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Building Pictures: Hiroshi Sugimoto on Visual Culture
*Patrick Query *
/ Loyola University, Chicago/
pquery@luc.edu
(c) 2006 Patrick Query.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architecture. Chicago Museum of Contemporary
Art. 22 February-2 June 2003.
Figure 1
*Figure 1: World Trade Center, 1997.*
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2004
1. One of the most useful points Nicholas Mirzoeff makes in An
Introduction to Visual Culture is that visual culture has
permeated and saturated our "everyday life." He uses that very
phrase over half-a-dozen times in his introduction to describe the
most productive ways of conceiving of visual culture as a
phenomenon and as a discipline. Unfortunately, Mirzoeff's idea of
everyday life leaves out most of what constitutes lived
experience; his conviction that "modern life takes place onscreen"
leads him to limit his understanding of modern life to those
aspects of it which are the products of modern visual
technologies: cameras, digital imaging, virtual reality, and the
like.
2. If it is true that the visual "is not just a part of everyday
life, it is everyday life," then surely it extends well beyond
mechanically orchestrated moments of seeing. Indeed, Mirzoeff
allows that "visual culture directs our attention away from
structured, formal viewing settings like the cinema and art
gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life."
Still, in his model, this diffuse visual experience is limited by
other structures, those concerned with the technological
production of images. Although "most of our visual experience
takes place aside from . . . formally structured moments of
looking," Mirzoeff describes the generalized visual culture he
envisions in surprisingly narrow terms:
A painting may be noticed on a book jacket or in an advert,
television is consumed as a part of domestic life rather than
as the sole activity of the viewer, and films are as likely to
be seen on video, in an aeroplane or on cable as in a
traditional cinema. . . . [V]isual culture prioritize[s] the
everyday experience of the visual from the snapshot to the VCR
and even the blockbuster art exhibition.
It becomes apparent that what Mirzoeff means by the "visual" is
actually the representational, the virtual, or as W.J.T. Mitchell
says, the "pictorial" (11). A film shown in many media is an
illustration not of the saturation of modern life by the visual
but of what Lisa Cartwright calls "media convergence," a concept
with real implications for visual culture but not a definition of
it (7).
3. As Paul Jay has rightly pointed out, what Mirzoeff calls visual
culture might more accurately be termed "screen culture," since it
has almost entirely to do with the machinery of image production
and distribution, not with visual experience more broadly. For
Jay, the most appropriate use of "visual culture" would include a
host of "everyday, even banal objects and signs" that contribute
to the visuality of experience. These would include anything from
architecture and interior design to "landscaping, advertising . .
. store fronts, monuments, and built spaces." For Jay, to emerge
from the dim subway and be struck by the stark light and sheer
verticality of a downtown Chicago street would constitute an
experience of visual culture. Likewise, one might participate in
visual culture by meandering through Rome's "maze of small,
winding streets" while noting its "dizzying interplay of
historical periods and vernacular styles."
4. One does not need to be looking through or into a camera to be
within visual culture. Certainly images of all kinds, particularly
the mechanically reproduced, have complicated and enriched our
notion of how culture is visual, but to limit the discussion of
visual culture to a discussion of visual technology would be
missing a great opportunity to glean even more meaning from what
happens when we look. DVDs, films, snapshots, advertisements all
have a necessary place in visual culture, but they do not contain
it entirely. The need to develop a vigorous visual culture studies
encourages us patiently to observe all the visual forms and
surfaces of life and to ask how the perception of these is
informed, not just by culture but also by visuality itself.
Regardless of its status, or lack thereof, as the subject of an
organized academic discipline, visual culture exists for our
contemplation. In many instances, it exists /in/ our
contemplation, by which I mean we are within visual culture
whenever we choose to notice it, since it is constituted both by
modern subjectivity and by the world of objects. Photographer
Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of those who have chosen to be within
visual culture.
5. All the technological factors Mirzoeff emphasizes have created a
cultural situation that emphasizes a visual response to the world.
The meaningful possibilities of such a response, though, have
always depended at least as much on the kind of deliberate
meditation on the visual that drives Sugimoto as on our
technological apparatuses of looking. Sugimoto's work,
particularly his recent series, Architecture, provides a useful
commentary on the status of the visual in contemporary culture and
begins to suggest some of the most promising paths a vital visual
culture studies might take in the future. Among these are the
contestation of "class, gender, sexual and racialized identities,"
but Sugimoto's work asks us to pause before too quickly limiting
our idea of visual culture studies to the terms and assumptions of
its relative, cultural studies. The pictures in Architecture hint
at just how much is there in the "everyday" experience of the
visual. Sugimoto has created hundreds of meta-images, the kind
that are attractive to visual culture studies and that have made
artists like Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close important to it.
