Sugimoto, Hiroshi not Taku
I flew down to SF to see the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at the De Young Museum. I’d seen the show the year before at the Hirschorn in D.C. and was curious whether it had the same photos, or whether it was different. The show at the Hirschorn left me speechless and nearly in tears, the room with the seascapes being one of the more intimate venues I’ve experienced for an art show. The room was pitch black, on a curved wall, with lights only directly on the photos. The room was deep with couches and as it was late in the day, there were few people about. As a result, my expectations for the De Young show were high.
Entering the De Young show it became apparent that this was the same show, only with less pieces and extremely poorly hung. Pictures were set opposite one another so they reflected into the picture you were looking at. Lighting glared out photographs so you could hardly see some of the pictures. The real travesty was hanging the seascapes in a narrow hallway that was the main thoroughfare from the first rooms to the rear of the show. I was shocked and dismayed. However, this did not hinder the photographs ability to communicate and once again I found myself sucked into the particular moment these photographs inhabit. The play of light and shadow vary from one to another and as I reached Lake Superior, Cascade River, where both the sky and water appear white I was once again choked up on my own senses. Yet the structure of the photos are simple, the scene is birfucated, sky above, sea surface below. Yet different weather, fog and light change everything, obscure the boundary with diffuse mist. The sense of minimalist geometry is turned to expressionist haze, and photos at night with moonlight set the lighting topsy-turvey with the moons reflection lighting up the water below where it was dark sea during the day. The photos are taken from what seems the same perspective though they are from different seas throughout the world.
What is this perspective? A view of the existential infinite, a pythogorean mystical take on geometry yet imbued with the play of the senses that Tanazaki describes in his book, In Praise of Shadows. The subtlety of light, to illuminate, to bring the objext into being yet reveal something far deeper that resides there. The actuality of phenomena.
In the diffuse photographs the subtle details have huge effects, the calm surface of the ocean in one, yet slight ripples on the surface change the drama of geometry. This is no filter trick, this is light, fog-water blurring the boundary of ocean and air showing the interconnectedness of the two. The ripples of waves adding gestural texture thereby adding austere worlds of motion to the static geometry of the view. A perspective almost god-like if it were not so full of a pervasive sense of loneliness. Yet marvelously so. I find myself exhilerated and heartbroken as if these pictures summed up time and within my own mind that is the sum of my time embedded within a longue duree that spans beyond my ken. A twilight of existence. Standing here I leave the details, the specificities and the noise behind. In this universal perspective, I am one.
