At the Palais de Tokyo Hiroshi Sugimoto’s version of the Museum of Innocence

 

Placed at the entrance of “The world is dead (Human genetic archive)” – Hiroshi Sugimoto’s massive installation currently at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – the text below is a keystone for the understanding of this kind of “Museum of Innocence”, which gathers together photography, writings and objects collected by the artist during his lifetime. The ambitious text, signed by the artist himself, has to be read bearing in mind that the installation it introduces has the structure of a blog: every post, thus every episode, includes a text written by Sushimoto, or by fictional characters such an astronaut or the chairman of a euthanasia society. It follows that form and information are endlessly linked one to the other.

 

Today the world died. Or may be yesterday, I don’t know.

 

I often think of the artists of the Renaissance, a time in which a harmonious combination of religion, science, and art existed. In their eyes, only God was capable of creating a form as superbly balanced as the human body, which did not prevent Leonardo da Vinci from exploring in from the point of view of anatomy as well. A point of view he also projected into his painting, even into Mona Lisa’s gaze. So Renaissance artists were stirred by a profound religious faith in the same time as being scholars. After the astronomical telescope had been used by Gaileo on the one hand, and the microscope had been invented by Leeuwenhoek on the other, human beings achieved an objective view of the world. From then on the human race was caught between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

 

It is now just a little over three hundred years since we started to know the world we live in a little better. That is equivalent to fourteen of fifteen generations. Before that an age extends in which the darkness of ignorance prevailed, which we call ‘obscurantist.’ Yet, I don’t know why, I am fascinated by the age of darkness. For before the human mind started apprehend matter through the laws of physics, the world was filled by a sacred mystery. If we think about it, the great myths of humankind are all wonderful poems, really a form of art. Today I am obliged to come up with art that is not at odds with the state of current knowledge. But the reality that surrounds us appears very limited to me in comparison with the world of the Ancients, in which God existed, and manifested themselves in the form of a great many avatars. Thus my imagination as an artist is impeded by contemporary knowledge.

 

In this restricted present, the only field in which my dreams ca still unfold is the future, its form not yet being fixed. Imagining the worst conceivable tomorrows gives me tremendous pleasure at the artistic level. The darkness of the future lights up my present, and foreknowledge of a coming end guarantees my happiness in living today. In this exhibition you will find the worst scenarios created by my imagination regarding the future of humankind. It is up to the younger generations to take every possible step to prevent them from becoming a reality. Where I am concerned, I choose to give completely free rein to my intuitions as an artist. That does not mean that we should not continue to hope for the future. I leave it to the last survivor to record the actual course of the end of the world, and to preserve the genetic information of the human species, either by metamorphosing into a mummy, by preserving his genes in a test tube, or else by handing on a DNA map of his genome.

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto

September 22, 2014