Asuka Katagiri started photographing stars in a non-paparazzi way when he was twelve. Here are some (unaltered) heliolatry shots from his Light Navigation series.

An exhibition of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series Koen (’The Park’) has just opened at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. It will tour to the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne (16 September–23 October 2011) and Adam Art Gallery in Wellington (24 January–25 March 2012). See below for the catalogue essay I wrote …

“Being seen by absolutely no one and being unaware of being seen were similar, yet basically different.”

(Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn)

Seeing Darkness

In one episode of the BBC TV series Planet Earth, thirty desperately starving lions kill an elephant in the middle of the night. It’s one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. Knowing that their night vision is far greater than that of any elephant’s, the cats wait for their prey to be isolated from its herd before leaping up onto it and mauling its flesh until it collapses. The carcass will feed the huge pride for at least a week. We’re given an extreme close-up of one of the elephant’s useless eyes, and a lingering shot of a lioness gnawing its trunk. Lightning strikes in the distance. Figures lurk in the shadows. The score is unashamedly film noir. And the entire six-minute sequence is shot in the dark on infrared.

With wavelengths just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, infrared rays are invisible to our eyes but can be made visible with the right equipment. The use of such technology thus reminds us of the inherent limitations of our vision. The cats’ eyes pierce much further through the enveloping darkness than the elephant’s can, while the prosthetic eye of the camera far exceeds the capacities of the eyes of the film crew. They were crouching in pitch blackness, but as this network of watching shows, darkness isn’t something objective – it depends on who is doing the looking. The scene was undetectable to the unaided human retina but not the privileged feline eyes or the camera’s lens, and thus as ultimate viewers we have the strange experience of seeing something our bodies are not equipped to see. Steven Connor describes a similar effect of visualizing the invisible with images produced by X-ray scans:

“Here, I seem to be able to see the ways in which I cannot see; I can see my own blindness. But, for this very reason, I also seem to see that I can sometimes see what I never in fact can; X-ray photographs provide the visible proof that vision can encompass a vision not its own. This of course is true only because the non-optical effects have been translated into the order of sight, most notably by being captured in some form of visible or material form – a photograph, or fluorescing screen … ”

Indeed, the X-ray is one of several 19^th century inventions that were paired with photography and led to a new conception of the camera as being not a tool for recording what we see, but a means for capturing what we can’t see. Telescopes and microscopes were also part of this shift in understanding. The relationship between seeing and knowing was becoming more complicated and the uptake of these technologies heralded a growing awareness of there being a lot more in the physical world than our subjective senses could detect on their own.

In a similar vein, the images in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series Koen (‘The Park’) push the boundaries of human perception. They activate our vision where it usually fails – in the dark. Yoshiyuki obtained them by taking his camera on vespertine prowls of Tokyo’s public parks in 1971 and 1979, furtively capturing on film the Peeping Toms he found watching people engaged in sexual acts. Using infrared sensitive film and filtered flash bulbs, the amateur photographer was able to grant himself a gaze that penetrated straight through the very darkness that made him invisible to everybody else there. The levels of complicity, performativity and victimisation on the part of the subjects remain ambiguous – we know we are seeing something we are not permitted to see, but we have the sense that the amorous subjects audacious or desperate enough to have sex in these places must have been aware of the possibility of being visible.

Of course, there’s nothing especially Japanese about bonking in public parks. But in their localised context the photographs explore the limits of privacy in Tokyo of the booming 1970s. After WWII the Japanese love hotel phenomena had flourished, allowing couples to rent rooms for ‘resting’, charged by the hour. And even before these short stay hotels, sex in urban Japan had often been removed from the private home, where typically very little personal space was possible, and assigned to public chaya ‘tearooms’. Many 18^th and 19^th century ukiyo-e woodblock prints survive depicting a third party casually watching copulating couples in such venues, so Yoshiyuki’s series can be situated in a long aesthetic thread where artists have either recorded or imagined voyeuristic acts as the primary subject of their art.

