Reticence and reverence - Japanese artistic photography

"Photography and Beyond in Japan: Space, Time and Memory" presents intellectually engaging and often visually resplendent work by 12 postwar artists working with photographic media. It falters, however, on issues of interpretation and export of cultural identities within today's transnational artistic practice. Organized by independent curator Robert Stearns for the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the exhibition is currently touring North America, including four venues in the United States. It is accompanied by a handsome and informative catalog with several essays, documentation on the artists, bibliography and numerous illustrations, many in color.

In the major catalog essay, Stearns introduces the exhibitors individually and presents the exhibition's interpretive framework. Space, time and memory are his organizing principles, around which he assembles the exhibitors into three groups of four. Stearns has observed that in Japanese contemporary art, photography is "used differently than in the United States or Europe." Endeavoring to explain this difference in terms of Japanese culture - rather than Western constructs - he proposes that traditional attitudes toward space, time and memory give contemporary art photography in Japan its particular flavor.

Background on the history and aesthetics of Japanese art appears in "Japan's Persisting Traditions: A Premodern Context for Post-modern Art," an essay by Robert Singer, curator of Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He corroborates Stearns's conceptual strategy by elucidating how "premodern Japanese pictorial strategies" contributed, consciously or unconsciously, to contemporary Japanese interpretations of space, time and memory. In "The Shock of the Real: Early Photography in Japan," Japanese critic and historian Kohtaro lizawa writes about the advent of this Western technology in his country, briefly tracing its uses and reception in the nineteenth century. He, too, suggests that earlier practices resonate in contemporary work.

Although it is the first large-scale American exhibition devoted exclusively to the subject since the Museum of Modern Art's "New Japanese Photography" in 1974, "Photography and Beyond in Japan" nevertheless relates to several later presentations of Japanese modern and contemporary art. The most recent and most ambitious of these, "Japanese Art since 1945: Scream against the Sky," appeared in New York and San Francisco in 1994-95, and its hefty catalog provides the single most important English text on postwar Japanese art.(1)

"Photography and Beyond in Japan" treats photography as a subdivision of art production. "This exhibition and its publication are more about art than about photography," Stearns writes. "Photography is the root of the works shown here, but it is only the means to an end." In fact, several among the 12 photographers were trained first as painters or sculptors and only as mature artists turned primarily to photography.

A brief review cannot do justice to the subtlety of the curator's informative interpretations of the specificities of space, time and memory in contemporary Japanese art. Nevertheless, his discussions are not completely satisfying. With respect to his first category especially, Japanese space, Stearns struggles with a resistant concept. He explains that traditional space is a quality derived from landscape but applicable to other subjects, and that it is a nearly tangible element "defined by what frames it." In the exhibition, the work of the "space" artists is both conceptually and emotionally discontinuous, and Stearns does not convincingly demonstrate why they are grouped together. In the end, because the works are so varied and the spatial concept remains elusive, the impressive works in this section seem to resist the insight that the curatorial association is intended to clarify.

The exhibition opens with the work of Nobuo Yamanaka, an experimentalist who died at the age of 34 in 1982. (He belongs to the generation of the other exhibitors, but is the only one who is deceased.) Primarily interested in perception, Yamanaka made brilliant use of primitive photographic technologies, the pinhole camera and the camera obscura, to produce the two types of works seen in the exhibition. One group consists of 8[inches] x 9-1/2[inches] color contact prints of pinhole-camera views, mostly of Manhattan and Tokyo, made between 1977 and 1981. In these, one or more small, picturesque scenes emerge mysteriously from blackness to culminate in a sharp-focus center. For the other set of works, Yamanaka cut up and reassembled images in two three-dimensional shadow boxes and an installation. While Stearns does not entertain the possibility, these vigorous works of considerable formal complexity surely owe as much or more to Cubism than to any traditional Japanese feeling for space.

