Seeing Hiroshi Sugimoto’s show at the Met in 1995 was a life-changer, and then seeing his Time Exposed (Buddha Series) photos and Accelerated Buddha, his 5-minute video, at Sonnabend in 1997 blew my mind.
Sugimoto spent ten days in 1995 photographing the 1,000 12th century kannon Buddha sculptures in the Sanjusangendō in Kyoto, in 48 images. Each identically composed photo shows 33 kannon in eight rows, for 1,584 Buddhas. There are eleven rows of statues, so there’s plenty of room for overlap while still photographing them all.
Like the video, which packs all 48 images in 1,000 times to get to a million Buddhas, Sugimoto published a book, Sea of Buddha, a little leporello that reproduced all 48 images, in an edition of 1,000, for another million Buddhas. [Except, as noted above, it’s technically 1,584 headshots of 1,000 Buddhas.]
The most extensive accounts I’ve found so far of his seven-year process of trying to get permission to photograph the Buddhas were in interviews with Phong Bui and Interview Magazine tied to a 2016 show of large-format prints of the series, retitled as Sea of Buddha, at Pace. Basically, he was a nobody getting nowhere, and either Philippe de Montebello helped, or he didn’t, until a Japanese culture bureaucrat helped him get a deal, and then he just had to pay $10,000, or $15,000. It’s kind of crazy. Sugimoto described his show at the Met as life-changing, but also as his first museum show, which, his own chronology lists fourteen museum shows before that. He said they were shown at the Met, but honestly, I don’t remember them being shown until 1997.
I was at the Sanjusangendō yesterday, and so have been thinking anew about Sugimoto’s work. And besides the shifting explanations, it feels weirdly destabilizing to see how many different formats, editions, and installations there have been over the years, all seemingly with the same date of 1995. Sugimoto’s moved major galleries multiple times, and shown the work in various single and triptych forms, in editions of 5, 15, and 25. Accelerated Buddha was shown on a single monitor in 1997, and as a wraparound three-channel video since, with different soundtracks by Ken Ikeda.
I’m all for artists continuing to make and revisit and rethink and rediscover things about their work. And to continue to push it forward as technology and technique changes. On his own site Sugimoto describes the Sanjusangendō installation as a form of conceptual art, and wonders, a bit disdainfully, “Will today’s conceptual art survive another eight-hundred years?” And I’m like, only if it has an archivist? Because it’s only been 30 years, and things are already confusing af.
[enlightenment update]即是空, 空即是色