INCHOATE THOUGHTS
January 1, 2010
“TARO SHINODA:
LUNAR REFLECTIONS”
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Boston, Massachusetts
November 5, 2009 – January 31, 2010
Japanese artist Taro Shinoda was in residence at the Gardner
Museum in 2007. Inspired by the nighttime fall of moonlight in the central
courtyard, he developed a work first shown at the Istanbul Biennale that fall, Lunar
Reflection Transmission Technique, in which images of the moon that he
captured in Tokyo and Istanbul using a home-made telescope and a video camera
were shown simultaneously.
Returning to the Gardner, Shinoda silvered
the walls of a darkened gallery. At one end hangs a projection screen, at the
other is a low platform for viewers. His purpose is to evoke a Japanese engawa—a vantage point between the
built environment and nature for the meditative viewing of a stylized Zen
garden. During a residency in Los Angeles in 2005, Shinoda built a mobile engawa that could be towed anywhere.
Any prospect seen from it could become an object of meditative contemplation.
The object of meditative viewing in the
Gardner is a circa 45 minute black-and-white video projected on the screen. The
camera never moves. A patch of light appears in the upper or lower left corner
of the dark screen and steadily expands across it, revealing itself as the face
of the moon, familiarly streaked and cratered. As its surface crosses the field
of vision of Shinoda’s camera telescope from left to right—so large as never to
be visible in its entirety—its light gently suffuses the silver-walled gallery.
An occasional scudding cloud partly obscures the continually shimmering lunar
terrain. The moon’s ethereal body passes steadily beyond the frame, diminishing
until the final sliver disappears, leaving darkness in its wake. Then a long
lens shot of an urban scene at night fades in. We make out the illuminated sign
of a hotel, or a rippling flag, a wind turbine, or a minaret. An airplane
lands, we glimpse car headlights on a distant road, a beacon flashes. These
different nocturnal city scenes, shown in turn between the various passages of
the moon, share one feature: the scintillation of electric lights, whether in
buildings, streets, or on runways.
The city fades out and the moon reappears.
Its passage across the screen is never twice the same. It seems overwhelmingly
close: close enough to promise intimacy, while the urban sites remain
forbiddingly remote, devoid of human presence, except when a person appears
diminuitively at a distant apartment window. Intertitles announce the cities in
turn: Tokyo, Istanbul, Limerick, Boston. The same moon glides at the same speed
and in the same direction, though at different angles, over each.
From our seat on the engawa we feel the world turn, prompted
by the ceaseless progress of a moon casting its cold light on the cities of the
earth. Few of us who live in cities know, on any given day, whether the moon is
waning, new, waxing, or full. We rarely witness the moonrise. Yet if we take
the trouble to do so, we, like Shinoda, might feel its gravitational strength
provide a unifying experience to humankind.