Blown up and printed at life-size, the photographs were shown in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo where the lights were turned off and visitors were instructed to navigate the space with hand-held torches. The prints were destroyed after the exhibition, but the photographs were published in a book in 1980 before Yoshiyuki (a pseudonym, his real name remains unknown) set up shop as a family portrait photographer and vanished into obscurity. In 2006 Martin Parr’s publication The Photobook: A History included Yoshiyuki as an unknown innovator, prompting Yossi Milo Gallery in New York to track down the reclusive artist and convince him to reprint the remaining negatives.

The photographer’s sudden destruction of the prints and abandonment of the project suggests contention might have arisen over him showing the potentially incriminating photographs that had been so clandestinely taken, very recently, in the same city. Here, now, with the safety barrier of geographic distance and more than three decades firmly established between us and the images, we have greater anonymity. And yet their powerful capacity to involve us prevails. Paradoxically, it is when the figures have their backs to us and evade being identified themselves that we are most heavily implicated, no matter how much distance in space and time we have secured. As with the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s rückenfigurs, and their modern manifestations in the surrogate bodies seen from behind in video games, when we are positioned in the same direction as the figure depicted in front of us, our gaze is projected onto the same scene from the same angle and we are implicated as active viewers.

Looking at Yoshiyuki’s images induces an uneasiness that has something to do with seeing the seer looking while seeing ourselves being seen looking. Paintings depicting the Biblical story of Susanna and The Elders, where an innocent woman bathing in a garden falls victim to exploitative male desire, can have a similar effect. The scene was depicted by the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Tintoretto and Gentileschi – its popularity being easily attributed to the justification it offered for a prominent fully exposed female nude, sanctioned under the categorical label of ‘historic painting’. While a sanctimonious position is superficially implied for the viewer, we can’t condemn the invasive gaze of The Elders without indulging in moral hypocrisy, knowing that we ourselves have gone on to perpetuate the same gaze so prolifically.

When we move from painting to photography the image’s capacity for implication is even stronger, because the photograph asserts irrefutably that its subject at some point existed physically before the camera’s lens. It is a curious feature of the history of photography that long after the daguerreotype was superseded by cheaper and more efficient techniques, pornographic daguerreotypes continued to be produced and sold. The historian Geoffrey Batchen has linked this to the status of the daguerreotype as a hand-held non-reproducible one-off tactile object. The private act of opening the daguerreotype case (as with the nominally ‘sealed’ section of a men’s magazine, sealed only from those incapable of tearing the edge of a page) must have been part of the ritualised process of stimulation. The extremely long exposure time the sexy daguerreotype image was known to have required could also have invested it with a sense of intimacy that enhanced its eroticism.

In contrast, these gritty candid images suggest anthropological distance on the part of the photographer. Whether we like it or not we are lined up right behind Yoshiyuki in the chain of voyeurism, while in many of the images (the most compelling ones, I think) the final object of vision (the erotic act) is out of shot/sight. They are hardly suitable masturbation material: we are granted proximity while being denied any illusion of intimacy. Rather than removing traces of the photographer and the photographic process to suggest we are seeing directly, they make us intensely aware of the photographer and his precarious position, as well as the photographic act. In this sense they are less photographs about sex, and more photographs about photography. The photograph (photos + graphé = ‘drawing with light’) was for a long time an image made with light that paradoxically needed to be developed in a darkroom. These images make visible what is supposed to invisible – sex, yes, but more interestingly, darkness itself.

Images courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery

While Einstein declared that his theory of the Cosmological Constant was his “biggest blunder”, recent work in physical cosmology is suggesting he might have been right after all. In any case, it’s a deeply pleasing phrase. Cosmological Constant. Cosmological Constant. Um, here are some pics from Cosmic Wonder’s circle-ridden fashion project Light Source …

In the mid-1950s, Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka made herself a ‘dress’ out of coloured light bulbs and electric wiring, inspired by the hidden physiological systems of the human body. She wore the dazzling, cumbersome thing to various exhibitions and happenings in Tokyo and Osaka. More here.

