Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Gagosian Gallery | New York, New York

What is properly sublime," Immanuel Kant explains in Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), "cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation." At Gagosian's 21st Street venue, Hiroshi Sugimoto's 14 black-and-white gelatin silver prints from his ongoing Seascapes series are set in two enormous rectangular rooms. In the front space, which is filled with natural and artificial light, images of seven daytime scenes are hung on one very long wall. In these photographs, the horizon line divides sky and water in bays, gulfs, lakes, and the sea. The back room, which is very dark, contains seven spotlit night scenes. When your eyes adjust, you see reflected on the polished floor rectangles formed by Sugimoto's frames, which look curiously like Dan Flavin's fluorescent tubes. Walking from the front to the back rooms, it is as if you have passed from daylight into the nighttime world, traversing that banal diurnal movement in a few short steps. In Manhattan, space is a true luxury, and Gagosian's enormous, almost empty rooms--when I visited, no one else apart from two guards was there--are the ultimate luxury.

If we think of Sugimoto as merely representing the seascape, then he just photographs places like those painted by late-nineteenth-century artists such as Eugene Boudin, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. Should we then locate him in the history of painting? His photographs do look like Rothko's mature pictures, or any number of late modernist images, like Ad Reinhardt's, that depict the void. But it is fatally limiting to interpret Sugimoto's images in this literal-minded way. Viewed in any normal gallery these splendid photographs could plausibly be placed in such a historical narrative. But in this upscale installation, they inspire different reflections. What is the relationship of the gallery to its larger urban environment? Close to the Hudson River, which is physically inaccessible, north of the financial district, but south of busy Times Square, in Chelsea you are in a neighborhood occupied by rough-looking car repair shops and elegant galleries. It is a strange place to encounter seascapes.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For Kant, the sublime was what "is great beyond all comparison" because it surpasses any measure accessible to us. His examples are great mountains, the crashing surf, and St. Peter's in Rome. For us nowadays, I would suggest, what feels sublime is the economy of Manhattan, whose massive power makes possible exhibition spaces like this. And right now, to extend the parallel in an obvious way, what is indeed monstrous--"almost too great for our faculty of apprehension," to quote Kant again--is the meltdown that threatens such grand institutions. By provoking these reflections, Sugimoto's "Seven Days/Seven Nights" installation challenges such an unsettling comparison. The New Yorker critic who found the show "quiet, meditative, and, if you're in the right mood, even sublime," must live in a different world. For me, walking through this show was a bit like seeing a science fiction movie about the end of the world.