"To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you. To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you. I was moving through the silence without motion, waiting for you. In a room with a window in the corner I found truth" - Shadowplay, Joy Division
Union City Drive-In, Union City (1993)
The Japanese photographer (and, let's not forget) architect Hiroshi Sugimoto works in the shadows. Sometimes, quite literally. Other times, metaphorically. In the shadows of our minds, our consciousnesses, our ideas of what photography, and art, can be. His Time Machine retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery is a well curated, easy to take in, look at his life and work so far and I'm not sure if the fact I visited with some kind of fever (I felt unnecessarily cold, tired, and had a bit of a headache) enhanced the show or not.
It's hard to say. I know it meant that I didn't hang around long afterwards and when I got home it wasn't long before I was tucked up in bed. I just about it enjoyed it (not madly, but enough) though - even though I hadn't been sure exactly what to expect. It certainly started on a note that surprised and, ultimately, wrongfooted me.
A series of large black and white photographs of animals that I imagined Sugimoto had taken in the wild. He hadn't. Okay, the bizarrely humanoid apemen do look a bit odd but the colobus monkeys, the ostriches, the warthogs, hyenas, manatees, and polar bears - despite being depicted in a depressingly pretentious and regressive monochrome, look as if they could be stills from one of David Attenborough's shows.
Sugimoto had arrived in New York in 1974 and on a visit to the American Museum of Natural History he'd been struck by the Victorian era dioramas showing animals in their 'natural' habitats. He thought the animals looked "utterly fake" until he closed one eye - and then they looked "very real". If you say so. Sugimoto's reason for taking these photos was to "bring dead nature back to life" but soon he began to see other interpretations. The hyenas, jackals, and vultures were, he thought, emblematic of the gloomy, and grasping, New York art scene though the polar bear, as far as I can tell, was never anything other than a polar bear.
Earliest Human Relatives (1994)
White Mantled Colobus (1980)
Ostrich-Wart Hog (1980)
Hyena-Jackal-Vulture (1976)
Manatee (1994)
Polar Bear (1976)
The show's name, Time Machine, comes from the fact that Sugimoto sees his camera,
THE camera, as some kind of time machine that can freeze history and evoke eternity. He resides very much in the uncanny valley where death becomes life, stillness becomes movement, safety becomes fear, and fear becomes safety. Sugimoto has said that he's not interested, so much, in capturing specific images so much as he is in projecting his "inner idea of reality".
That reality doesn't have to be, necessarily, particularly thrilling. From 1976 onwards, Sugimoto has been taking photos, using very lengthy exposures, of movie theatres and drive-ins. He's condensed, in each image, roughly 172,800 photographic afterimages into one and that one ends up being a still image of a glowing white screen. Almost
abstract expressionist except for the fact it's very clearly where these photos were taken. Less so why.
UA Playhouse, New York (1978)
Cinerama Dome, Hollywood (1993)
Union City Drive-In, Union City (1993)
Palais Garnier, Paris (2019)
Metropolitan Opera House, Philadelphia (2015)
They're quite relaxing, meditative even if I wish to be even more pretentious, to look at (and I like the vapour trails or whatever they are in the Union City Drive-In photo) but they won't detain you long. Stillness is the move, again, when it comes to Sugimoto's portraits. Portraits of people who are no longer with us. In some cases, people who are long gone.
Sugimoto borrowed wax models from London's Madame Tussauds (now there's a place I've not been for a long time) and, like the Night At The Museum franchise, brought the figures to life in the dark dead of night. By removing them from their backdrop, isolating them, and lighting them sympathetically Sugimoto attempted to make these waxworks look as human as the people they represent. Which, to be fair, is exactly what the modellers at Tussauds were trying to do in the first place - and their job was the much tougher one.
Anyway, check out Salvadaor Dali, Yasser Arafat, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Henry VIII (there's a mix of the the good, the bad, the ugly, and the mad) and make your own mind up if Sugimoto has succeeded. I think they're pretty good but, as I said, I give more credit for that to the creators of the waxworks than the celebrated photographer!
Salvador Dali (1999)
Napoleon Bonaparte (1999)
Henry VIII (1999)
Mr VIII looks like a gnarly old fucker. The sort of bloke who'd cut off his wife's head. The next room was dedicated to architecture which excited me as I'm a big fan of architecture and have lots of books (some read, some unread) about it. But the photos were all blurry. That was intentional but it took me a little while to get over.
I still (quite) enjoyed it though. For the last two and a half decades, Sugimoto has been travelling around the world taking photos ot celebrated modernist buildings by architects like
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Luis Barragan. He was attempting, somewhat pretentiously you may think, "to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture" and believed that 'superlative' architecture can survive blurring. In fact he's gone so far as to say that by blurring his photos he's hewing closer to the architect's original vision which is something me and him will simply have to disagree with.