Consider, for instance, Sugimoto's earlier series, Portraits,
photographs of wax representations of famous persons. The wax
models themselves were often based on paintings, so Portraits
gives us an experience of image as simulacrum par excellence.
Another series, Theaters, also dwells on the representation of
representations. These are black-and-white photos of the interiors
of classic movie theaters, exposed for the duration of a film
actually being shown. The result of a full-length motion picture
reduced to a still image is a blank but bright screen and a
ghostly but detailed theater interior; this series provides a
fascinating look at the relationship of the two media to a viewer,
to time, and to one another. Sugimoto's is a conceptual art, but
it is also an essentially minimalist one. His compositions are
spare, his basic forms uncomplicated. Even as his images offer
highly sophisticated commentary on the modern experience of
looking, they are all produced using the most basic photographic
equipment: all his pictures are shot with a nineteenth-century box
camera.
6. Even if the viewer is not familiar with or interested in the
concept behind the work, "there is pleasure in the images," as
Arthur Lazere says. This is at least in part the fortuitous result
of selecting famous people, classic movie houses, and avant-garde
modernist architecture as the subjects of the photographs.
However, another recent Sugimoto series, Seascapes, offers very
little of this kind of content-based information. These pictures,
which from even a short distance appear only as horizontal dark
and light halves, are often compared to the paintings of Mark
Rothko because of the resolute simplicity of their form. Although
knowledge of Sugimoto's technique (long exposures of sea-and-sky
horizons from around the world) and purpose (his preoccupation
with the temporality of what is usually thought of as a timeless
view) adds depth to the images, the pleasure they provide is
intensely visual. Apart from the titles (providing location and
date) of the individual seascapes or a close examination of their
few distinguishable details, they encourage a fairly pure
satisfaction in visual forms themselves.
7. A similar process of formalist reduction is at work in
Architecture. One of the first things one notices about these
buildings is that they are isolated from their contexts. As a
result of camera angle and of blurring, each structure is made to
loom up in all its stark particularity as though out of nothing.
In an ironic twist, the viewer ends up contemplating the structure
for its lack of detail; shapes emerge as ideas sketched on a
napkin. His own intention, says Sugimoto, is "to recreate the
imaginative visions of the architecture before the architect built
the building, so I can trace back the original vision from the
finished product." This is the source Rebecca Wober aptly calls
"the architect's inspiration, the untested dream." Such a notion,
that the physical building is but one in a series of its
realities, including its existence in the mind of an imagining
subject and the eye of a viewer, makes Sugimoto's work relevant to
the study of visual culture. So does the idea that a photographer,
as well, if not better, than the architect, can cause the object
to stand as its imagined self. To depict actual buildings (and
dams, and bridges) as though they were internal images is to draw
photographer and gallery viewer across some of the key dividing
lines assumed to exist in the practical experiences of both
architecture and the visual more broadly.
8. Along with this heightening of the imaginative content of
architecture comes a pronounced concern for the conditions of
spectatorship. Another effect of the blurring in Sugimoto's images
is to call attention to the process of seeing. If we were to
observe the same buildings in perfect clarity and/or in color,
could we get the same sense of their form? Sugimoto's suggestion
is that we could not. As Jonathan Jones observes,
we are made vividly aware of the spatial extension, the weight
of the building. Sugimoto's photographs have the presence of
real architecture--equivalents to the experience of looking at
a building, walking round it, trying to grasp it in your mind
. . . as if Sugimoto's camera were feeling with an extended
hand, running its fingers over the surfaces. Stripped of their
setting, the city streets or suburban settings lost in blur
and shadow, with no sign of human beings, these might be
architectural models.
The implication is that these photos have the paradoxical effect
of bringing the viewer closer to the, dare one say, unmediated
experience of the object itself. By placing such pressure on sight
as the medium of transmission, the images force visuality to
reveal some of its secrets. For Sugimoto, those secrets seem to
point less in the direction of an endless deconstruction of
visuality, a postmodernist exultation in sheer multiplicity, than
to raise the idea of the truth of the object.
9. If that interpretation, coupled with Sugimoto's fascination with
the austere architectural monuments of high modernism, raises the
suspicion of a kind of aesthetic essentialism, the artist seems
unapologetic. "Usually a photographer sees something and tries to
capture it," he says, "but in my case I just see it in my head and
then the technical process is how to make it happen in the real
world." For visual culture studies, these sentiments are perfectly
timely. Could a photographer any better articulate the complete
reversal of traditional notions of photographic representation?
