1. Das Thema

Hans Belting

The theatre of illusion

Movie theaters are built as theatres of illusion. But in Sugimoto’s equally disturbing and beautiful photographs, such interiors are reintroduced as metaphors. They remind us of our own vision which is confined in a permanent theater of illusion. Our attention is drawn to a screen which represents the archetypical image we welcome as the epiphanic window of the world. The window is bathed in a blinding light which seems to enter the dark room from the outside though, in fact, it is projected from within. But the screen is empty and thus qualifies either as the everything of all possible images or else as their nothingness as vehicles of illusion. If we want to grasp what is happening in front of our eyes or in the back of our mind, the everything which we are eager to see, similarly results in the nothing we can trust. Sugimoto’s theatre series therefore strangely resembles the living camera obscura which we are ourselves.[1]

It seems that the photographs record empty rooms where nothing happens, and yet they are supposed to picture a movie during the entire length of its projection on the screen. The result however is not meant to work in a naive sense and in fact cannot work in any documentary or indexical way but produces an unexpected deception. The technique Sugimoto adopts, has been described many times. He takes great efforts to use the projection time of a feature film (its length) as the exposure time of his camera. The screen where the pictures appear and disappear, in the end remains empty as it cannot keep the many pictures it attracts. Motion creates emptiness in the photograph. The site of the pictures which have been shown on its silvery surface, reflects nothing but a trace of the light they carried with them when crossing the dark interior. The light, as it were, represents an invisible film enshrined in a visible interior.

Even the visibility of the interior is not such as we could decipher it with the naked eye. It has a highly artificial visibility only available to the camera eye and only to be recorded in the photograph. Sugimoto in fact uses the projector’s light which carries the film images, for the almost opposite effect of illuminating a dark room: it is the very room which we usually occupy with our bodies but which we tend to forget while travelling with our imagination to the sites we are shown in the movie. The white screen which as such is not visible to the audience during the film show, fills up with the accumulated light living in the film story of one or two hours length. The reflected light, from there, is further deflected to the surrounding room where it hits the relief of the wall decoration and bestows on everything a ghostly, nightly shape. The visible room emerges from the light of an invisible film. The light is not pure light but is abstracted from the glittering sequence of thousands of pictures which have chased each other into flight during the time span of a film story. The discontinuity existing between a film and the theater while the film is shown, in Sugimoto’s subversive vision turns into a pseudo-continuity, as the film vanishes from our eyes and transforms the interior into a kind of imaginary or filmic site. It is hard to distinguish the real from the unreal. In the photograph, we look into a black room where the attention is directed to a blinding white nothing. This iconoclastic use of the filmic light takes a lot of experience. The light amount needed to evoke the shadows of such interiors varies between different movies. Hollywood comedies, Sugimoto told me, offer more light than poetic films of tragic content. Thus, the technical face of a film which we are unable to discover with our living organisms, in Sugimoto’s photographs is transformed to an unexpectedly poetical mise-en-scène.

Had Sugimoto just attempted a nice surprise, he only would have needed a single photograph. But, in fact, he does not tire to take pictures in innumerable cinema theaters of the US which resemble each other in that, each time, the movie screen has become empty in the projection light whereas the interiors never resemble each other, how much they may serve the same function. Sugimoto also has produced other series which, in a similarly irritating monotony, contradict the creed of an ever changing world which so much imported for the mainstream in modern thought. The seascapes which he produces as long as the theaters, impressed me first. They represent the horizon in ever the same position in the picture. Since they omit the evidence of the shore where Sugimoto stood while doing the picture, they turn our gaze to the water and the sky alone. In that respect, the oceans of our world are almost undistinguishable from each other. One has no clue whether Sugimoto took the picture in the Pacific or at the Mediterranean. The photographs only differ in the ever changing light of daytime and season, i.e. as a result of different cycles as they are contained in the course of the year or in the spectacle of the wheather. The water may be agitated or calm, removed from our sight by fogg or sparkling in sun shine. This view of the motif may disappear in the very next moment and thus disprove the indexicality of photography in the sense of a unique event in time. Sugimoto's pictures survive as arbitrary glimpes within the old stream of time. The rhythm of day and night or of clouds and wind confirms a given theater of nature in which the eternal change disproves itself.[2]

Time and space which we love to see as opposites, in Sugimoto’s view are interwoven such as to reveal an abyss of riddles. The visible structure of the Interiors is as simple, as their semantic complexity seems inexhaustible. Their vision invites a contemplation which we can only reach after allowing their illusion as a guide to mental conception to work on us. Our initiation already begins with the interplay between subject matter and its technical medium: the medium stages the interior in a manner we cannot see without the photographs. Photography’s indexicality (the record of something which has been and therefore survives as a faithful trace) is subtly dissolved or, better, used as the indexicality of the imaginary or the mirror of our conceptions. Photography’s ontology, as André Bazin wanted it in the days of high modernism, does no longer convince us when photographs reveal what we cannot see. In Sugimoto’s series (which use the emptied evidence of an invisible film sequence) two media are involved in a playful and yet philosophical way. One medium (film) is blended into another (photography). It is not only that we see an image of a site of images where the images are cancelled. The site we see is not part of the movie, and the movie we do not see (has the camera seen it?) has dissolved in its own time unit while illuminating the site.

The camera uses the same position as the projector, high above the heads of the audience and thus keeping a similar distance to the people's view in the cinema. Camera and projector have technical eyes which register the theater space in a way different from the way the people do. While competing for the same position in the cinema, the two nevertheless produce a totally different result which confirms the difference of the two respective media. All the same, the result has an abstract quality against the movie experience or the cinema theater experience of the audience. The work of the camera mirrors the procedure of the projector without paying notice to the illusion which the movie generates as its very essence. The difference of technical fiction and human imagination thereby reveals itself. The ritual of the medium whose blind eye waits to be filled with the gaze of the spectator, only becomes meaningful as a result of the anthropological use of the image.

We use to think that photography is about space, as film is about time. This distinction has been confirmed and also disproved by Sugimoto. The motion image disappears in the photographic image which easily wins over the younger medium. This result is contrary to our expectation which depends on the linear idea of medial history and progress. Sugimoto offers us a further paradox while turning the well known illusion inborn in the speed of a movie which deceives our slow eyes with a virtual movement, into the opposite illusion of a stillness resulting from an abundance of motion pictures. The sleeping time in a physical space (the cinema interior) cancels the linear time in a filmic event. The remembered time of a photograph survives the acting (or running) time of a movie. We not only see the photographic memory of an interior but also the equally, but paradoxically pictured memory of a film whose existence on the screen we are forced to believe as we cannot actually see it. The diversity of the Theatres which we only grasp in the series and not in the single picture, adds weight to their physical and local existence while the anonymity of the empty screen emphasizes the ubiquity and instability of the film which as a medium of temporality is not part of our living space. The asymmetry familiar to us from the permanent site of a theatre and the impermanent event of a theatre performance, increases in our common movie experience when we see an outdoor world while sitting in an indoor space. This spatial inconsistency is in a strange way inverted when Sugimoto reveals the indoor experience with the light of movie pictures not born in this space. The space is bathed in the dim light which it receives in the movie sequence, that is in time.

Sugimoto’s Theatres however need more than just description. We realize that we are confronted with a kind of allegory which addresses philosophical issues such as time and space. Their mutual dependance involves both the realm of illusion and the territory of mere conception as against our usual visual experience. Sugimoto practices visual philosophy when he uses the title „Time exposed“ for the cycle of seascapes in an outdoor exhibition where they changed further under the impact of weather. But the same title could be given to the Theatres. „Time exposed“ makes a double reference to exposure and exposition: exposure, as a photographic technique, here turns into the meaning of an exhibition of time (or of photographs, i.e. of art) but also may adopt the rhetorical meaning of the exposition of an argument. „Time exposed“ at the same time closes time against any simple notion. It could be said that time is nothing but actual time which anyway does not apply to any photograph in the world. But Gilles Deleuze has taken great care to tell us that, even in the case of cinema, time image and motion image are separate phenomena.

„Time exposed“ in our case can only mean that time is encoded in the Theatres in many layers whose classification, in any neat sense, is bound to fail. We may ask ourselves whether time, the time unit of a film, has become invisible or whether it has adopted a transformation of its visibility. The time event, as is the movie, dissolves into a time space where many sediments of time remembered are buried in a simultaneous view. A photograph of the usual kind arrests time or cuts out a time fraction never to happen again. Sugimoto seems to have done something similar which yet secretly indicates a stern opposition to any photographer’s confidence in grasping time. He carefully measures a time unit whose measuring principle however remains inaccessible to us. We have to believe that his exposure time coincides with the length of a given movie. The particular relation between the time of a movie and the time of memory, in a building, in our case remains obscure. What we see, can last for ever and in fact does so in Sugimoto’s photographs which protect the timeless calm of what we see from every attempt to interrupt or to end it.

It is an almost arbitrary act that Sugimoto, as we know, at one point handles the shutter in order to produce the photograph. He thus fixes the floating time in a paradoxical way forever. The photograph, so to speak, testifies against its own traditional evidence as a medium and introduces a startling new time experience. The utmost precision with which Sugimoto measures the time quantity taken from the film, is nothing but a solemn gesture. The ritual he applies guarantees a concept which escapes our visual control. The usual indexicality of photography has adopted a new meaning which as yet needs (or defies?) a proper theory.

One picture, one may say, would have been enough to prove this point. But Sugimoto has suffered through many different movies which always produce the same abstract image. This exercise builds up a photographic series in which the different sites contradict the sameness of the light’s epiphany. Thus, they insist on their individuality as interior decoration und demonstrate their physical existence. The ceremonious dualism which governs the cycle of photographs, requires a short digression. As we study the interiors more closely, we discover a new stratification of time layers which extend the memory of the particular interior to the memories of other sites distant in time and space. We recognize suddenly that the American cinema palaces deliberately evoke a long history of theaters of illusion which have been built (or dreamed) in old Europe for centuries.

The history of illusion is mirrored in a mythical genealogy of archetypes whose memory is celebrated both in the cinema palaces and in their photographic afterlife. It seems that movies, in the early days of Hollywood were rarely performed in an equally modern and American type architecture. The fictional world of the movies extended to the fictional setting of movie theatres. This setting confirmed the irreality of the movie (against the experience of the audience to the contrary) by a long ancestry of historical sites which had been built for spectacles of another kind. We therefore even find a paradoxical proscenium which is laid out between the curtain and the orchestra of an old opera house. Also the balconies no longer await the former society of an opera performance but are ironically contradicted by their pseudo use as memories of he past. The cinema visit which took place on a sunday afternoon in Ohio or Pennsylvania when the movie was the new and only medium to see the world, included an imaginary visit to theatres in the old world. The historical fiction coincides with a spatial fiction, as a result of which the cinema interiors in the photographs look older and more unreal than the European (or Oriental) prototypes they quote. Not only do they pretend to be sites of drama and opera. They also open up vistas of past cultures which owned other manners of illusion. In Sugimoto’s photographs, the American spaces which served a new medium in their own days, by their setting introduce us into a long history of illusion – and equally reveal the illusion which lives in our view on history.

In a strange way, the Theatres turn contemporary reality, as it was recorded in Robert Frank’s series The Americans, into a past reality despite the fact that they were still in use when Sugimoto, after more than half a century, entered them with his camera. There is a double space experience which we know all too well whenever the „here and now“ of a cinema audience fades away into the „there and once“ of the fiction we have come to see. But this familiar dualism continues via the historical setting which creates a third and memorial type of space. Our eyes are tuned to Palladian or Baroque prototypes which in turn were modelled after theaters of antiquity long gone and reinvented out of mere nostalgia, as also the cinema sites fill up with modern nostalgia. After this long sequence of ancestors, the cinema invited the people to attend a performance of another kind: the living stage, as it were, became replaced or outshadowed by a kind of living image whose life was faked by the illusion of motion photography. Nevertheless, the cinema experience was still tied to the old theatre experience and its character as a public place. Sugimoto’s photographs where the boundaries existing between the one and other site are blurred, confirm this linkage all too well.

At the same time, these photographs hide a deep asymmetry which divides drama and film. The illuminated screen not only is the window to a space so imaginary that it is no longer part of the same building. The screen also is the mirror of our own images which we project on its surface no less than the projector does. There is no longer the fixed distance which we keep from the living stage. The surface of the screen, as it has no connection to the topology of its pictures, draws us into a stream of images which resembles the experience of dreams. It therefore has a special significance that, in Sugimoto’s photographs, the screens are empty or better, the site of virtual images which we produce ourselves in exchange with the pictures shown in a movie. The screens are empty because they are the matrix of all possible images whose illusion is wanted and needed. The screens, as it were, solemnly symbolize the paradoxical presence of images best defined by their absence. In that capacity, they also resemble our own minds which continually produce and destroy images of vision, of memory and of imagination. We are ourselves theatres of illusion in which we are centered on an inner screen ready for ever new images, a screen whose emptiness also signifies the virtuality of whatever it makes appear. The nothing and the everything are reciprocal.

There is however another asymmetry which, this time, separates photography and film. Sugimoto’s photographs remind us of cinema rooms we have visited ourselves, even if we never went to those where Sugimoto took his camera. They also paradoxically remind us of movies we were sitting through. We anyway look at movies with the expectation nourished from past experience of movies. And we leave a cinema with the memory of images which cannot be substantiated in any material way (film stills are no proof to the contrary) and which only survive in our imagination. Thus, films leave us with virtual images, images that do not leave any trace in every day’s reality. Photographs which are antithetical to films by definition (despite the fact that films are „built“ from single photographs), are expected to prove the disappearance of filmic images in a physical world. The memory which lives in a photograph, contradicts the memory we keep from a film.

The same applies to the concept of time which is owned by the two visual media. The time which is enshrined in a photograph (and which is not our time, as we look at it), resembles the aura of a past time which has imprinted the presence of physical places we can visit. The time illusion of the film testifies against the time memory inherent in a photograph. The film is meant to produce the illusion of living images (images in real time) whereas the traditional image insisted on absent time or time lost. Sugimoto therefore restores the time experience of the film to the time experience in a photograph, when he emphasizes the time memory linked to a particular place against the ephemeral time of filmic narration. His exposure time, as it were, is real fiction, as it uses a unit of filmic time for the evidence of photographic time. Sugimoto’s input-time in using the shutter performs (and mirrors) the output-time of movies of varying length. But, in fact, neither the one nor the other can be verified such as to be tested against each other.

The riddle of time which is buried in Sugimoto’s photographs, is not easily to be exhausted. There is the faked time in the story of the invisible film which is produced by the very different time built in as the length of the movie and which again differs from the repetitive time of its possible projections on many possible screens. There is further the time when Sugimoto produced his photograph (which in a most ambivalent way, for the first time becomes visible for us). There is finally the time when we look at one of his prints or when we possibly again look at it in another moment of our life. But time is not only illusion. In fact, the accumulated illusion necessarily meets our resistance. Our life experience includes time experience as the vital creation of our mind. What is most uncertain, is forcefully ascertained by our self-experience and world-experience. We all live in the same time but our life-time differs among ourselves and produces different images of time in us.

After all this is said, we must finally turn our attention to the mise-en-scène of the light which Sugimoto practices. His photographs are examples of a different kind of "Lichtbild" (to use the German term of lantern slide or light-produced image in terms of a word play), as we usually denote it when using the term. The light, in his case, is not medium or a technical device (as it also is with the projection of movies), but it is the very theme of his pictures. While the movie light has swallowed the movie pictures, it has receded into pure light. We know for sure that what we see is nothing but reflected ligt which however performs its own spectacle in the dark room. The photograph replaces the light beam of the projector with the light surface of the screen from which the light is reflected. Since however the light source remains invisible in our back, we occupy a viewing point in the photograph which also is the viewing point of the camera. Thus we tend to ignore the technical procedure, as if we could experience an independent spectacle of light which happens in front of our eyes (and not behind our back).

The light which Sugimoto needs for his camera, thus adopts an iconic quality which transcends the condition of the photographic medium. Our fascination also results from the fact that Sugimoto uses the light against its filmic meaning. Even the light's photographic meaning does not matter, after the light changes from a technical device into its own image. We would have to call it abstract light if it were not the case that it assumes a sensual presence in which it triumphs over the world of solid objects. The walls and the furniture which are touched by the light in the semi-dark space, loose against the reality of the pure light. They emerge from the traces of reflected light while the screen seems to radiate in an absolute light which from here spreads to the cinema room. The screen, thus, no longer seems to reflect, but to produce the light we see in the photographs. Sugimoto, as in his other work, offers us negations or proofs ex contrario in order to introduce us into the secret message of his pictures.