A second artist in the "space" category, Hotaro Koyama, also presented two disparate groups of works addressing different problems of size. His tiny light boxes simultaneously reveal and obscure minuscule images; the viewer must peer intently into the box to make out the subject, but a bright filament prevents a clear view. Koyama's other works are at the opposite extreme of scale, and like Yamanaka's shadow boxes and installations, they are unique objects. However, their somber, grandiose and mythic tone contrasts with Yamanaka's exuberant formalism. Approximately seven to nine feet high and 10 to 16 feet long, the three oversized works in the exhibition draw only part of their impact from their enormous scale. Each image has been degraded with bleach, sandpaper and with other means, causing effects of aging, damage and disruption of photographic verity. In one, the viewer looks into a nearly symmetrical Japanese interior; in another, out the mouth of a cave, which appears as a great, blank aperture in the center of detailed rock formations. Because these are more or less "life-size," the viewer becomes an enveloped participant. The third is a plein-air view of railroad tracks with buildings in the distance - a mundane scene made foreboding by the artist's reworking. Although Stearns does not consider their relationship to Western art, the moody, heroic and alienated atmosphere of these works brings to mind the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

The other two artists in this group emphasize extremely fine print quality in large black-and-white images. In this exhibition, all of Hiroshi Sugimoto's works originate from his 20-year investigation of the American theaters that have provided grandiose settings for the consumption of popular film. His eerie combination of intensely realized interior space and decor, the glowing central rectangle of the screen and a depopulated space is, in a large part, achieved by using extremely long time exposures; the light that seems to emanate from the screen is in fact the record of an entire movie. The formal beauty of the resulting images bestows a meditative serenity upon spaces usually associated with clamor, thrills and high emotion, but it is difficult to see anything identifiably Japanese in these works. The artist's relationship to the "space" theme might have been amplified by including examples from his more recent, and compelling, minimalist series depicting the ocean horizon.

Of all the artists in the exhibition, Toshio Shibata is most closely allied with the American tradition of majestic, unpopulated views of the environment, recorded with fanatical attention to detail, tonal variety and compositional form. Unlike the canonical practitioners of the American tradition, however, Shibata chooses subjects that incorporate material traces of the human presence, or are even dominated by human construction. His point of view frequently obscures the horizon line or in other ways flattens the space in his photographs. While this technique may be related to spatial arrangements seen in traditional Japanese pictorial art, it also produces the expressive effects of creating a confined and psychologically confining space and of sometimes undercutting the literalism of his images by rendering the subject matter wholly or partially unintelligible.

The second category in the exhibition, "Time," comprises the work of four artists who "use the camera as a dynamic tool to express what is not normally visible in the world around us." Stearns also reminds us of the connection between time and space, conceptualized as "ma" in traditional Japanese thought, and notes the tendency among these artists to understand time as "cyclical, endless and even random," rather than linear and directional. Of the four, the work of Tadasu Yamamoto is the least complex and the least satisfying as a meditation on time. Using a large-format view camera to maximize detail, Yamamoto photographs waterfalls. Each work consists of two enlarged views of a single waterfall - the upper and lower parts, which sometimes overlap - mounted on an eight-foot steel plate that rests on the floor and leans against a wall. Whereas the tension between the fluidity of the captured water and the solid weight of the metal supports is all too obvious, so too the element of "time" embedded in the falling water hardly seems to be an original conceit. Still, these are handsome and assertive works that might seem more at home in another interpretive context.

The other three artists in this section have each developed remarkable visual techniques for alluding to, or even demonstrating, the passage of time. Of the three, Hitoshi Nomura addresses this problem most directly, but with no lack of subtlety. His subject is the sky, in which he captures the regularized variability and ceaseless repetition of heavenly bodies. For one series from 1990, he photographed the sun on a single negative from the same position at intervals of 10 to 14 days over the period of a year, thereby revealing a graceful figure-eight pattern. Other works record the moon, stars or additional aspects of the sun's motion. Using this technique as a "Cage-ian" method of musical composition, Nomura has produced several "moon scores" by photographing the moon at regular intervals over a long period of time (one of these pieces took five successive Januarys to complete), superimposed on a musical staff. In the gallery, a recording of one of these scores provided an analog to the visual experience of Nomura's work.

