Imitation of Life
A work commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin on world tour:
following the exhibitions in New York, Bilbao, and Auckland, Hiroshi
Sugimoto's Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Portraits can now be seen at the Singapore Art Museum beginning
on December 4, 2002. The larger-than-life
photographs of the wax figures of historical personalities that the artist
removed from their setting at Madame Tussaud’s and staged before a dramatically
lit black background seem eerily alive. With an almost hallucinatory precision,
Sugimoto’s portrait gallery shows the wax identities of Henry VIII, William
Shakespeare, or Fidel Castro in a new light. Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
on the authenticity of the artificial, ”the first photographer of the
16th century,” and the awkward question of how to paint a supper that allegedly
occurred two thousand years ago.
Henry VIII
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
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Anne Boleyn
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
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For years already, Sugimoto
(picture),
a Japanese artist who lives in New York, has had the idea of combining
his black and white photo series of dioramas in natural history museums
with his photographs of figures in wax museums around the world in a single
volume – as a pictorial narrative that could also serve as a travel guide
for extraterrestrials. As is already implied in the title of the work –
”A First Visitor’s Guide,” the handbook’s aim, according to Sugimoto, would
be to explain to the newly arrived ”what there is to see on Earth, what
kind of people live here, and to show how life came about on Earth.” The
artist even wrote a foreword for the book, which spans millions of years.
His project has gone unrealized to this day, yet the catalogue published
in 2000 on the occasion of the Berlin exhibition of his ”Portraits” in
the Deutsche Guggenheim (order here) gives an impression of how this fictive
travel guide might look: along with the likenesses of world-famous personalities
from several centuries, a selection of earlier works by Sugimoto can be
found in the catalogue’s introduction, representing scenes of very different
kinds: a brilliantly illuminated canvas before the empty seats of a movie
theater, prehistoric deep sea spheres, executions by guillotine or the
electric chair, or the hazy horizon of the Pacific Ocean. As is the case
with the more recent historical ”Portraits” of famous personalities, an
unfathomable aura of quietude adheres to all of these images, which is
founded in the absence of any human life. If a human figure appears at
all, then it is merely in the form of a wax reproduction.
In Sugimoto’s
photographs, the world appears to be uninhabited, almost without a body,
hovering between life and death. Thus, his sea pieces from the nineties
that borrow from the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or Claude Monet
not only call their famous models to the viewer’s mind, but also the beginning
of Biblical Creation, the opening sentence of the Old Testament Book of
Genesis: ”And the Earth was…” Indeed, Sugimoto’s photographs of natural
historical evolution and human civilization capture nothing more than the
traces of life on Earth – uninhabited building structures, arrangements
in museums, stuffed or imitated specimens of flora and fauna, artificially
created doubles and representatives illustrating past history.
William Shakespeare
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
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Diana, Princess of Wales
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
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The
historical relationship between truth and photography and the belief in
the camera as a recording instrument that never lies are elements Sugimoto
implements with virtuosity in order to call attention to the fundamental
discrepancy between the world as it is seen and the world as it is represented
(on this subject, see the interview
with the London art critic Martin Herbert). |
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Thus, in a manner more obvious
than ever before, his photographic work commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim
reflects the relationship to representation in painting, referring to the
works of Holbein, Vermeer, and Van Dyck: with his ”Portraits,” the Hasselblad
award winner Sugimoto for the first time departed from the format he’s
been using since the seventies, 20 x 24 inches, and is now showing large-scale
works and tableaus comprised of several parts. Larger than in real life,
William Shakespeare, Anna Boleyn, Princess Diana, or Rembrandt gaze back
at us. In contrast to Sugimoto’s earlier shots of dioramas or wax museums,
the figures depicted here appear before a black background in a lighting
rich in effect, complete with gestures borrowed from the repertoire of
Dutch oil painting and photographically simulated down to the last detail,
creating a bizarre dialogue between painting technique, wax figure, and
the camera.
When the visitor to Madame
Tussaud’s in Amsterdam stands before the reconstruction of Vermeer’s
famous painting ”The Music Lesson,” he is struck by the feeling of actually
being inside the Dutch master’s painting and so within the ambience of
the 17th century; this subjective impression becomes intensified in a paradoxical
way in Sugimoto’s version. In his photograph ”The Music Lesson,” which
came about together with the ”Portraits,” the wax scene doesn’t look like
a reconstructed copy at first glance, but rather like the apparently authentic
photographic model Vermeer might have painted from. While in Vermeer’s
painting the reflection of the painter’s easel can be seen in the mirror
hanging above the piano, the camera tripod occupies its place in Sugimoto’s
work, as though the photographer himself had been a witness to the actual
scene centuries ago.
The Music Lesson
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
The conceptual refinement with which Sugimoto
transforms his image subjects of a variety of times and media into the
present tense become especially clear in the case of his version of ”The
Last Supper”: The holy scene painted by Leonardo da Vinci was imitated
so many times that the imitations are better known than the original painting.
No one knows how this scene might have actually appeared, yet da Vinci’s
fresco is the prevailing representation the ”exactitude” of later copies
is measured against. In Sugimoto’s case, who has admitted that he’s puzzled
by the popularity of the Christian religion, these icons of Western art
and history take on an alien meaning. By using an ensemble of figures he
discovered in Japan to photographically resurrect the scene with the painstaking
exactitude of a wax sculptor and as ”true to life” as possible, as though
it were a historical moment that had actually taken place, he not only
liberates the motif from its religious context, but also the viewer’s linear
understanding of time. (on this subject, see Sugimoto's interview
with Robert C. Morgan)
The Last Supper
© Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
Against the backdrop of the room’s darkness,
the strangely deformed participants of ”The Last Supper” meet to form a
group ensemble: their artificial limbs are raised in frozen poses as though
they were filled with a sense of duty and wanted to eternalize a canon
which they no longer remember. Refraining from imposing any values and
limiting itself to the representation of a wax existence, Sugimoto’s photograph
embodies a reality that began in the 15th century with a fresco and that
has survived to the present day through a chain of innumerable reproductions.
As works of art, Sugimoto’s works not only testify to the illusions of
the past, but also the fiction of a distant future – a time in which human
fate can only be interpreted through man’s attempts at immortalizing himself.
In his proposed travel guide for extraterrestrials, Sugimoto’s ”Portraits”
are presented in the chapter ”Extinction”: ”Widespread deaths can be observed
from time to time among the forms of life on Earth. Please do not plan
a trip to Planet Earth for the duration of these rare catastrophes.”
Translation:
Andrea Scrima |