Witness also the meticulousness with which Sugimoto orchestrates
the viewer's experience. The strange point of view many of the
Architecture photos posit is akin to a technique of Edward
Hopper's, placing the implied viewer at odd angles in order to
make both familiar objects and the habitual act of looking seem
strange. Sugimoto's viewer is likewise held in a defamiliarizing
stance relative to structures already defamiliarized by the
aforementioned blurring and decontextualization.
10. The aesthetic of the gallery defies the viewer to break out of
this state of suspension. Although the visual rewards of moving
about the gallery are plentiful, the viewer, no matter how he or
she moves, can't force the images to reveal more than they offer
freely. Standing farther than "normal" viewing distance from one
of the Architecture photographs further distorts its object.
Approach the photograph and the object disappears altogether as
glare, shadow, and shine. It /dissolves/, a term often used to
describe Sugimoto's effects. Furthermore, the gallery layout
repeats the aesthetic of the pictures themselves. Its colors, all
silvers and shades of gray, seem to extend the picture space into
the room. In the case of "Temple of Dendera," the photographic
ceiling mirrors almost exactly the gallery ceiling in Chicago's
Museum of Contemporary Art. The stern gray monoliths on which the
pictures are mounted reinforce the formalism of Sugimoto's various
edifices, and vice versa.
11. This layering provides a valuable commentary on the relation of
architecture to visual culture. First, the installation puts
pressure on distinctions we might make between the organized
viewing situation inside the museum and the supposedly less
managed variety of looking that goes on outside. The gallery
design simulates an urban cityscape; the experience of standing
among the edifices is akin to standing on, say, a downtown Chicago
corner. The design brings the city inside the museum, in a sense.
What is even more interesting is that, by extension, Sugimoto's
artwork brings the museum out into the city as well. One can't
help, upon exiting the museum, but tilt one's head into various
positions and gaze at the surrounding structures as though they,
too, were part of Architecture: Sugimoto's art tells us that they
already are. Although his representations of buildings are the
occasion that prompts a reevaluation of our practices of looking
at them, we don't need a representation if, in fact, we treat
everyday sights as representations.
12. Timothy Mitchell has pointed out the same process at work in
nineteenth-century Orientalist exhibitions in Europe. Here, he
argues, "the uncertainty of what seemed, at first, the clear
distinction between the simulated and the real" was both a draw
and a shock for visitors (300). While Architecture does not go all
the way toward making the real indistinguishable from the
exhibition, it is clearly arranged with at least a wink in that
direction. At the 1867 Paris exhibition, Mitchell explains, "it
was not always easy to tell where the exhibition ended and the
world itself began" (300). Heading home, patrons were often
confronted with an "extended exhibition [which] continued to
present itself as a series of mere representations, representing a
reality beyond" (300). The carefully orchestrated division between
the reality of the Paris streets and the simulated reality within
the exhibits was confounded by a human subjectivity conditioned
more and more to treat all visual experience as representation,
not reality. Sugimoto's subject is not the exotic, but his work
raises issues similar to those described by Mitchell. The
differences between the philosophy of Architecture and that of the
Orientalist displays are not as pronounced as they might seem at
first. Part of Architecture's power is that it isolates pieces of
the everyday before a viewer to make them appear alien, just as
Egyptian artifacts placed behind velvet ropes radiated the exotic
for nineteenth-century Parisians. The great works of high
modernism are hardly "everyday," and the choice of these may only
be what Lazere sees as the artist hedging his bets. Even so,
structures like these are everyday in our visual culture.
Structures recognized by the average viewer are mixed with the
residue of previously viewed images of them. In contemporary
visual culture, the structures have become more familiar as images
than as concrete-and-steel objects. As images, not as edifices,
they have their deepest meaning for most of the modern world. It
seems clear, though, that Sugimoto's camera could cause almost any
technically undistinguished built structure to rise up as the
haunting shadow of an interior vision. The photographer and the
viewer, perhaps even more than the architect, have that power in a
culture so visual that we look at real buildings as though they
were pictures.
13. The emotional and conceptual leaps Architecture encourages speak
directly to visual culture's radical re-imagination of reality.
For all of its resonance in the personal unconscious, in the play
of images on the subject's interior screens, the exhibit does not
attempt to hide the fact that it is happening /in/ photography. As
Jones notes, it is these images' /photographic/ insight that opens
up the buildings' material specificity. Architecture is not only a
visual medium. One can participate in architecture, can use it, be
in it, can experience it with or without the aid of its visual
component. Sugimoto's work seems to argue that in our profoundly
visual culture, the images of a building, its representations,
come closer to what is true about it than, say, scaling it or
walking its hallways.
14. Still, the situation is not that easily reducible. One factor that
complicates this idea of visual as opposed to physical truth is
the work's serialization and physical means of display.
