HIPPIE MEDIUM

By J. Hoberman

IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO THINK OF Andy Warhol when pondering Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination, 1968–69, currently tucked away in the Museum of Modern Art’s new Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, albeit originally installed in the Ginza discotheque Killer Joe, where the ceilings, walls, and pistonlike pillars were covered with silver vinyl. During the brief period I served on the board of advisers to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh before its 1994 opening, a colleague who had been close to the artist suggested that the institution really should be configured as a discotheque (“Andy would have loved that!”). There was a silence while the staff held their breath, before the notion was deemed a joke and the board moved on to other things. The idea of the museum as a space for fun and games was then beyond outlandish; the Instagram-friendly process that critic Ben Davis has somewhat unfairly called Kusamafication was years in the future.

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, Cinematic Illumination, 1968–69, eighteen slide projections (1,350 black-and-white slides, sound, 114 minutes 45 seconds), 108 color gels, disco ball. Installation view, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020. Photo: Robert Gerhardt.

Based on a 2017 reconstruction at the Tokyo Photo-graphic Art Museum (and organized for MoMA by Sophie Cavoulacos), Cinematic Illumination consists of eighteen slide projectors clustered in a sort of overhead space station, each one beaming out seventy-five images onto screens arranged in a cycloramic, 360-degree circle. Geometric forms whirl past, as well as cars, manga pages, blurry street scenes, the face of Marilyn Monroe, and various bodies, sometimes in silhouette, sometimes seemingly pressed against the wall by centrifugal force...READ MORE