“The more we learn about the world, the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance – the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” (Karl Popper)

The unknown is always vaster than the known – unlike what is illuminated, darkness is boundless. On the small art-studded island of Naoshima in Japan’s Setouchi Inland Sea is a profoundly simple work by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and Californian light artist James Turrell. Situated in an old temple, the commission is part of the Fukutake Foundation’s Art House Project series, where artist restorations of historic sites are scattered throughout the island’s old residential Honmura district.

The name of the work, Minamidera: The Back Side of the Moon, reminds us that despite being unseen, the moon’s dark side still exists – and while we talk about lunar waxing and wanning we know we are only witnessing the effects of shadow play. Visitors enter a pitch-black room where they wait until they gradually detect a faint light that has always been there but only becomes perceptible after ten to fifteen minutes of retina expansion. The initial darkness feels dense and heavy on the body and the experience is situated somewhere between the anxiety of not understanding the surroundings and the pleasure of anonymous immersion in infinite space. The element of time is crucial – as with the dusk and dawn viewings at Turrell’s Sky Spaces (one of them situated nearby in the Tadao Ando museum Chichu), we must wait patiently in silence before we can see. In keeping with a non-dualistic view of the world, participants are made sensitive to the ways in which light and dark (known and unknown) exist only through each other.

Thinking back on a John Cage performance he attended as a fresh-faced freshman, Turrell said “I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I knew it was important”. Comparisons between Cage’s music and the body of work Turrell went on to create can be useful in thinking about the artist’s practice: while the composer’s noise incorporated silence, Turrell’s light includes darkness; and while Cage is concerned with in his listeners listening to themselves listening, Turrell hones in on the seer seeing her or himself seeing. Furthermore, while Turrell’s work is largely lost in photo and video reproductions, Cage doesn’t translate well to recording: they both offer live, experiential environments which cease to exist without the listener/seer: the imaginative, cognitive and perceptual space in the minds of their audiences is what assembles the reality of the works. In Turrell’s words, “my work is not about my seeing, it is about your seeing. There is no one between you and your experience. It is non-vicarious art.”

Cage wrote what he considered to be his best composition, 4’33” (a work that was included in the concert the young Turrell attended) after sitting in a noise-proof anechoic chamber and observing the cacophonous sounds of his own body. It was then that he realised there is no such thing as silence, and while 4’33” is commonly perceived to be a four minutes and thirty-three second silent composition, it actually consists of the perpetual sounds of the surrounding environment, which the audience is made sensitive to as the performer remains as still and soundless as possible. It exists on the principle that sensory deprivation amounts to sensory enhancement.

After Cage found there cannot be silence because there are always the sounds within, Turrell went on to teach us there is no such thing as darkness once we locate our inner light – and this is less New Ageist than it sounds. The artist was experimenting with experiences of sensory restriction resulting in heightened sensitivity from very early in his career. With Robert Irwin – an older artist identified with the Californian Light & Space movement of the 1960s – and the perceptual scientist Edward Wortz, Turrell set up an anechoic space at UCLA and conducted a series of experiments on volunteers, as part of the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art & Technology (A&T) 1967-1971 program.

The aim was to focus the participants’ attention on their sense awareness, creating a setting for them to perceive themselves perceiving. In the A&T report Turrell wrote that “The viewers must assume the responsibility, they get into the experience, and they make the art – they are the actuality.” The conceptual groundwork for the project was closely tied in with the practice of meditation and teachings of Zen, which Wortz was at the time heavily focused on and Turrell was also engaged with. They wanted to explore the notion of time as illusionary, quoting from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Turrell’s work ­– which he has referred to as being like ‘visual koans’ – has found unique resonance in Japan, a country where the idea that presence will always grow from its interaction with absence, has developed in artistic traditions for centuries. In examining the Chinese landscape painting that would come to also take root in Japan, François Jullien writes (in The Great Image Has No Form), “Any presence that is no longer haunted by its absence gets bogged down, entrenched in itself and, thus isolated, becomes sterile.” Seen and unseen, known and unknown, shadow and light, day and night, emerging and submerging, silence and sound, being and not being: all should dissolve into each other.

