Self-portrait by Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2008
The April 2009 issue of Modern Painters is completely devoted to photography. The cover story is about Hiroshi Sugimoto and profiles his recent work and experimentations.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roofline of Lacock Abbey, most likely 1835–1839 (2007), (from a negative by William Henry Fox Talbot).
I had not heard about this before but Sugimoto has been buying up early negatives made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830’s and is now using them to make his own work from them. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that.
According to a 2007 article from Globe and Mail, Sugimoto owns at least 15 of these negatives. He claims to have spent a whole years income on the negatives and proclaims, “I will be using it to make my art, I can write it off. I am creating my art by buying another person’s art. I call this art anarchism, because I don’t pay tax!”
Besides fiddling around with the Talbot negatives, Sugimoto has been busy experimenting with a Van de Graaff generator using electrical jolts of energy to create photographs that resemble tree like shapes of radiant light. He calls them Lightning Fields.
The Modern Painters issue also has an article about Sophie Ristelhueber and an interview with James Welling, both are online for your reading pleasure right now.
I guess this takes ‘appropriation’ to a whole new level. What he’s doing, to me, doesn’t sound illegal in the sense that … he now owns those old negatives, so they’re his to with as he pleases, but one can’t help but think that there’s a big of ego involved in fusing them with his own work. At least it seems more that way than simply a genuine homage.
The whole thing sounds really quirky to me, and a little extreme, as if he’s as much about attention-getting as art-making. But at least it brings up an interesting philosophical debate: should those old negatives be treated as history, and permanently be stored in a museum, or should they be used … as they were, in fact, intended to be used? To make pictures? When does art stop becoming functional and become ‘artifact,’ instead? I find it all very interesting.