PRESENCE OR ABSENCE The Photographs of Tokihiro Sato

Checklist of the Exhibition
Dimensions are in inches; height precedes width.
1. Gleaning Light (Favorite Place 2),
7. #374 Sakatashibi 2, 1999
Gelatin silver print, 38 x 38 in.
The West Collection
2005.
C-print photograph, 40 x 50 in.
Collection of Brenda Edelson
8. #2 Shirakami, 2008
2. Gleaning Light (The Ravine), 2005.
Gelatin silver print, 48 x 38 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
24 Type C prints, each 14 x 11 in., 45 3/4 x
98 1/4 in. overall
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
9. #8 Shirakami, 2008
Gelatin silver print, 60 x 50 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
3. Gleaning Light (The Site), 2005
24 Type C prints, each 14 x 11 in., 45 3/4 x
98 1/4 in. overall
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
10. #9 Shirakami, 2008
Gelatin silver print, 60 x 50 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
4. Gleaning Light (To and From 2),
2005
Type C print, 40 x 50 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
11. #340 Yura, 1998
Gelatin silver print, 19 7/8 x 23 7/8 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
5. #346 Hattachi, 1998
Gelatin silver print, 18 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
12. #388 Yura, 1999
Light panel (transparency), 39 x 48 x 5
Private Collection, New York
1/2
in.
6. #276 Koto-ku Aomi, 1996
Gelatin silver print, 96 x 120 in.
Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks +
Projects, New York
2010 Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery Exhibition Sponsor:
Welling LaGrone and Morgan Keegan
Fig. 2. #276 Koto-ku Aomi, 1996
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
June 18–September 12, 2010
Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
© Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Cover: Shirakami #9, 2008
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by:
919 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203
www.fristcenter.org
PRESENCE
OR
ABSENCE
The Photographs of Tokihiro Sato
PRESENCE OR ABSENCE: The Photographs of Tokihiro Sato
The use of light to mark the intersection of time, space, and the movement
of the body is a consistent motif in
Japanese artist Tokihiro Sato’s landscape photographs. While his images seem surreal in their eerie and
implausible content, they are not
digital fabrications or the results of
darkroom manipulations. Instead, they
are directly made with a traditional
eight-by-ten-inch camera on a tripod.
The artist positions the camera, sets a
long exposure—often from one to three
hours so that anything moving (other
than a strong light) is not captured on
film—then walks or swims across its field
of view with mirrors during the day or
flashlights at night, pausing at intervals
the subject that actively animates the
scene—he simultaneously observes and
performs. The relationship between
subjectivity and objectivity reinforces
the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s observation that the photographed view
can “point two ways … to perceive
the world is to co-perceive oneself.”1
The artist does not have to be in two
places at once—time elapses from
the moment he sets up the shot to the
completion of the process—but since
the photograph compresses hours into
an apparent, single instant, the viewer
takes in multiple perspectives simultaneously. Since Cubism, the unfixed
position of the artist as viewer and
Fig. 1. #340 Yura, 1998
to direct or reflect light toward the
camera lens. Sato checks his location and the angle of light in a large
mirror mounted around the camera,
which allows him to compose as he
moves through the view. The resulting spots and trails of light become
photographic indices of the otherwise
invisible artist. They are quite literally
“drawings in light.”
Paradox and multiple meanings
abound in Sato’s works. The photographer is both the recording eye and
subject has often been posed as just
this sort of dance between perspectives—being one place and another
at the same time, a moving eye watching a subject as it moves, creating a
dynamic relationship between artist,
viewer, and subject.
This contemplation on the refractions
of space and self will not likely distract
the viewer from the more fundamental
question: “What am I looking at?” The
spots and trails of light trigger many
associations, particularly with rhythms
and distributions seen in both the
natural and urban environments. In
Sato’s misty seascapes, hovering orbs
suggest networks of lights from gravitydefying ships, buoys, or lighthouses;
in his Shirakami series (see cover),
fireflies seem to be clustered near trees
in the forest. In the more urban setting of #276 Koto-ku Aomi (fig. 2), a
tangle of light-trails suggests hordes of
luminous commuters oozing their way
through the empty street like electric
lava.
If symbolic associations arise from
these traces of light, messages are
also conveyed by the photographs’
locations. Steeped in portent, the
landscapes and seascapes on which
Sato stages his light drawings are
often empty, primal, and ethereal. The
scene in #388 Yura, showing dense
fog penetrated by baroquely pocked
volcanic rocks, could have been
unchanged for millions of years. This
place seems to be not just outside of
time, but also beyond our capacity to
visit to see for ourselves—it could be
a dream of Jupiter. Such a fantastic
quality remains even when there is
an archaeological dimension to the
landscape, as in #340 Yura (fig. 1),
which shows piles of cubed concrete
that people have placed in the water
to form protective barriers against
erosion. One can imagine these as
naturally occurring crystalline deposits,
formed from elements and through processes that remain outside of humanity’s ken. Even Sato’s black and white
depictions of cities seem to show a
post- or non-human world that is eerily
unpopulated save for spectral entities
floating and zigzagging through the
wide streets and public squares—zips
of pure energy and hints of a postapocalyptic imagination.
As Sato shows, the camera’s ability
to generate a sense of the uncanny
through rational, mechanical means
makes it a useful tool for artists who
possess romantic compulsions to
penetrate the appearances of this
world to unveil another reality and to
produce illusions of mystery that are
effective because of the frequently
held notion that the camera does
not lie. This provokes the viewer into
making interpretive projections based
on what he or she might desire to see:
temple architecture, and Chinese
it is perhaps not surprising that Sato
and Japanese landscape paintings
studied sculpture at Tokyo National
(see fig.4), echoing Andrew Juniper’s
University of Fine Arts and Music. It
observation that “Space and the
may be more surprising that his greatdiscipline required to maintain it is
est influence is not Japanese, but is
a key aspect of Japanese aesthetic
Robert Smithson (1938–1973), the
ideals.”6 As is expressed in the invisible
American Minimalist
land artist best known movement of Sato through the camfor his monumental
era’s field of view, Buddhist landscape
imagery frequently features the theme
Spiral Jetty (fig. 3),
of the wanderer—a monk, fool, or
a nebula formed
sage—who moves freely through time
of stone jutting out
and space seeking enlightenment by
into Utah’s Great
losing socially wrought conceptions
Salt Lake. Much of
of self. Juniper notes that in Japanese
Smithson’s work emphasizes the temporal tradition, the artist’s task is to humbly
“subdue the ego so that mind and
nature of humanity’s
body can work in a free, natural, and
relationship with the
uninhibited way.”7 A similar quality of
landscape, often
signified by his use of
ego erasure is implied by Sato’s statemirrors in indoor and
ment that although there is an aspect
outdoor installations.
of self-portraiture in his work, “I want to
In describing several
express universal existence by the fact
Fig. 3. Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, 1970. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, and water
of
his
mirrored
works,
that I myself do not appear in any of
coil, 1500 x 15 ft. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson /
Smithson
anticipates
my photographs.”8
licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York
the effects of Sato’s
photographs:
The art historian Joseph D. Parker
to the spiritual-minded, the lights may
discusses Buddhism’s interest in showbe the souls of the dead; to the child,
“Space” is permut[at]ed into a multiplicity ing that the “true and artificial” are not
they may be will-o’-the-wisps or fairies;
of directions. One becomes conscious of opposites, but are “meaningful only in
to the fan of science fiction, they may
space attenuated in the form of elusive
non-dualistic, intimate relation to each
be flecks of disembodied consciousflat planes. The space is both crystalline
other.”9 This idea reverberates in Sato’s
ness descending from a higher plane.
and collapsible….
