The second exhibition to which I treated myself on my recent trip to London was at the Hayward Gallery. It is strange that, although I have been visiting the city for many years, and have done so often with a specific interest in art, this was the first time I set foot in the Hayward. It is, one might argue, the foremost venue in the city in which to view contemporary art. I guess that might say something about my artistic preferences! Anyway: on this occasion I decided that I had to check it out.
I was hesitant at first as to whether I had made a sound decision. The principal displays there are of the work of a Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Photography is not exactly my scene, but I persisted and was rewarded. Sugimoto presents us, first of all, with a selection of huge photographs of the dioramas in the New York Museum of Natural History. The interesting thing is that, carefully positioned and lit, at first acquaintance these are not obviously photographs of dioramas. They look as if they are simply pictures of wildlife in its natural setting (for example, hyenas with their kill.) This illusion is shattered however, when one confronts a couple of early hominids in an ice-age setting. The phrase “double-take” describes precisely my response to this one. “Hang on, a minute …. !”
The trick is repeated in another gallery in which he has borrowed models from Tussaud’s gallery of waxworks, and after careful positioning and lighting, photographed them. I was nearly fooled by Oscar Wilde, but Napoleon …. ? Somehow or another, treated in this way, he manages to persuade us, even if only for a moment, that if we are looking at a photograph we must be in direct contact with reality.
This is a fascinating experience, because we cannot avoid asking ourselves what is going on in our heads when we look at “art”, and how this might (or not) be the same as when we are confronted by something identified to us as a “photograph”.
This is a particularly active question for me at the moment, in relation to my current series of studies of trees. A large part of my reference material consists of photographs. There is a highly realistic aspect to my pictures …. indeed, one of them definitely does have a “photographic” quality about it (whatever that might mean). There is something going on here about the processes of looking and seeing, but I think that I am going to need to give more thought to that one.