Hitoshi Nomura: Seriality and Photographic Time

Hitoshi Nomura: Seriality and Photographic Time CHANON KENJI PRAEPIPATMONGKOL

“What is photography?” asked the critic and Provoke member Kōji Taki in 1970, opening his essay for First Abandon the World of Certainty, the group’s final publication.1 “Photographs,” he continued, “are indeed no more than fragments, and no more than the visible,” yet “they call into question the meaning of all experience.” Precisely because photography depends on the limited conditions of the visible, it has the ability to point to the reality that is not visible. The work of Hitoshi Nomura proposes an answer to Taki’s question: photography opens up the invisible dimension of time to investigation. Time for Nomura, however, is neither a metaphysical nor a mystical concept that can be allegorically fixed in an image. It is rather a variable measure of lived experience that Nomura investigates through the labor of photographing and accumulating images. Since 1969 Nomura has used the camera to capture moments along the passage of a day’s walk, the cycles of the moon, the path of the sun, and the restless motion of his gaze, among other things. Similar to such conceptual artists as Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and Hanne Darboven, Nomura employed seriality as an alternative to expressive art making and its attendant notions of heroic artistic subjectivity that were perceived as outdated in the late 1960s. However, for Nomura, seriality not only is a mode of production but also generates the logical visual structures that render visible the otherwise elusive concept of time. His series of photographs beckon the viewer to follow them, from one image to the next, as time progresses, and as the duration narrated by these photographs breaks free from the conventional register of the event and spills into the uneventful zone of everyday life and cosmic rhythms. The serial practice of Nomura is exemplary of a kind of photographic practice in 1970s Japan that was radically reconceived and expanded, becoming generative of new modes of conceptual exploration of the relations between man, matter, and world. The young Nomura’s interest in time began in the context of sculpture. On March 18, 1969, Nomura erected Tardiology (fig. 1), a nearly twenty-eight-foot-tall stack of four cardboard boxes in the front courtyard of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art as his MFA thesis project. Challenging expectations of “monumental permanency” associated with publicly sited sculpture of such size, the work was designed with structural failure in mind: it would eventually collapse under its own weight.2 The auto-destruction of Tardiology was a gradual process, and only after its total disintegration, as the cardboard weakened and slowly bowed under continual exposure to the forces of gravity, wind, and rain, could the entire process be registered as an event. After all, the name Tardiology is Nomura’s neologism for “theory of lag,” suggesting the artist’s interest in the gap between the ever-expanding present of phenomenal experience and the retroactive cognitive structuring of time as discrete events.3 Aware of the work’s ephemerality, Nomura took photographs to document the destruction of the work over the course of four days. These photographs would lead Nomura to the problem of visualizing time through the photographic medium. They narrate the fall of Tardiology in phases, starting from its crane-assisted construction, the initial flexing of cardboard walls, a box buckling outward, and finally the entire sculpture’s total crumpling into a mound of cardboard. The use of photography to disaggregate motion into a series is far from new, as it harkens back to Eadweard Muybridge’s famous study of a galloping horse in the 1870s. However, not until 1967, with the publication of Mel Bochner’s essay “The Serial Attitude,” was the serial method of production employed by such contemporary artists as Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt traced back to the photographic practices of Muybridge. Underlying these historically disparate instances of seriality, Bochner suggests, is the conceptual operation of translating a primarily fluid, temporal mode of perception into a logical, spatial one.4 Nomura seems to have independently come to these conclusions regarding the spatial properties of seriality when he spoke of viewing the photographs of Tardiology as a revelatory experience.5 For if in the live

Notes 1 Kōji Taki, translated by Linda Hoaglund, in Provoke, exh. cat. (New York: Roth Horowitz, 1999), 5; quoted in Charles Merewether, “A Language to Come: Japanese Photography after the Event” (2002), in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 131. 2 Hitoshi Nomura, in Miru: Nomura Hitoshi—Gūzen to hitsuzen no fenomena/Seeing: Contingency and Necessity—The Work of Hitoshi Nomura, trans. Seth Yarden (Kyoto: Akaaka Art Publishing, 2006), 7. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude” (1967), reprinted in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 22–24. For the relevance of Bochner’s interpretation of Muybridge to conceptual uses of photography in the late 1960s, see Derek Weiler, Serial Aesthetics and the Concept of Technique: Mel Bochner and the 1960s, Ph.D. dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2013, 197–201.

