The "Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time" exhibition (through January 9) at Mori Art Museum is excellent. Although Sugimoto is one of the world’s greatest masters of art photography, occasions to see his work here in Japan have been few. This extensive retrospective exhibition is a rare chance to get an overview of Sugimoto’s work spanning almost his entire career. The artist also took charge of the set-up of the exhibition space, and the curator in charge of the exhibition told me laughing that he "had an easy job". However, it must have been tough enough to put together this brilliant show, and a look at one of the "Seascapes", a series of photographs divided by the horizon into an upper (sky) and a lower (sea) half, and how carefully the lighting was arranged as if it were coming out of the image itself makes clear that the curator had much more to do than simply line up photographs on the wall.
Sugimoto is famous for his photographs, but he doesn't content himself working only in two dimensions. His recent works include also three-dimensional, spatial creations. As I mentioned above, Sugimoto designed the exhibition space himself, so the entire venue could be considered the artist’s giant three-dimensional work. Shown inside the venue with a nested interior structure are among others a Noh stage made in Bregenz (Austria), and an installation that features also sounds created by Ikeda Ryoji. An actual performance took place on the Noh stage on October 19 and 20. Sugimoto also reconstructed and -designed the Go'oh Shrine on Naoshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea, for which he combined the styles of ancient burial mounds an Ise Shrine. His own Tokyo residence the artist renovated with an ultramodern design, but using traditional techniques of Japanese-style architecture.
The current issue (volume 9) of ART iT magazine features a special on Sugimoto titled "Sugimoto: Spatial Perspectives" (and a second special that asks, "Is Graffiti Art?"). Included are rare photos that haven't been published and aren't featured in the "End of Time" exhibition, such as pictures of the aforementioned private house and others, as well as an interview by architect Hino Naohiko, an essay by critic Shimizu Minoru, and other pieces aming to expose Sugimoto Hiroshi’s views of art, spatial structures, and the world. Allow me to be a little immodest and say that the result came out perfect.To go and see the "End of Time" show, buy the budget-priced picture catalogue, and this issue of ART iT is all you need to do in order to become a Sugimoto expert. The Sugimoto special in the latest issue of "Brutus" magazine (No. 578, on sale since Sept. 9) is another really good one, so to all those who read Japanese I warmly recommend this one too.
In the interview Sugimoto joked, "I like to call myself a postmodern experienced pre-postmodern modernist". As a photographer who in his "Architecture" series keeps shooting constructions by the world’s leading architects, and as a creator of actual spatial objects, Sugimoto has been consistently criticizing the happy-go-lucky postmodernism. In short, he blames postmodern design for its readymade production and a lack of historical awareness. He based his work on the Go'oh Shrine reconstruction project on the question, "What exactly is a sacred precinct?", and next, what kind of space is appropriate for a sacred precinct? It’s perfectly natural that he condemns every piece of art, architecture or literature whatsoever that is not a result of such a process but simply the fruit of a quick flash of inspiration as "happy-go-lucky". You find plenty of those in the "childish" art I wrote about in the previous volume of this column.
Sugimoto, who prides himself on his connection to the family tree of Marcel Duchamp, produces "grown-up" works that are to be located at the opposite end of the "kiddy art". While the latter lack historicity and exist only for the moment, grown-up works take over and develop in a critical yet constructive way various assets and accumulations of the past, and sublimate and open synchronic, individualized subject matters to diachronic, universal themes. Sugimoto praises the Japanese modern architecture of the likes of Horiguchi Sutemi, Murano Togo or Yoshida Isoya, and explains that we wants to "take over the modernist elements in Japanese-style architecture". The recent works featured in ART iT surely serve as good examples of how this can look like.
photo by Ozaki Tetsuya
During his visit in September, architect Rem Koolhaas kept emphasizing in his lecture the importance of "universalization", while making several suggestions. Regardless of the quality of his actual work, Koolhaas, who has been associated (quite naturally for an architect of his calibre) with big business, is criticizing the global equalization as a result of capitalism and market economy. The way how he negates universalization due to the power of money, and at once glorifies and aspires universalization of a scale that transcends money matters scale, is very much a postmodern paradox. The backdrop is of course the increasingly childish world as a product of capitalism and market economy. It’s obvious that Sugimoto hates Koolhaas the architect, but the inheritance of history and the tendency toward universal values is what both of them share. I wish I had asked Sugimoto in the interview about his opinion of Koolhaas the thinker.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO