Hiroshi Sugimoto’s solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery featured twenty-two hazy black-and-white photographs of artworks by modernist masters such as Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Other prints highlighted (or, perhaps more accurately, gently obfuscated) paintings from the more recent past by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Kosuth. All of the pieces here were from a series titled “Past Presence,” 2013–, which was generated by an invitation from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to commemorate its sculpture garden. (One image from this project is currently on view at the recently reopened MOMA, where it overlooks this famous enclosure.) Sugimoto’s pictures represent his interpretation of how these renowned artists envisioned their paintings and sculptures in their mind’s eye just prior to creating them. But what’s more intriguing is how Sugimoto’s bleary images of these canonical art objects seem to heighten—rather than diminish, per Walter Benjamin—their auratic qualities. The works’ softened contours diffuse their objecthood, bleeding them out of their fixed points in space—and perhaps even in history. Their shadowy presences are as mysterious and seductive as Greta Garbo.
At the end of a long corridor that leads to the south gallery was Past Presence 029: Blond Negress, II, Constantin Brancusi, 2014, installed to stunning effect. Walking down that hallway—not unlike a bit of time travel—never felt more rewarding. As soon as I stood before it, Brancusi’s sculpture snapped into (soft) focus, imposing and luminous. Adding to the wonderment of this experience was the way two other prints also featuring pieces by the Romanian artist—Past Presence 021, The Cock: Constantin Brancusi and Past Presence 022: Maiastra, Constantin Brancusi, both 2013—were hung together with Blond Negress, forming a sort of smeary and all-encompassing triptych, and inviting a kind of looking that enlisted the viewer’s whole body.
Sugimoto’s decision to capture several of the sculptures in three-quarter view added an additional layer of strangeness, as if he were taking portraits of living subjects. In some cases, they were scaled up, imparting a sense of ghostly grandeur. A few of the paintings, however, shrank when they were shot, such as Past Presence 060: Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, Pablo Picasso and Past Presence 024: Dance (1), Henri Matisse, both 2014. These iconic canvases, through Sugimoto’s transformative photographic process, became vacuums. He collapsed these massive stars of avant-gardist innovation and lyricism, their significance (or, yes, auras) so vast within the imagination of Western culture, into black holes. The effect was odd, funereal, and vaguely disconcerting.
“Brancusi’s Endless Column manifests but a sampled portion of the infinite,” Sugimoto once wrote. One wonders how Sugimoto has managed to document these brief glimpses of the ineffable with such care and skill—and for more than forty years. Be they seascapes, old movie palaces, Madame Tussauds–like wax figures, or natural-history-museum dioramas, the artist is able to turn so much of this familiar world into moments of uncanny splendor.