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Hitoshi Nomura, in Fergus McCaffrey, “An Interview with Nomura Hitoshi,” in Hitoshi Nomura—Early Works: Sculpture, Photography, Film, Sound, exh. cat. (New York: McCaffrey Fine Art, 2010), 8.

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FIGURE 1 Hitoshi Nomura, Tardiology, 1968–69. Eight gelatin silver prints, 2 prints: 31½ x 47¼ inches (80 x 120 cm); 4 prints: 47¼ x 31¼ inches (120 x 80 cm); 2 prints: 31½ x 47¼ inches (80 x 120 cm). Fergus McCaffrey. Checklist no. 210

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presentation of Tardiology change is experienced in the present tense, its photographic representation excises duration, transforming the event into discrete frames that denote temporal progression through the visual differences and the lateral spacing between them. Tardiology thus presented a formal problem that Nomura explored throughout the 1970s: how to create art that can “represent the characteristics of time and space in equal prominence.”6 The use of photography to capture and display moments in time gave way to the use of photography to generate series of images whose visual relationships to each other convey temporal experience. For Nomura the photographer and artist, the camera is not merely an apparatus that marks the passage of time but also a tool for exploring the interrelatedness of image, time, and space that underpins temporal experience. In 1969 and 1970, Nomura continued investigating the inherent instability of materials in Dryice and Iodine with the integration of performance and photography. Nomura first created and exhibited Dryice in the fall of 1969 at the second Exhibition of Contemporary Plastic Art at Kamogawa Park, Kyoto. Among the five physical iterations of Dryice that he produced during the exhibition period,7 the second one, on November 2, consisted of six blocks of dry ice weighing a hundred kilograms and a ten-meter-long rubber mat. Nomura weighed the blocks and recorded their weight and the time of the measurement on the mat using a white marker before photographing them; Nomura moved the blocks by hand down the mat and repeated the process of weighing, recording, and photographing, eventually establishing a series of photographs showing the stack of dry ice receding into the distance with diminishing mass in each iteration. In Iodine (fig. 2), created in 1970, Nomura repeated a similar process with rows of iodine along [iron] sheets. Unlike Tardiology, in which the morphology of structural disintegration is tracked solely through sculptural form, in Dryice and Iodine, these morphologies are also revealed through the visible changes of the support. In the five iterations of Dryice, Nomura used cardboard, rubber, and canvas—materials whose thermal properties generate different visual effects under extreme cold. The blocks of dry ice dampened the cardboard as it changed state while crumpling this support with their weight. Repeated on rubber, the same process yielded dramatic effects. The dry ice froze the rubber, creating white splotches, before eventually warming up to the point of condensation, making the rubber mat dark and wet. On canvas, these cooling and warming effects were not visibly indexed on the support, and the only measure of change is seen in the receding of the blocks into the distance. The black-and-white gelatin silver print heightens the contrast of the mats upon which the dry ice was placed, drawing attention to the crispness of the written text and to the effects of temperature on the surface of the mat. Whereas the surface indexes the temperature at any given instant, the duration of change is conveyed through the written record of date, time, and mass. The notation on the mat in both Dryice and Iodine beckons a calculation of the rate of matter’s sublimation. Should viewers decide to rigorously follow through the reiterative labor of calculating the time difference between each frame, they would find that this operation becomes progressively difficult as the written text becomes smaller, inducing eye fatigue over time, much in the same way that repeatedly lifting blocks of dry ice and scooping mounds of iodine would have been taxing for Nomura. The transition between frames thus denotes not so much the subtraction of duration, but the laborious task of reconstituting time, such that photographic seriality becomes a method that exacts repeated work on both the artist’s part and the viewer’s part. Even if Nomura’s actions follow a strict protocol to give viewers information through various indices, the result is far from the “stiff calculus” often associated with seriality in conceptual art, but rather a calculus rife with uneven rates of change that viewers must try to grasp.8 Photography thus exceeds its function of documentation and becomes generative of a phenomenological experience for the viewer that is as cognitively demanding as it is visually demanding. Indeed, Dryice and Nomura’s Time on a

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Nomura, Seeing, 7. The dates and the materials he used are: October 19 and 26 (cardboard), November 2 (rubber sheet), November 3 (canvas), and November 9 (canvas). See chronology in Time-Space: Hitoshi Nomura (Kyoto: Kōrinsha, 1994), 146. These dates fell on Sundays and a national holiday (November 3), indicating that Nomura made these works on his days off from his regular nine-to-five job.

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Sol Lewitt, quoted in Robin Kelsey, “Playing Hooky/Simulating Work: The Random Generation of John Baldessari,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2012): 747.

