Binding history.

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: HISTORY OF HISTORY

ASIAN ART MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO

OCTOBER 12, 2007-JANUARY 6, 2008

Curated and installed by the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, the exhibition "History of History," on view at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, highlighted not so much Sugimoto's photographic practice as his artifactual and curatorial predilections. These, in turn, shed light upon his oeuvre in a way that a straightforward exhibition of his photographs never could. Most of the objects presented--many of them owned by Sugimoto himself--bear directly or obliquely upon his photographic work, as with a thirteenth-century scroll depicting a Bodhisattva, the subject of the artist's "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays" series (1997), or the fossils that appear in certain images from the 1970s. The exhibition ranged in tenor and tack from the anthropological to the inventive, from the visual immediacy of the photograph to the circuitous cerebrations of conceptualism.

The first gallery in the exhibition might well have been titled "Sugimoto's History of Pre-history" in that it presented exclusively prehistoric fossils from as far back as the Silurian period (425 million years ago). The alien beauty of these natural artifacts rivals the hand-wrought intricacy of any sculpture. A sprawling shelf of fossilized sea lilies from 400 million years ago reveals a mesmerizing panorama of lolling plants whose wispy heads seem to flutter while the rocky surface appears veined with traces of water that also seem to pulse and course undyingly in the strange abeyance of eternity Remains of a prawn and crayfish (from the Eocene Epoch) hung nearby in flat, ghost-like silhouettes, betraying a different kind of preservation more reminiscent of a photographic image. Indeed, while the presentation of these objects obviated the camera as mediator, the direct, physical relation between these expired objects and their phantom remains conjures issues at the heart of photography and photographic theory--especially the notion of the photographic image as a physical trace or index of its object.

Sugimoto's photographic practice has long engaged with other modes and means of representation and thus, by extension, with the ontological questions that haunt photography. His photographs of wax figures (many of them based on paintings themselves) and diorama tableaux, for instance, take his imagery to a higher mathematics of re-presentation. His images from the American Museum of Natural History, such as Cambrian Period (1992) and Cro-Magnon (1994), like his wax portraits of painted portraits of Henry VIII (1999) or Fidel Castro (1999) stage subjects at multiple degrees of remove. Yet their presence seems utterly, and thus deceptively, unmediated. Sugimoto's reputation as a photographer rests on the cogent, thematic series in which he has exhibited since the 1970s: "Dioramas" (1976), "Wax Museums" (1976), "Theaters" (1978), "Seascapes" (1980), "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays" (1995), "Architecture" (1997), "In Praise of Shadows" (1999), and "Pine Landscapes" (2001). A few images from these series were present in the San Francisco exhibition, but--with the exception of two full-sized pieces--they appeared in shrunken form as constituents of other composite objects.

Time's Arrow (1987), for example, marries one of Sugimoto's seascapes from the 1980s--reduced to Lilliputian scale--with a gilt bronze reliquary from the thirteenth century. The tiny image is thus framed just as the symbolic bones of the Buddha would have been. Even the large-scale gelatin silver print, Caribbean Sea, Jamaica (1980), formed part of a simple but striking installation: it hung behind a miniature thirteenth-century pagoda fitted with a crystal ball that refracted Sugimoto's expansive seascape into a diminutive version of its normally outsize dimensions. The image appeared suspended in glass like an insect in amber, echoing the fossilizing logic of the exhibition's introductory room. Similarly miniaturized was Sugimoto's series "Henry VIII and His Six Queens" (1999)--photographs of wax likeness, presented in small frames and arranged in a neat semicircle around King Henry.

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The majority of works on display (Mandala scrolls, votive images, wooden reliquaries) offered insight into various aspects of Buddhist and Shinto religious practices--subjects of enduring interest to Sugimoto in both their material and metaphysical manifestations. In numerous instances, he revealed his hand in the hanging and disposition of objects--whether the display of a Buddhist scroll in a sutra case or the juxtaposition of artifacts with modern, "readymade" objects. Sugimoto has commented, "Contemporary art and ancient art are like oil and water, seemingly opposite poles. Yet for the longest time now, I have found the two melding ineffably into one, more like water and air." The work Testament of a Penis (2003) consists of a steel hospital gurney from the 1950s bearing a phallic stone rod from the Jomon period (10,000-300 BC). The work thus unites millennial ritual with the most contemporary of aesthetic sensibilities, though their admixture here felt less like an ineffable melding than a violent incongruity. Still, the museum's ability--similar to that of the photograph--to make any object the focus of meditative reflection attests, perhaps, to the ceremonious thread that unites these seemingly disparate realms. And it is that thread, too, that seamlessly binds Sugimoto's work to both worlds.

ARA H. MERJIAN is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where he teaches modern art and architectural history and theory.