"Montage, Color, Haptic"
Naruki Oshima
When you take a picture of a huge object, for example a building, its upper side will normally be distorted to be narrower because of the characteristic of lens of the camera. But a special operation of a big size camera can straighten this distortion, and then I have photographed my works with the widest aperture.
In this way many parts of the photographed image become out-focused as in the close-up photography. I have extracted from the scanned digital photo image the green color as a sample, and have printed the color image without negative film as the green belt (lower part). The photographs taken at various places are combined with the green belt and mounted on the plexisglas together.
In this work I aim to treat the color as an image in the interaction between the 'mountain' as green mass and the green belt. To 'treat the color as an image' means to make a subtle tactility of images emerge which is independent of our subjective images. And in order to inactivate the tactile quality of the color image, I have mounted the photo on one surface of the trapezoidal support projecting from the wall. Then I have put the five pieces side by side to one whole scenery that differs from an actual landscape. This montage to show them as one chain of a fictive mountain disturbs the feeling of stable distance of the observer to the photographed object. Furthermore the instable distance of the observer to the chained whole and to the each piece triggers the movement of the image.
When we see a object, we settle it in a system of meaning and recognize it. In order to recognize it, we need a stable distance between the object and ourselves. Recognizing means therefore taking and keeping the distance to the recognized object. The viewpoint and distance to the object is required for our recognition of things.
But when we have lost the stable distance and viewpoint, it is difficult to recognize the object clearly in its meaning system. We are so to speak hanging up in the uncertain distance and viewpoint, and the meaning of object becomes to be faint. The result is that the concrete image is transformed to be an abstract image, i.e. a mixture of brightness and darkness. Instead of the image of a 'mountain' a green mass appears in the photo. The object is still 'mountain'-like and is already not the 'mountain' but a green colored mass.
Let me suppose there are two ways of photographic expression. One is that of daily photographs around us where the most important matter is what is photographed, and we read and interpret the photographed image in relation to its socio-cultural contexts. The other is that of a photographic expression of no objectness. What is printed on the photographic paper is nothing but colors and shades of light. We cannot find any meaning of object and find ourselves at the zero degree of photographic imagery.
I have been thinking my photographic works always at this zero degree of image, in order to go beyond the subjectivity of the image, that is, the subject as being always already prefigured historically and culturally.
But in this point there exists a number of danger to be thrown into the "abstract photo" as a genre of photography. Most of the abstract photographs, though they are seemed to be at the zero degree, can be categorized to "Abstraction" and subsumed to the ordinary abstract image.
The system of signification is so dominant that they can be immediately integrated to the system. That is to say that naive abstractions at the zero degree can be at once thrown into the system of daily signification. Therefore, in order to prevent this integration, I have begun thinking about the visual montage based on the optical tactility, i.e. the haptic.
?I think my art in the middle of these two ways of photographic expression in order to get the rigid quality of image which is not easily integrated into the ordinary system. I think of a photographic expression which oscillates between concrete and abstract, meaning and non-meaning. The meaning of object is still existent, but is fading away in the shades of colors. The sense of visual tactility, the feeling as if one would touch the images with retina, is getting more and more important than the color, the figure or the surface texture of the photographed object. Through the montage the 'haptic' will begin to move and effectuates an another image which will emerge as something new.
(Osaka, March 2000)