Yoshiko Ito examines the passage of time in black-and-white, 35mm, half-frame contact prints sequentially arrayed into complex compositions. In most of the works, Ito plans the photographs so that formal relationships and patterns are revealed when the film is cut into strips (usually six bands of 12 images) and mounted in adjacent rows. The notion of duration is embedded in the format of these works, since the individual images had to have been taken over a period of time. The subjects are usually drawn from simple outdoor elements, such as trees, clouds or shadows. More recently, Ito has cultivated chance by incorporating birds or animals, whose positions cannot be pre-programmed, or by working with double exposures. In all his works, the tiny images draw the viewer close, but the larger patterns can be fully comprehended only by stepping back. This structure once again emphasizes the role of time, now as it applies to the viewer's full perception of the work.

The most audacious presentations in this section, four enormous works by Tokihiro Satoh, depend on time exposures in which Satoh ingeniously intervenes as a transparent actor. While the open aperture is trained upon his chosen site, Satoh uses a flashlight or mirror to produce lines or flashes that the film records. In one, vertical streaks of light descend a staircase. In another, a seemingly deserted (because of the long exposure time) intersection in a commercial sector of Tokyo is animated by bright blips of light that seem to hover just above the ground. In a massive triptych entitled Sainsbury's Mayonnaise Bottles from Photo-Respiration (1995), we see cooling towers on the left, with similar mysterious flashes in the foreground; a circular arrangement of greatly enlarged Sainsbury's brand mayonnaise bottles, each ringed with uneven bands of light, in the center; and, on the right, again enlivened with light flashes, a Druidian rock circle in a pastoral landscape. As Stearns explains, "Drawing together these three quite different objects - disparate by scale and age, though vaguely related in form - Satoh alludes to the mysterious fugitiveness yet constancy of human enterprises." Because all of this artist's works are approximately eight feet tall, they seem to extend the viewer's space. At the same time, they are presented as physical objects (Satoh uses a variety of means, such as suspending works from the ceiling or pushing them away from the wall), undercutting any tendency to see these as literal windows onto space and heightening their metaphorical capabilities.

The section devoted to "Memory" draws on a specific aspect of Japanese thought - that through its history an object accrues meanings. Stearns turns his attention here to artists who shuffle symbols and contexts. Tying them to recent Western interests, he observes that "recasting symbols in new roles and establishing new relationships between them is the essence of twentieth-century postmodernism." Indeed, three of the four artists he chose for this section have much in common with recent Western strategies of appropriation and the critique of consumerism.

Nobuyoshi Araki displays this contemporary edge in his work, but what Stearns calls his "strategy of accumulation and juxtaposition" derives from a documentary impulse. Araki takes color photographs of all aspects of Japanese life, with emphasis on night life, "low life" and celebrity culture, but includes quotidian moments for contrast. He often presents his work in books and slide shows - in which sequencing can be controlled - as well as museum or gallery exhibitions that juxtapose untitled images in profusion. At the Corcoran Gallery, his large prints were displayed in a single horizontal row just below the ceiling of the central atrium space and outside the confines of the exhibition itself. Catalog illustrations of an installation in Japan show his photographs totally covering the walls and ceiling of a small room. The claustrophobic effect of this installation, as well as the images' proximity to the viewer, appear to have created a much more intense experience than the one offered in Washington, particularly because of the intentionally salacious and potentially offending subject matter of many of the images.

The other three artists in this section clearly draw upon Western postmodern appropriation and media critique. The original and provocative work of one of them, Yasumasa Morimura, has been frequently exhibited in the U.S., but the other two, Miran Fukuda and Emiko Kasahana, both the youngest and the only women artists in the exhibition, are nearly unknown in this country. In this exhibition, Morimura was represented primarily by works of the type that have made his international reputation: large-format color photographs of elaborately restaged works of art, in which the artist himself plays all the characters. These raise issues of appropriation, self-disclosure, gender stability, the truth of photography and the value of the historical canon, even as they also provide appealing and witty visual experiences.

