Many fundamental questions about the nature of time remain unanswered. We still don’t really know what its relationship to space is, whether it exists independently of the mind, whether it can stop or move in other directions, or whether there can be other times besides the present moment.
Having explored the temporal through the medium of photography for over three decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has concluded that time is an exclusively human construct, which no other animal has any sense of.
In 1978 he took a black and white photograph of the sea. With the horizon in the dead centre of the image, it became the first in his ongoing Seascapes series that now includes photographs from all over the world – taken at different times of day and night under varying weather conditions – always with exactly half sky, half water, and nothing else.
At Benesse Museum on the island of Naoshima in the south of Japan, a selection of the achromatic seascapes is on permanent display outside on the terrace, as well as in several surrounding inaccessible cliff faces, one of them just visible from the museum if you know to look for it. The decision to install them amongst the elements like this came from the artist’s desire to let the images fade into nothingness over the years, while the original ocean and horizon they represent will endure right behind them. The image of the sea, says Sugimoto, remains as the most consistent things in the history of vision on our planet.
On the other side of Naoshima, in a bamboo forest on top of a hill, stands Sugimoto’s reworking of an ancient and decrepit Shinto shrine. The staircase of roughly cut pieces of glass represents the threshold of material and immaterial. The steps lead from a modest wooden structure through the ground to a dark, subterranean cave accessible by an extremely narrow passageway with the aid of torchlight.
It takes around five minutes for the eyes to adjust and detect the steps continuing downwards, and on the way out through the tunnel a real life Sugimoto seascape, with half sky and half water, can be seen. To mark the opening of the shrine a traditional Noh theatre production was staged at night by candle light, and in keeping with the time-honoured teachings of the cycles of decay and renewal, the Go’o Shrine will be taken down and rebuilt every 20 years.
The artist has recalled discovering both Zen Buddhism and hallucinogenic drugs upon moving from Japan to California in the 70s, saying both helped the early formation of his practice. It was evidently during a hallucinogenic episode that he had the idea to photograph cinema, by keeping the shutter of his camera open for the duration of a film.
He has since developed his extensive Theatres series with dozens of prolonged exposure photographs from indoor and drive-through cinemas across America. By reducing the moving images to blank white screens he defies duration, makes time stand still, and harks back to the Zen and Shinto ideals of empty space and the infinite possibilities of nothingness.
The series also raises interesting quetions about the relationship between photography and cinema. Film dictates how long we look at things; we can only perceive what the editing permits – but a still image can be looked at for as long or as short as we like. In the words of Roland Barthes, “in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images.”
Along with the Seascapes and Theatres, the other ongoing series Sugimoto classifies under his Time Exposed body of work is his Dioramas. Photographing wax figures and recreated scenes from Madame Tussauds and natural history museums, he makes representations of representations that appear more lifelike than their ‘originals’ and are often mistaken as photos of the real thing. The success of the illusion, the artist says, relies on his use of black and white photography. Colour would give away the artifice, but without it people have to use their imaginations and in so doing project more accurate colours into the image.
Hiroshi Sugimoto will be appearing in Sydney this May for the 2010 Biennale, where his recent experiments with electricity on film will be featured in a Shinto shrine structure.
That structure on Naoshima looks incredible, what a fascinating meeting between old and new.
Comment by Erika — March 31, 2010 @ 4:02 pm