CHANON KENJI PRAEPIPATMONGKOL

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FIGURE 2 Hitoshi Nomura, Iodine, March 29, 1970. Twelve gelatin silver prints, 27⅝ x 33⅞ inches (70 x 86 cm) each. Fergus McCaffrey.

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Curved Line (see fig. 00) were the first photographic works in Japan to be presented and evaluated as art and not merely as documentation or supplementary material.9 The critic Yūsuke Nakahara was so impressed when these works were shown at the Kyoto Independent Exhibition in March 1970 that he invited Nomura to participate in that year’s Tokyo Biennale, subtitled Between Man and Matter, which placed Nomura among an international selection of conceptualists. Nomura received here the institutional validation for his turn toward photography, which found simultaneous developments in Euro-American art.10 In the early 1970s, Nomura shifted toward working on grander time scales. He tackled the challenge of capturing everything he saw between 1972 and 1982. Using a 16mm Bolex film camera to shoot stills, Nomura produced a hundred feet of film every month, all of which was published as a series of 120 hardcover tomes—one per month, with twenty-one frames per page—titled Ten-Year Photobook or the Brownian Motion of Eyesight (fig. 3). Selections from this project have been exhibited as a film projection, running at four frames per second, under the title The Brownian Motion of Eyesight. That these two presentation formats—the photobook and the film—fall in between the single frame of photography and the traditional twenty-four-frames-per-second rate of cinema evinces Nomura’s interest in opening up temporalities that privilege neither the decisive moment nor the continuity of temporal flow. It is here that seriality as a process of marking time is overrun by a mix of purposeful and haphazard changes within the programmable parameters of the camera and the projection apparatus. This refraction of time through a play of intentionality and chance continues in ‘moon’score (1975, fig. 4). From December 1975 to June 1979, Nomura shot a roll of 35mm film every night that it was possible, taking thirty-four shots of the moon and two shots of meteorological newspaper clippings detailing the date, the moon’s phase, moonrise, and moonset. (He has since continued to shoot the moon in this manner, although the frequency has decreased.) Each shot is double exposed in order to create an overlay of a five-line musical staff. Nomura exhibits the series as a set of black-and-white contact prints, as well as black-and-white large prints, so that each exposure of the moon makes an accidental musical note that can be read as part of a musical score. These scores have been interpreted by orchestras and turned into musical pieces in their own right. In this way, photography is reconceived as a game of musical composition, as Nomura aimed to align the moon with the middle of the frame while also allowing for sufficient variations to emerge. These variations in the location of the moon in the frame arose in part from Nomura’s intention to generate musical tonality, but also in part from the shakiness of Nomura’s hands in using a handheld camera and a super-zoom lens to try to capture such a distant object. Even as photography remained indexical in this work, its documentary function was less significant. On the one hand, ‘moon’score is a model of hermetic seriality in its creation of a spatial and temporal system of composition internal to the work, but on the other hand, it escapes the rigidity of the system to engender playful new rhythms of temporality that can be experienced both visually and aurally. ••• Although Nomura has to date continued his exploration into other astronomical phenomena, ‘moon’score marks a logical conclusion to the early phase of Nomura’s artistic career in the 1970s. Beginning with his interest in serializing a dramatic event in Tardiology, Nomura had since discovered the flexibility of the photographic series in generating other durations of temporal experience, from the everyday to the cosmic. Nomura’s conceptual photographic practice thus allows a fresh appreciation of the play between the specific and the infinite, logical order and chance, out of which the richness of lived experience appears.

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Nomura, quoted in McCaffrey, Hitoshi Nomura: Early Works, 9. The significance of this decision is contextualized by Reiko Tomii in “The Culture of Showing: The Operational Context for Nomura Hitoshi’s Early Works,” in Hitoshi Nomura: Early Works, 74. 10 For example, Martha Buskirk compares Nomura’s Dryice and Iodine with works at the 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), given their shared conception of the photographic document as that which not only contains information but also expressively conveys. See Buskirk, “Marking Time,” in Hitoshi Nomura: Early Works, 37–38.

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FIGURE 3 Hitoshi Nomura, The Brownian Motion of Eyesight (page), 1972–73. 16mm black-and-white film (transferred to DVD), 4 frames per second, 5 hours. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey. Checklist no. 214 FIGURE 4 Hitoshi Nomura, ‘moon’score, December 19, 1975. Gelatin silver print, printed c. 2003, 37⅞ x 39⅜ inches (96.2 x 100 cm). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2014.715. Checklist no. 215

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