In her most recent work, Fukuda also appropriates classic paintings for her own purposes. She does not intrude autobiographically into the work, but rather intervenes by reproducing the original to give us a new way of looking at it. Her Forge of Vulcan (1992) is a computer-altered version of a Velasquez painting from which all the figures have been removed. Another work, which is not in fact a photograph but a 1992 painting indebted to her photographic approach, reinterprets a portion of his Las Meninas. Fukuda's earlier and somewhat less original works draw more directly on the rather flat-footed critique of consumer culture that was popular in the New York galleries a few seasons ago. The painting Mrs. (1989), for example, displays two women appropriated and adapted from a fashion magazine. For Tablecloth (1990), Fukuda affixed a table mat with a photographically reproduced scene of the Swiss Alps to the center of a canvas, then "completed" the scene by painting a continuation of the view on all four sides.

Kasahara, who has worked with sculpture as well as painting and photography, was represented in the exhibition by a tripartite work titled Lamb (1994). It comprised a small billboard (posted outside the entrance to the Corcoran) depicting eight grazing sheep wearing red bandannas around their necks; a scale model of a billboard, showing an unmade bed, affixed to a small model of the same field with its sheep; and posters of sheep suitable for purchase. Kasahara has previously exhibited work on this theme in other contexts; the catalog illustration of her sheep billboard repeated three times among other commercial billboards in downtown Tokyo suggests that this work can function whimsically to draw attention to relentless commercialism in an urban setting. In the museum, however, Lamb has neither the conceptual nor formal intensity to sustain interest for long. According to Stearns, the artist's stated goal is to "probe the delicate balance between our public and private selves," a notion she extends to acceptance of the "social contract" within a nation at the peril of "severe consequences." This rather overdetermined reading was not accessible through the visible evidence of the work.

Perhaps it is instructive that the youngest exhibitors, Fukuda and Kasahara, both born in 1963, so clearly conceive of their art within the trajectory of international postmodern art that has its headquarters in New York. The same cannot be said of the 10 older artists and their varied approaches to style, concept and content. Yet at the same time, their work would also fit comfortably into Western contexts of art presentation. Indeed, most of them are directly connected to the Western art world. Sugimoto has, in fact, lived in New York for 20 years, while many of the others have lived in the West at some point and all have shown their work in the U.S. and/or Europe. In the catalog, Stearns himself points out that postwar Japanese culture has looked to the West for status and, in particular, that Japanese art education stresses Western over Japanese art.

Under these conditions, what does it mean to be "Japanese"? Japanese artists and intellectuals have long been wary of an uncritical, westernizing modernization that might dilute their country's cultural identity. Stearns's approach provides a corrective to the easy assumption that as it has modernized so spectacularly, Japan has also Westernized to a comparable degree. On the other hand, the work presented in this exhibition suggests other characteristics that might be interpreted as more salient cultural distinctions than the three developed in his schema. For example, two qualities Stearns himself identifies in passing as characteristically Japanese pervade the work: reticence about asserting one's individuality and reverence for the well-made object.

Two additional factors, to which Stearns gives little attention, are important to the consideration of this art and the degree to which it is distinguishably Japanese. First, Japanese art and thought (along with other aspects of Asian culture) have been so influential in the West for a century and vice versa, that it is difficult to disentangle what is "Japanese" and what is "Western." Most obviously, notions of pictorial space were altered forever in the west by the discovery of Japanese prints, which were at once esthetically sophisticated and detached from the elaborated perspectival tradition of the Renaissance. Second, Japan today, at least in its urban settings where most Japanese and nearly all artists live, no longer seems to be dominated by traditional notions of space and time. Tokyo, for example, may be the quintessential postmodern city: cacophonous, discontinuous, unfathomable, dominated visually by advertising to a degree almost unimaginable in the West. While this does not mean that traditional space and time have disappeared from the life of the mind, it does mean that the physical environment experienced by these artists is likely to lead them in new directions.

By looking through an essentializing lens at his subjects, Stearns constricts his insights. He undercuts the richness of these artists' accomplishments by stressing tradition at the expense of intercultural creative tension. Although it is intellectually fashionable to emphasize "difference" in analyzing both cultural and personal experience, for this impressive photographic exhibition similarities and continuities are no less eloquent and substantial.

NOTES

1. Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky, (New York: Abrams, 1994). The exhibition opened at the Yokohama Museum of Art and was also seen at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

ANN LEE MORGAN writes on Modern and contemporary art from Princeton, NJ.

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