Architecture, after all, is not one image or even thirty images in
one picture plane, but a large scale installation requiring both
time and movement to inspect. It is a further replication of the
modern city that one must walk up and down Architecture's
"streets" and turn their corners to take in the full range of
images. The exhibit might alternatively have been curated with,
say, all the photos on the room's four walls, so that a viewer
could take them in by standing centrally and turning in place,
which would have imitated a different kind of city looking, one
that minimizes the body's consequence. Instead, the arrangement
maintains the role of the body in spectatorship, even as the
individual images downplay it. Human beings are completely absent
from the photographs. Not one human arm, face, or foot appears in
Architecture. There is thus a palpable tension between the
gallery's built space and the photos it houses, a tension that
seems to forestall a dive into an utterly visual experience devoid
of the body. If Architecture threatens to render the human body
irrelevant, the museum installation is there to rescue it.
15. That play between the material and the immaterial is, however, at
work also within the individual image. Although it is
inconspicuously situated within the installment, "World Trade
Center" speaks to the contemporary viewer with a unique
directness, so much so that it would not be a stretch to see the
entire display as a meditation on September 11, 2001. It speaks
quietly and with a stillness that evokes Maya Lin's Vietnam
Veteran's Memorial. Indeed, seen next to this image, the entire
series comes to seem memorial in nature. The gray gallery
monoliths resemble tombstones as much as skyscrapers, and people
are surprisingly quiet around the pictures, which seem to
discourage talk. Although only one of the thirty pictured
structures is no longer standing, Sugimoto's decision to include
the exception obliges the viewer to respond to the series at least
partly in its terms. Because "World Trade Center" is not otherwise
distinguished from the others, one feels that the memorialization
extends proleptically to all of these structures; perhaps that is
what critics mean by "timeless": these images take the viewer to a
time outside the objects' physical existence.
16. Yet to look at "World Trade Center" is also to be impressed by the
sense of the Towers' physical presence in space. Sugimoto's towers
loom large and heavy in their environment. They dwarf the
surrounding structures and are skirted by early morning fog and
still water, tangible reminders of the specific gravity they held
as objects. If on one level they appear dreamlike, on another they
are all too materially present. Even as the image beckons the
viewer into the thin shimmering world of pure visuality, it fixes
him or her in the material world with an almost overwhelming sense
of weight and space, a sensation heightened, no doubt, by the
unavoidable recollection of the towers' collapse. We may indeed
live in a world that privileges the image over the physical
reality--a condition that the proliferation of images of the World
Trade Center towers after their disappearance illustrated in a way
that the standing buildings themselves never could--but
Architecture tacitly warns against denying built things their
place in the visual drama of everyday life.
17. In Hiroshi Sugimoto's photography, the world's architectural skin
is the screen onto which the imagination of form is projected. It
is also the comparatively stable background against which the
other images with which visual culture studies is so much
concerned--billboards, movies, television programs, digital and
virtual media--flash and signify. The harder one looks at that
background, though, the less solid it becomes. The study of visual
culture should broaden its gaze to include this built, this
everyday world, and Sugimoto's work offers us a chance to look in
that direction.
/ English Department
Loyola University, Chicago
pquery@luc.edu /
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Notes
This essay is based on several visits to the exhibition of
Sugimoto's Architecture series at the Chicago Museum of
Contemporary Art (22 Feb-2 June 2003). The series was most
recently exhibited in the United States at the Fraenkel Gallery in
San Francisco, 4 Dec-31 Jan. 2004, and in Europe at the Galerie
Daniel Templon in Paris 10 Sept.-23 Oct. 2004.
Works Cited
Cartwright, Lisa. "Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film
Studies in the Era of Convergence." Journal of Visual Culture 1.1
(2002): 7-23.
Jay, Paul. "Picture This: Literary Theory and the Study of Visual
Culture." Lecture. La Sapienza, Rome, Italy. March 2000.
Jones, Jonathan. "Slow Dissolve." Rev. of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The
Architecture of Time. Edinburgh 2002. The Guardian Online 7 Aug.
2002. 28 April 2003
.
Lazere, Arthur. Rev. of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Portraits, San Francisco
2001. culturevulture.net 4 May 2001. 27 April 2003
.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "What is Visual Culture?" Introduction. An
Introduction to Visual Culture. Routledge, 1999
.
Mitchell, Timothy. "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order." The
Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge,
1998. 293-303.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1994.
Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Interview with Martin Herbert. eyestorm 15 Aug.
2000. 28 April 2003
.
Wober, Rebecca. Rev. of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Architecture of
Time. Fruitmarket Gallery 2002. Edinburgh Architecture Aug. 2002.
25 April 2003
.