We Bay Area art lovers subsist for the most part on the thinnest of aesthetic gruel, doled out daily by the braying identitarians and performative virtue-signalers heading the local museums, arts centers, and scholastic art departments. So Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Point of Infinity’, a new 69-foot-high sculpture installed in a park atop Yerba Buena Island, offers a kind of artistic intelligence and cultural ambition that we rare experience locally. I saw the work up-close for the first time yesterday (it’s visible from the Bay Bridge as you drive towards San Francisco), and thought it more than significant enough to ponder in a short blog piece.
Sugimoto emerged in the early 1980s with striking photographs of movies screens created by the still camera with an open lens registering the showing of an entire film. Consequently the screens showed a great radiance of undifferentiated white light, a luminescent cloud that is understood to contain all the film’s frames while exhibiting none. Later series of long-exposures took as their subjects seascapes, dioramas, and wax figures. In every case the impression is of a kind of refined intelligence, both conceptual and visual, producing a visual paradox expressive of sublimity: life as death as life; stillness of motion in stillness; physicality as ideality made physical. In the early part of this century Sugimoto first saw and was inspired by a series of photographs from the mid-1930s by Man Ray that showed in dramatic black-and-white physical models of mathematical equations.
In interviews Sugimoto has repeatedly stated his conception of his artworks as models that condensed and expressed space and time, each through the other. The photograph of a mathematical model is for Sugimoto a kind of third-order object, a model of a model of an equation, and one expressive of the formula-derived orderings of mathematics, geometry, and topology. The range of application of such formulae is indeterminately vast in a way that rhymes with the ontological placelessness of the individual photograph; both are models ready for placement and application.
Sugimoto began making his own mathematically-derived physical models and photographing them. At roughly the same time he began collaborating on architectural projects.
Sugimoto has described an early commission: “For the entrance of Oak Omotesando, a mixed-use building in Tokyo, the brief from the client was “to transform the whole space into a work of art. We began by creating a six-meter-high mathematical model—a three-dimensional expression of the formula of a cubic function—and suspending it from the nine-meter-high ceiling. Known as “surface of revolution with constant negative curvature,” the cubic function creates hyperbolic curves; the point where these curves finally intersect is infinity. This model was created as a visualization of the point of infinity. It is, however, impossible to physically make that point. . . I imagine the curves pass through the center of the earth and emerge in Brazil at a width of a few microns before finally crossing at the point of infinity somewhere in the outer reaches of the universe.” (Sugimoto and Sakakida, p. 57) --Sugimoto’s construction irresistibly recalls the pillars in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building, though I can see or find nothing that suggests that the visual allusion is intentional:
Sugimoto is unwavering in his conceptualizations: he understands his works as third-order models that present sublime condensations of space and time, and ‘Points of Infinity’ sustains all these marks. The sculpture is evidently a monumentalization of the doorway’s mathematical model, rotated 180 degrees so that the ceiling attachment becomes the supporting base.
The sculpture rises 69 feet, with the lower part made of an unfortunate fiberglass (a chunk has already been broken off, likely by one of the hoodlums and/or selfie-taking narcissists who infest the Bay Area) and the upper part made of stainless steel whose tip is less than one inch wide. Though placed high near the top of Yerba Buena Island, at a distance of say the Bay Bridge it resembles a tiny church spire dwarfed by the hodge-podge of downtown San Francisco’s grotesque high-rises a couple of miles away. Sugimoto has said that the sculpture will function as a sundial, with stones marking the exact spots of the sun’s shadows at noon on the equinoxes.
To my mind the most intriguing aspect of ‘Points of Infinity’ is the revealing way in which it invites comparisons with humanity’s earliest monuments of the Neolithic and also with the great cosmic architectural conceptualizations of the early civilizations of India, China, and Central and South America. The conceptualization of monoliths and apertures as markers of celestial events is of course a prominent feature of many Neolithic structures, most famously at Stonehenge and Newgrange. But Sugimoto’s remark about imagining the curves of his earlier work passing through the center of the earth invites comparison with the widely attested concept of the axis mundi, the center of the earth and center of the cosmos that serves as the basis of physical and spiritual orientation and about which everything that is arrays itself and turns. As Paul Wheatley put it in his canonical account of the organization of early Chinese cities, the city bears a ‘centripetalizing symbolism’ that gathers and gives expression to basic cosmic elements: “In the Chou-Li it is explained how the [relevant] official . . . calculated the precise position of this axis mundi (ti-chung), which is there characterized as ‘the place where earth and sky meet, where the four seasons merge, where wind and rain are gathered in, and where ying and yang are in harmony’.” (Wheatley, p. 428) Looking up from the base of ‘Points of Infinity’ gives a vivid sense of the meeting of earth and sky. ‘Points of Infinity’ joins Nancy Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’ and Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ as an instance of the little-populated sub-genre of cosmic Minimalism.
References and Works Consulted:
Kerry Brougher and Pia Müller-Tamm, Hiroshi Sugimoto (2010)
Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West (1967)
George Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture (2000)
Klaus Ottmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Models (2015)
Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tomoyuki Sakakida, Old is New: Architectural Works by New Material Research Laboratory (2021)
Paul Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (1971)