolic matters: but this time the deixis points out ‘behind’ the
visual text, or into an infinite inner regress, and not up and out as in the
art history of the image. Furthermore, in this case the pointing beyond is
overlaid on what remains, on the light made out of a complete narrative; a narrative
which is lost and worthless, complete and lost, completed and so lost… The
awareness of which only reaches us through indirect means (by means of
information over and above that contained in the title and the image (the image
as product of a prolonged exposure, precisely the playing time of a film)) …so
secondary and redundant (doubly lost, doubly redundant). Pure light, as in
other landscapes, points elsewhere. Interior landscapes can also do this - and
this is one that does just that…. Like the Seascapes,
a more ‘traditional’ kind of landscape, bearer of a double language; of image
and of idea, pleasure and thought, plenitude and absence, or our old, not yet
absent, friends (because bearing the residual ritual element in art), the
beautiful and sublime.
If in Edward Hopper’s’ ‘New
York Movie’ (1939) the division of space questions the role of the imagination
in a divided world, then Hiroshi Sugimoto, in the divided spaces of ‘Seascapes’
and Theatres’, shows a division in space which reveals the split world of our
imagination.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk,
2012