Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimo,
Wax Museum Figure
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring the wax-museum photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (April 1995).
Exhibit at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Hiroshi Sugimoto is known primarily for three series of photographs which he has been working on since at least the early 1980s. The series are nominally differentiated by content — movie theater interiors, seascapes, dioramas and wax figures in museums — although Sugimoto approaches them all with a precise sense of form: balanced if not symmetrical compositions, extreme clarity of focus, grays modulated into a sort of photographic grisaille, long exposure times reminiscent of an Atget. All of this — the impulse to work in series, to foster a project over a period of ten years or more, to apply a stringent set of compositional rules to his works — lends a tantalizing deliberateness to Sugimoto's works, as though there were a single skeleton key leading to the machinery behind his method.
In his most recent exhibition, Sugimoto presents a disturbing series of photographs of dioramas and wax figures taken in museums ranging from Madame Tussaud's in London and the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park to the Denver Museum of Natural History. It is not his intention to comment on institutionalization or the conditions of display or some such; to the contrary, there's never a glare of glass to suggest diorama, never a sheen of paraffin to skin to suggest wax dummy. Sugimoto is able to present the simulacra of famous criminals, movie stars, world leaders, Neanderthal men, ancient flora and fauna so illusionistically that the feedback loop between your brain and eyes short-circuits; it's like looking at the sun, seeing it as two inches in diameter and having to correct that perception with the knowledge that it is actually much, much vaster. In Neanderthal (all works 1994), a hairy beast of a man sharpens the point of a spear, insouciantly allowing little wood flakes to pile on his left foot, while a woman stretches a hide between her hand and teeth in order to scrape fat off it with a stone in her other hand. That the figures are in motion helps to give them a semblance of life, as do such well-wrought details as saggy breasts and paunchy stomachs. What you see in a photograph such as this is an impossibility: the lifelikeness of the figures contradicts the knowledge that Sugimoto can't have photographed a "real" Neanderthal family.
If thresholds abound in these series — the seascapes are cut into halves by the horizontal line where sky meets sea, and the theater pictures are centered on the movie screen, the glowing portal between audience and film, reality and fiction — in these new works, it is sublimated into something less visible but more vexing: what divides the animate from the inanimate? In The Royal Family, Prince Charles smiles, showing his teeth, Queen Elizabeth folds her hands dignifiedly in front of her, Princess Diana looks right at you with eyes infinitely more vivacious than the white orbs in ancient statues. The joke is that, for a formal portrait, the royal family would be so stiff and so posed that they might as well be inanimate anyway. It's like the paradox embodied in someone brain dead — hence, by legal definition, truly dead — even though his heart still beats. If art is long but life is short, Sugimoto appears to be aiming at that gray area — as difficult to find as the precise point where the sky does meet the sea — where the two meet, where life edges toward the inorganic, where art is supposed to take up the organic and preserve it.
Email this page to a friend
Tell someone about Hiroshi Sugimoto at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not abused.)
