The Year of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Edward Rubin
With "History of History," Hiroshi Sugimoto’s personal collection of ancient traditional Japanese and East Asia artworks, being shown alongside his own photographs at the Japan Society in New York City, and the artist’s first major retrospective "End of Time," currently at the Mori Museum in Tokyo–both exhibitions will be traveling to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, next year–Sugimoto has finally arrived. Is he happy? You bet! But that didn’t stop the notoriously candid artist, albeit with a twinkle in his eye, from announcing at his press opening here in New York, that this recognition was a long time coming. "If only it had happened sooner. I could have used this 20 years ago," he said.
While the 57-year old Hiroshi Sugimoto is not exactly a household name, his photographs, which have been knocking about since the late 70s, once seen are not easily forgotten. In some primordial way they register deeply on the brain. Nobody else clicking away today works in quite the same serially minimalist manner as Sugimoto. And far fewer photographers cart a heavy 8×10 wooden box camera around the world on their backs, as Sugimoto has been known to do for weeks at a time, as he captures the ever-changing beauty of the sea and the luminescent screens of ornate movie houses. He also designs his own exhibitions–he insists on this–and writes, as is evident in the catalogue that accompanies his "History of History," beautifully at that, about the history, religion and art of Japan as well as his own work.
The Japan Society, known for their elegant and intelligent shows, is the perfect place to house Sugimoto’s "History of History." The space, with its bamboo gardens, skylights, pools of water and expert lighting design–at this they do excel–like the exhibition itself, is all about the quiet beauty of contemplation. Here among prehistoric fossils, ancient and medieval religious and ritual artifacts and Sugimoto’s stunning silver-gelatin photographs, we are gently reminded as we walk from gallery to gallery viewing the ancient works that Sugimoto has collected, that all of history, ever and however connected, is an eternal present.
Interestingly enough and aptly so, the exhibition begins in a small, low lit, religious feeling, anti-chamber that contains the artist’s fossil collection. Standing among fossilized Trilobites, a Sea Lily Colony and a couple of stingrays, all formed hundreds of millions of years ago, we are transported back to the beginnings of life. For Sugimoto, fossils, a record of history, work in almost the same way as photography. Earthquakes, volcano eruptions, landslides and meteor impacts bury the organism under dirt and ashes and in doing so imprint their forms at the very moment of their demise. This accumulation of time and history is the negative of the image. When the dirt and ashes, which eventually turn to stone, are removed, the positive image, the fossil itself, is exposed. Thus photography, the artistic stage of imprinting memories of time, for Sugimoto, functions as a fossilization of present time.<
In the second gallery, even more dimly lit than the first, for affect as well as to keep the images from fading, are twelve of Sugimoto’s well-known dioramas. The photographs, taken at the Museum of Natural History in New York and Madame Tussuad’s Wax Museum in London, each one placed in its own light box and laid out in a single row, appear to be Sugimoto’s wry comment on evolution. Starting with a beautiful underwater vista before man appeared on the scene, the series continues on through our ape-related period when we first began to stand up straight and ends rather abruptly with a photograph of the Royal Family of England and one of Einstein. Each diorama gives off an eerie light, which makes looking into the box to view the photo somewhat chillingly akin to traveling back in time. Our mind led by our eyes, flips back and forth as we wrestle with a realness that is seemingly inherent in the photographed diorama, and the actual artificiality of what is essentially a man-made reality.
By the third room, with this gallery’s higher ceiling and brighter lighting, the mood, now light and airy, has changed significantly. It is here among ancient clay figures, a jasper bracelet, a bronze halberd, a ritual sword made for burial rather than battle, and a long and large stone rod on a hospital gurney humorously titled Testament of a Penis, that we are first exposed to three of Sugimoto’s seascapes. Originally attracted to the sea because it is "the most unchanged scene on the surface of the earth…the oldest vision that we share with ancient people," Sugimoto has been continuously documenting seas around the world since 1980. While each of his seascapes share, a center-frame splitting of sea and sky by horizon, each photograph, taken at a different time of day and different weather condition, plays out the balance of light and time in its own unique pallet of luscious silvers, grays and blacks.
In the last three galleries, with the lights low again, we are in the 12th and 13th Century religiously examining, as the intricate and storytelling detail that each object demands, beautifully painted hanging scrolls, 7th Century fragile fragments of textiles and six stunningly carved and painted ancient masks. The show ends, at least for me, with one of Sugimoto’s illuminated movie screen photographs from the 90s, which is hidden away outside the restrooms in the building’s basement. This time-lapse photograph of the theatre’s pure white screen and its murky interior forces us to adjust our eyes as if in a darkened room. By slowing down the act of perception to the point where it becomes itself a palpable aspect of the work, Sugimoto allows us a glimpse of the working of our own vision. It is this very act of magical perception, that prolongs our looking, that makes a Sugimoto a Sugimoto and the "History of History" history.