Chrysler Building (1997)
World Trade Centre (1997)
Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1998)
S.C.Johnson Building (2001)
Architecture and
mathematics are necessary bedfellows so it seems right that the
Hayward's curators should follow the architecture room with a small one devoted to mathematical models. Less blurry but, sadly, less interesting the original models were produced by Sugimoto himself, with the aid of computers, in aluminium and stainless steel and are said, not entirely unreasonably, to evoke the work of
Constantin Brancusi.
Sugimoto claims that he "never was good at mathematics" and that he couldn't see beauty in equations (somebody call
Hannah Fry) but, yet, inspired by the likes of
Man Ray and his emphasis on the anthropomorphic qualities of physical representations of mathematical concepts he taught himself to become a fan. He even spoke of how these models, and the photographs of them, helped bring him closer to understanding the ancient civilisations of
Greece,
Rome, and Asia. If you say so.
Conceptual Forms 0006 (2005)
Conceptual Forms 0002(2004)
At one point there's even a highly complex equation printed on the wall that went right over my head (I'm a keen hobbyist when it comes to maths but I'm no expert). I didn't spend long in that room. Nor the next one, to be fair. That was devoted to Lighting Fields (not actually caused by lightning but by friction creating static electricity to spark and scar the film) and Opticks (a rare blast of colour in an otherwise monochrome show).
As regards, the Lightning Fields, Sugimoto, as with maths, wasn't keen at first but came to love it and eventually started to force it so that he could create images that looked like, you guessed it, lightning. It led to Sugimoto taking an interest in photographic pioneer
William Fox Talbot (1800-1877) who had researched static electricity a long time ago. He also treated himself to a Van de Graaff Generator which I have mentioned for no other reason than to give Peter Hammill's prog rock titans a mention.
House With No Door is a tune.
With the Opticks, Sugimoto went even further back than Fox Talbot. All the way to Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and his proof that natural light was not purely white but consisted of seven distinct colours:- red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet. Sugimoto, like Newton, and like you and me, can sing
a rainbow.
Even if he's loath to use any of those colours in his work. Sugimoto felt seven colours wasn't enough (a bit rich when he tends to stick to two) and started to experiment, though only briefly - it seems, with the "disregarded intracolours". He believed he'd created "a new kind of painting" and though they are pleasant enough I'd disagree with him. Fields of abstract colour had been used in art for decades before. Sugimoto may have found a new way of making such images but the resultant images are hardly groundbreaking.
Lightning Field 225 (2009)
Opticks (2018-2022)
Opticks (2018-2022)
N. Atlantic Ocean, Cape Breton Island (1996)
Sugimoto consciously avoids any distracting elements (birds, boats, distant shores) so as to focus on the sea, and its waves, solely - along with the light of
the sun or the light of the moon. Look at them and marvel at nature and then compare to them to Sugimoto's Sea of Buddha series where human created religions and man made artefacts intended to inspire devotion fail to match the show that nature puts on for us every second of every day.
Lake Superior, Cascade River (1995)
Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993)
Sea of Buddha (2001-2014)
Sea of Buddha (2001-2014)
Sea of Buddha (2001-2014)
The temple had been built for a devout retired emperor and to offer a prayer for rebirth in the afterlife. I wonder if a mere citizen (rather than en emperor) would have been offered such a chance of redemption or if Buddhism, like all other religions, is more interested in wealth and power than it would care to admit.
Sugimoto liked to compare the Sea of Buddha to contemporary
conceptual art and wondered if that art will, like this temple, survive another eight hundred years. I suppose that depends if somebody wants to build a religion, or belief system, round it. Most things don't survive for eight hundred years and I suspect there's as much luck, as there is aesthetical judgement, as regards to what does so, for me, Sugimoto's question is a moot one.
That would have been it for the Time Machine show except, in keeping with an exhibition that features photographs of Tussauds waxworks, there was a Chamber of Horrors downstairs in a part of the
Hayward I'd never seen open before. I was quite excited about this. There was even a warning that some of it might not be for the faint hearted so I descended the staircase with high expectations of at least being repulsed.
I expected at least one large room but what I got was basically a stairwell with a few not particularly horrific images to look at. They were, no doubt, images of horrific events about to happen, happening, or having already happened but there was nothing to scare even children here let alone cynical old bastards like
me. It was, as was a lot of this show, pleasant enough. None of the photography was bad, some of the concepts were genuinely original and interesting, and I enjoyed my brief visit but I came away from the
Hayward Gallery feeling mildly disappointed. More disappointed than when I visited Madame Tussauds all those years and accidentally spoke to a model of Martina Navratilova.
The Electric Chair (1994)
The St. Albans Poisoner (1994)
No comments:
Post a Comment