eizogaku

James Turrell prepares specific spaces with natural light. His space shows variations under conditions of natural light. And appreciators may enter into his light-space environment actually. But we cannot enjoy all of those variations, because natural light varies at every moment. Moreover, his spaces are installed only in specific circumstances. Many appreciators imagine many phases of lightning of Turrell’s only with photographies, which, however, cannot catch all those phases. But the light-space of Turrell is photogenic in itself. It is an ironical fact that material, method and procedure of photography are also originated in light profoundly.

Nowadays we have much of informations about works of art with photocopies. I would make some considerations about works of art and photo-reproductions of them, especially in the case of Turrell.

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The history of the motion pictures in Japan does not merely begin with the importation of the apparatus, but with the formation of the object cinema through a variety of discursive operations which ultimately distinguish film from other entertainment media. By focusing on the case of the Tokyo police’s banning of the French film Zigomar in October 1912, this essay argues that cinema in Japan only emerged from the rubric of the misemono by being labeled a unique social problem. A series of discourses emerged at that point which articulated the motion pictures and their viewers as abnormal, as transgressing established boundaries. Film’s speed, chaos, and disruption of previous spatial and temporal modes of narration made not only the question of how viewers read films central, it underlined the dangers of a new form of modernity emerging in Japan. Efforts to control this unruly medium through censorship established that this was a medium centered on a new form of signification ―the image― that threatened to undermine established orders of knowledge and understanding. The Zigomar incident thus defined the course of the history of discourse on cinema in the 1910s as one delimited by the conflict between competing modernities: the modernity of the cinematic image and the modernity of its control.

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