The theatres' series, like the other sequences of photographs we know from Sugimoto, deconstructs the single image as a self-contained and self-sufficient unit and instead decodes its true meaning via the serial reference. This also applies to his Dioramas in which he takes stuffed animals in Museums of Natural History as his subject, or his wax figure cabinets. There is always a strategy which irritates our gaze and thereby deprives the single picture of its safe evidence. We know that Sugimoto started his carrier when Conceptual art had its heyday. His photographs are neither faithful reproductions of the world nor mere examples of a personal style in constructing the picture. Inspite of their professional excellence and artistic quality they express an idea or concept.

In the series of the "Theatres" the concept is elucidated by the quantity of the cinema spaces. The single spaces contradict or neutralize each other in front of the radiance of the screen light which easily, and litterally, puts them into the shadow. The difference of absolute and relative comes to mind. The same applies to the relation between the ever shining light and all the different movies whose pictures have vanished in this light. We experience the timeless theater of light in the midst of a temporal world with its ephemeral appearances. The movies which we have recognized as the most important modern pictorial medium besides the TV, withdraw from the absolute presence of the light as an essence of its own. When we follow Sugimoto into the cinema then we do not get to see there anything which justifies the usual visit of the cinema.

In a kind of epilogue, an old time concept of Zen Buddhism may serve as an invitation to enjoy both the playful side and the depth in Sugimoto’s conceptual photography. The epilogue however must not be understood as the explanation of what Sugimoto is doing and thinking. Despite the fact that he is Japanese, I have no intention to link him to a given Buddhist tradition and in fact never discussed this view with him. The time philosophy of Zen ist best represented by Dogen Zenji, a famous teacher of Japanese Zen whose writings, dating from the 13^th century, were recently used by artists such as Nam June Paik. I also found the same book in the hands of Peter Sellars when he received the Erasmus prize at Amsterdam in 1998.

In chapter 20 of Dogen’s collected writings, Shobogenzo (The Eye and Treasury of the True Law), „Being“ and „Time“ are explained as synonymous which contradicts our familiar distinction of time and life as opposites. „Time“, we read, „is existence or being“ and vice versa. „The shape of a Buddha statue is time.“ Dogen Zenji in fact rejects „any difference between your mind and time... We, ourselves, are time“ instead of being victims of time passing. „Do not think that being is a stable concept“ which can be contrasted with the instability of time. Time is always passing but there also is „an aspect which is not passing. To realize this is to comprehend being.“ The empty screen which in Sugimoto’s photographs offers a kind of resting place for our searching gaze, may be understood as the allegory both of time and of being. The film of our life which is pictured on a screen in ourselves, by its very meaning also transcends the empty activity of time.

In the preceding chapter, Dogen Zenji addresses the „Ancient Mirror“ (Kokyo) as the emblem of the world and of its pictures which reside in our mind. Again, the screen with its consummation of pictures in a surprizing way relates to the view which the Zen monk develops in his book. „The Ancient mirror and the Buddhas are one and the same; outside the mirror there are no Buddhas“ to be seen and vice versa. „The one who sees and the one who is seen, the reflecting one and the reflected one are one and the same.“ The author, to be sure, discusses the practice of meditation which he considers an end in itself and not as a help to reach Enlightment. The Zen training, he concludes, amounts to the polishing of one’s personal mirror. Nevertheless, Dogen Zenji would not confine his teaching to the religious domain only. He addresses a world of illusion in which self training is a practice of secular and permanent enlightment.

Imagination and the world of appearances remain an inseparable unity. „Mind and eye are mutually each other.“ Whatever appears in the world, is being reflected in our mind. We live in a theater of illusion in which the screen (or the mirror) of our attention reflects the nothing and the everything which happens in (our?) time. Photography and film, in a way, are duplicates of our own mirror but they catch the opposite ends of image experience in their resting and in their fleeting time. In Western thinking, they often are linked to the antagonism of life and death. In the light of Eastern thinking, „being“ transcends this easy opposition. Sugimoto’s visual philosophy, in a most subtle way, uses two modern media against the stereotypes of modern thinking.