The literature on Sugimoto is overrun with metaphors of time; here I will run with them a little longer. The Pulitzer Foundation’s October 1st symposium underscored temporality’s persistence within discussions of the artist’s collecting, seriality, materiality, and attention to installation. Sitting in Tadao Ando’s building throughout the day-long program was itself an exercise in the effects of time on architecture, weather, the art object and the body. Considering this, one surprisingly absent citation—despite references to Neil Young, the October crew, buddhism, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Claes Oldenburg, and Tristan Shandy—was Barthes’ autobiographical ruminations in Camera Lucida. (This study seems particularly relevant considering Serra’s sculpture Joe is named in honor of the late Joseph Pulitzer, and because Barthes discusses photography, time and the monument).
How time works in and on Sugimoto’s photographs varies like the clouds captured, as did symposium participants’ opinions about which of Sugimoto’s works might withstand its critical test. (We know the photographs have already stood the physical test of time very well despite some outdoor installations, although Sugimoto’s unframed mounting at the Pulitzer raises new questions of fragility.)
Sugimoto himself has stated that his works are about the language of time: “I am tracing this beginning of time, when humans began to name things and remember.” But like many of his gnomic interview statements, what does this really mean? Are we dealing with pre-history? Nostalgia? The “indecisive moment?” Are these, to borrow Ad Reinhardt’s formulation for his black painting series from the 1950s and 60s, the “ultimate” photographs? The last photographs that can ever be taken? Are they about banality and repetition? Duration and accretion? Japanese ritual practices? “Real” time, whatever that might mean for today’s media? The moment left exposed until it turns into the hour? Slowing down and stillness? All of these possibilities cropped up in lively discussion.
Despite this consistent return to time, Sugimoto seems to refuse to be in it. He seems reticent to photograph concrete objects concretely—often relying on his “double infinity” lens obfuscation (a term that curator Debi Kao opined Sugimoto might like as much for its name as its effect.) Indeed, Sugimoto’s latest series of photographs of Richard Serra’s sculpture Joe is only the culmination of this effort to eviscerate concrete reality and leave behind shimmering, suspended light and atmosphere. One hundred twenty five tons of steel becomes a play of graphic shadows.
This effect carries over to the viewer—or at least this viewer. It is very difficult to imagine being in Sugimoto’s photographs. (This becomes even more pronounced looking at them after strolling through Serra’s Joe and feeling the heat of the sun stored in its rusty sides. ) The time of Sugimoto’s photographs seem suspended without location or assurance of our own particular historical experience. Familiar landmarks are abstracted. Oceans we may have crossed become sheets of color adjustments, without anchoring land or boat, even when we learn such specifics as ‘the photograph was taken from the highest point of a bluff’ or ‘the photograph was taken at six-thirty a.m.’ And in the Joe series, the photographs sits at the brink of abstraction and discernable reference.
Norman Bryson has discussed the destructiveness of Sugimoto’s images, as art historian Robin Kelsey mentioned at the symposium in his own relation of Sugimoto’s work to Bataille. This could explain some of the photographic series’ seeming obsession with time and their almost unbearable perfection. Sugimoto, afterall, talks about his photographs of buildings as a kind of “erosion-testing” for durability, “melting away many of the buildings in the process.” Does Joe melt too? Can we see here at work the photographic sign that Barthes described as “the vertigo of time defeated”?
In its narrative destructiveness, might this kind of time be related to myth? (That is, if we call myths, following Sugimoto’s discussion of his photographs, our first attempts to trace and remember.) Sugimoto often refers to the beginning of photography and one of its inventors, Henry Fox Talbot, for whom the sun in its mixture with table salt produced his first fragile images, the “photogenic drawings.” Perhaps rather than the proclaimed end of photography, this latest series at the Pulitzer spirals back to photography’s mythic start, when the image hovered somewhere in the suspended time between clear perception and darkness
1Interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto, March 1997, William Jeffett.