Vanishing points
Sato disclaims any intention of implying are deliberately
a world other than our own, but does
inverted in order
acknowledge the power of light to
to increase one’s
act as a symbol for spirituality. He says
awareness of
“I don’t think about my art in a ‘spiritotal artifice. The
tual’ context. However, it is a fact that
commonplace is
light evokes such connotations. Also,
transformed into
my own activity involves monotonous
a labyrinth of
repetition such as breathing, which in
non-objective
itself might be a spiritual world.”2 As
abstractions.4
Sato exerts himself while crossing the
Fig. 4. Kano Tanyu. The Four Seasons, 1668. Six-fold screen; ink and slight color on paper,
field of view, he becomes aware that
While Sato consid- 68 1/2 x 150 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Maud Eells Corning 1992.394.1
his own breath, like light, is an ephemers his exploraeral marker of life and the passage of
tions of perception to belong to this
works, which break down boundaries
time. Describing his pictures as “breath- modern context, and he is not in any
between here and there, concept and
graphs,” Sato says “There is a direct
way religious,5 his imagery and ideas
physicality, reality and illusion. Many of
connection between my breath and
his images could conceivably function
often appear to coincide with certain
the act of tracing out the light.”3
as illustrations of the thirteenth-century
cultural manifestations of Taoism and
monk Chung Fen’s idea that “What
Buddhism. His simple organic forms and
is revealed by the clear water is the
limpid atmospheres bring to mind the
Given his interest in defining space
essence of illusion, what is reflected by
meditative arenas of rock gardens,
through the intervention of the body,
Fig. 5. Gleaning Light (The Ravine), 2005
the bright mirror is the traces of illusion.
When illusion is extinguished and
awakening reaches emptiness, this is
the supreme height of transcendental
awareness …”10
Sato’s recent works seem more removed from traditional aesthetics, yet
in them the artist continues to employ
early photographic technology to
pursue his interests in non-dualistic,
non-linear perceptions and the temporal reconstruction of space. He built
his own pinhole camera following the
centuries-old principles of the camera
obscura, in which light enters through
a tiny opening into a dark space and
projects an inverted image of the
exterior onto the interior’s walls or, in
modern times, an emulsified surface.
The pinhole camera features as many
as twenty-four apertures facing in
different directions, enabling him to
capture the landscape and cityscape
as an intersecting overlap of viewing
angles (fig. 6). This can yield simple
binocular views when the aperture
faces in only two directions: up and
down, or east and west. Or it can be
complex, dynamic, and spatially disorienting, as in Gleaning Light: The Ravine (fig. 5), a twenty-four panel view
of Manhattan showing tall buildings
photographed at different angles of
projection, then aligned contiguously
to suggest a whole that is defined by
twenty-four separate perspectives.
Through its title, the Gleaning Light
series reveals Sato’s intention of being
a harvester of the ephemeral; just as
his earlier works reinforced the sense
of the landscape’s impermanence, the
pinhole photographs propose that
the city’s apparent stability is equally
illusory.
Throughout his work, Sato encourages
the viewer to rethink the relationship
between the eye and the mind—since
reason is tied to vision, he seems to
ask, if we see something impossible
that is not an obvious sleight-of-hand,
do we trust the photograph or our
eyes? Or do we take a third path,
widening our sense of what is possible,
acknowledging that reason and vision
are not as close as we thought, while
mechanics and imagination are not as
far apart?
Mark Scala
Chief Curator
Fig. 6. Camera Obscura Project, 2004. Yamaguchi
Center for Arts and Media, Japan
Notes:
1. Patrick Maynard, “Scales of Space and Time in Photography,” in Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of
Nature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 190.
2. Elizabeth Siegel, Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Photographs
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2005), 31.
3. Ibid., 30.
4. From “Unpublished Writings” in Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996). Text available at http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/
short.htm.
5. Susan Edwards, notes from a conversation with the artist,
May 10, 2009.
6. Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2003), 116.
7. Ibid., 91.
8. Seigel, 31.
9. Joseph D. Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early
Muromachi Japan (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999), 163.
10. Parker, 199.