Of the many threads that wove their way through the Pulitzer Foundation’s recent Sugimoto symposium, two intersecting strands emerged early on. Broadly speaking, these themes responded to questions of materiality and medium specificity, and as Robin Kelsey suggested, the seeming, although perhaps illusory, incompatibility between Serra’s (extra) large-scale sculpture and Sugimoto’s photography. This idea first appeared in relation to Sugimoto’s previous installations in other institutions – LA MOCA, MCA Chicago, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, among others – and involved the photographer’s efforts to precisely control the installation of his work, and to what extent these efforts constituted a series of attempts to “conquer” the original architects.
From the outset, we seemed firmly in Serra’s territory: what greater spatial intervention, after all, than Tilted Arc? But in our discussion the issue quickly transformed itself from a question of subjugation to one of translation, in which Sugimoto’s installations operated as more subtle interventions, either slowing down or speeding up the viewer’s experience of whatever space in which the pictures were installed. This attention to the way that one moves through a space, coupled with the photographs’ part-by-part revelation of Serra’s work, seemed to some the closest point of intersection between the two Joes.
This focus on the temporal, ambulatory experience of architectural space seemed to me particularly suited to the Pulitzer Foundation as well. The pedagogy of personal curiosity suggested by Sugimoto’s installation, with its calculated tension between expectation and surprise, paralleled the lack of ‘direction’ enforced by Tadeo Ando’s building. Ando’s building itself inspires a sort of wanderlust, an urge to investigate and explore but without the relentless compulsion for forward movement that characterizes much contemporary museum architecture, and one was left to wonder what Sugimoto might have done in a different space. And how much of the installation’s success derived from the photographs’ physical proximity to Joe itself? Can one speak of site-specific photography, we wondered, and if so, was this it?
In what has become something of a trademark move for Sugimoto, the installation generated a productive tension – between individual and series, expectation and surprise, temporal expansion and condensation, series and group, motion and stasis – ultimately leading to an experience where one felt the need to probe further, while remaining free to choose one’s own path rather than following, however unconsciously, a preordained route.
A number of participants, myself included, initially admitted to a certain unease in comparing Sugimoto’s delicate – one is tempted to say precious – photographs to the obdurate mass of Serra’s sculpture, described by at least one scholar as not unlike having a “battleship” in one’s courtyard. After all, how could these photographs, so vulnerable to the elements, stand up to several tons of Cor-ten steel?! Similar concerns were voiced regarding photography’s ultimate ability (or inability, for some) to come to terms with abstraction. Can one make a truly abstract photograph? Or does photography’s inherent connection to the real preclude such a possibility from the start?
As with the photographs’ relationship to their architectural surround, the operative terms in this discussion seemed to be translation and tension. These works were not in competition but in dialogue with one another. This was driven home by our collective experience of excitement upon experiencing Serra’s Joe at night, precisely the moment at which Serra’s dreadnaught becomes most dematerialized – or, in other words, most like the photographs!
Although mounted to aluminum plates and mounted so that they stand out from the wall, emphasizing their “object-ness,” Sugimoto’s photographs of Joe will never achieve the physical mass, volume, and weight of Serra’s sculpture. But through his scrupulous attention to detail and his nuanced understanding of the formal properties of his chosen medium (including the processes of its own eventual demise) it seemed to me that these photographs asserted their materiality in their own, specifically photographic, way.
