I was in the city by the bay and I went to the newly refurbished San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The thing
I really wanted to see was the exhibition by Sohei
Nishino titled New Work. It consisted chiefly of what Nishino calls “Diorama Maps,” a kind of photo collage.
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| Image - Michael Hoppen Gallery |
The method, as I understood it, is that he
chooses, or gets a commission to photograph, a city. He goes there, explores, and takes thousands
of pictures. Much of this exploration is
done by walking the streets and most of the photographs are taken at ground
level, though some are obviously taken from much higher viewpoints.
Nishino prints off contact sheets, cuts out single
frames, and assembles them into large-scale collages that looks somewhat like
a map, somewhat like an aerial view of the city. These collages are then rephotographed and
printed large scale, and this print is the final product.
I didn’t absolutely understand all that before
I went, and I found myself just a little disappointed by the size of the
works on display in the exhibition.
Having seem images like the one below, I’d imagined they might
be as big as a gallery wall.
Still, it would be churlish to complain that the prints weren’t big
enough, so I’m not going to do that. Like real maps, these works by Nishino allow a dual perspective – you
see them from a distance and they give an overall sense of the city but then
you need to look closer at all the details.
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| Image - Michael Hoppen Gallery |
Nishino has been making the diorama maps for the best part of fifteen
years but lately he’s started a series he calls Day Drawings. He tracks his
own movements via GPS, brings them up on the computer screen, places a piece of
paper over the screen and punches holes in the paper tracking his route. This then becomes a kind of negative. He shines light through the holes onto a
sheet of photographic paper, thereby again forming a sort of map.
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| Photograph - Ivan Vartanian |
Nishino cites the great artist, walker and mapper Richard Long as an
influence (well, how could he not?) and a work by Long titled “Autumn Circle,”
1990, was situated in the museum conveniently close to the Nishina exhibition.
Thus:
You may already know that I once had a job guarding a stone circle by
Richard Long in the Tate Gallery in London (I was a security guard – long, not
very interesting story) and I spent hours on end walking around it. This was not long after there’d been some
controversy about the Tate acquiring Carl Andre’s “Equivalent VIII” otherwise known as the bricks.
People would come up to me as I was pacing
around the Long piece and say, “Is this the bricks?” and I’d take great
delight in saying, “No it’s the stones.”
How we laughed.
Meanwhile elsewhere in San Francisco, at the Paul Smith store on Geary
Street, the window-dressers (do we still call them window-dressers?) were
showing a certain disrespect for the printed map – I mean, really.