Capable of communicating thousands of nuances of emotion with tiny tweaks of muscles, the human face is a pretty strange phenomenon. The work of techno artist and ‘body hacker’ Daito Manabe has returned regularly to the face since his experiment electric face stimulus, which he performed live at Big In Japan 2009. His most recent projects have had him disconnect the cables from his flesh and turn instead to lasers: in Fade Out, a collaborative work by Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, an image of the artist’s face taken by IR camera is transmitted to a phosphorescent screen via live laser-beam irradiation, and gradually reproduced through the interplay of light and shadow …

An earlier laser experiment by Daito:

A common misconception of eternity is that is means lots and lots of time, when really it amounts to no-time. Eternity has no beginning, end or duration: it is timelessness in the most literal sense.

In 2008 the Paris-based Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda began a continued dialogue with Harvard mathematician and number theorist Benedict Gross (thanks to Le Laboratoire, a not-for-profit institute set up for artists and scientists to work on joint projects). Their points of discussion spanned the purity of complex and prime numbers, fractional dimension, the impossibility of knowing whether the random is really random, the infinity of points between 0 and 1, and the controversial mathematical theory that V is not equal to L.

Last year Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art held a major retrospective of Ikeda’s work, +/−, drawing on the his ideas about “the infinite between 0 and 1” (nothing and something) and incorporating parts of his dialogues with Gross. In 2010 he returned to Japan to tour his synesthetic live work cyclo., the result of a collaborative research project with Carsten Nicolai which focuses on the visualisation of sound.

He was also part of this year’s Aichi Triennale in Japan, where he used 64 high-powered floodlights and a symphony of ultra pure sine sound waves to re-create his Tower of Light (above) from Nagoya Castle. For one night only blinding white light sliced through the night sky into a single vanishing point 10 kilometers above.

Ikeda’s other compositions, installations, video works and sculptures often use ultrasonic waves or frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing in order to investigate the nature of sound and how humans perceive time and space:

Showing until the end of December, Ikeda has a solo show at Galley Koyanagi in Tokyo, including a suite of video installations from his Datamatics body of work and new pieces from his V≠L series:

The sun’s light comes to us from 150 million kilometers away, taking around eight minutes to arrive, without ever making a sound. With his fluorescent lighting instrument ‘optron’, Atsuhiro Ito introduces light to explosive noise and forces the two to cohabit, while darkness and silence get friendly in the apartment below. His performances and installations are disorienting synesthetic experiences that feel both primal and futuristic. Ito also plays in the “extreme optical noise core band” Optrum with drummer Yoichiro Shin. Between 2000 and 2005 he presented regular exhibitions and performances at his now-defunct independent gallery/venue Off Site in Tokyo, and since 2009 he has operated under his own label GOTOBAI recordings.

>>>> This November Atsuhiro Ito will perform in Sydney and Melbourne for our Big In Japan! events.

Above: installation works by Atsuhiro Ito. Below: Ito  performing at Ensembles 2009.

Anyone who says you don’t find straight lines in nature needs to be straightened out. Besides many naturally rectilinear cell and crystal formations, straight lines are to be found in such ubiquitous things as rays of light and gravity’s pull. Since the time of ancient Egypt small weights on strings have been used to mark true vertical lines. Today in place of plump bobs carpenters use laser beams, and it was at a construction site that architect Hiroshi Naito was first taken by the beauty of straight lines of light projected on a rough concrete surface.

When he was invited to do an installation for MOMAT’s current Where Is Architecture? exhibition, he decided to return to this image. In an otherwise completely dark room, 200 straight, parallel red laser beams form a rectangle on the floor. It is a curious property of light that we only see it in what it illuminates. In transit it is invisible, but when it reaches a surface it can appear to have its own mass. Looking at the red lines on the floor it is unclear whether we are seeing an object or image.

Forms appear abruptly from the darkness as people pass through the beams, so the ways in which bodies inform space and architecture are literally brought to light. There is an interplay of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality as the flat lines respond to the contours of the human forms moving through them, and to fully exploit this several dance performances with JunJun SCIENCE and Hiroaki Umeda are scheduled throughout the exhibition.