Building Pictures: Hiroshi Sugimoto on Visual Culture

September 10, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 16, Number 2, January 2006

Patrick Query

English Department
Loyola University, Chicago
pquery@luc.edu

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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