“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” (Roland Barthes)
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Faraday Cage is currently ticking away in the old Power House on Cockatoo Island – the former convict prison and dockyard for shipbuilding in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Following on from his recent experiments with electricity, the new site-specific commission is a clear highlight of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.
The artist had been working with early William Henry Fox Talbot negatives, buying as many as he could and making his own positive images with them, true to the original techniques. This Photogenic Drawing project then led to the Lightning Fields body of work, where he applies electric charges directly on to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The resulting formations rely on chance and suspend the electric charges in time as still images.
For this ode to Michael Faraday, a pioneer of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, a series of light-box mounted prints from the Lightning Fields series line a staircase where visitors ascend towards a thirteenth-century sculpture of the fierce Raijin, the Japanese God of Thunder. Nestled amongst the beautiful, dusty and redundant machinery the artist had added an apparatus that gives off intermittent volts of electricity, adding an element of shocking sound that makes the silence in between all the more eerie.
Sydneysiders were also fortunate enough to have Sugimono give the Biennale keynote opening address. He spoke about his extensive background as a collector and dealer in Japanese and Asian antiquities as being driven by an unshakable desire to “see with ancient eyes”. He also outlined his recent architectural work for the Izu Photo Museum at the foothills of Mt Fuji in Japan, and his building plans for a theatre space at a nearby mountain. So is he becoming less interested in photography? The performing arts are a natural progression from the medium, he said, theatre is much closer to photography than painting.
