Hiroshima Mon Amour: Toss those umbrellas aside, Hiroshima was all sun today!

October 2, 2015

I woke up at 3am and was disoriented but made myself fall back to sleep. My head hurt from being so hungry. I went down to breakfast at 8am and then headed out to downtown to visit my favorite thrift-clothing shop - Book Off. It was a perfectly sunny day after days and days of rain in North Carolina (hurricane expected there soon) and during the entire trip over here. A cool breeze felt divine as I walked and walked, over bridges and through parks with shrines, buddhas, green moss, magpies and more. This lovely umbrella used to belong to someone but it is now stuck in the grass alongside the river.....

It faces The Peace Memorial Museum across the river....

I immediately went to the Bank of Japan that withstood the atomic bomb and has since become a cultural center. I had a solo show there a couple years ago and will be there this October 6 for the opening of the Atomic Photographers Guild, of which I am a member. These umbrellas were bone dry in the entranceway.....

The current show at the Bank Building is Hiroshima Art Document and it was curated by Yukiko Ito - I hope to meet her while I am here, as I liked the show a lot. The artists are all Japanese and French. The first artist you see is Cecile Hartman, from Paris. She creates these tomb-like photographic graves of images from ground zero in Hiroshima and NYC/9/11 - I am not sure about combining these events - they are so drastically different time-wise, politically, culturally, historically specific, BUT I do like the presentation and the images and the gravity of the situations. Perhaps all bombings, all acts of severe aggression and destruction are ultimately linked, eternally fueled by Hiroshima?

Cecile happened to be there and we talked for a while but she asked me not to post the picture I took of her on the internet.

Down in the basement of the bank there are open vaults and safes, long hallways and mirrors, glow in the dark arrows and traces of history.....

These are A-bombed artifacts, fragments of the building on display in one of the rooms in a vitrine.

I love the white granite banisters and stairwells in this building. I have spent so much time in this one building since 2008. It is a very special place - owned by the city, run on a shoestring budget, int he center of town, half the rooms empty, the other half full of contemporary art, historical displays and childrens art.....

I really liked this piece by Jean-Luc Vilmouth - 3 clocks at the times of the disasters / crimes / tragedies in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima - mounted to a green chalkboard with concentric chalk rings....reminds me of Felix Gonzalez Torres

In one of the more stately rooms with the vitrine of artifacts is this half-repaired frame above a fireplace......so many marks of time and decay, repair and notes, archeological sandings.....

The main entrance to the bank.....

After the bombing and shoring it up, fixing it so it could be used as bank until 1992

One of the several courtyards in the bank building today

I have seen illuminated spinning projections in this room before but today is stands empty, forlorn...

another empty room - quite moving amidst an exhibition

providing pause for reflection and quiet

for an intense observation of surfaces and time's relentless markings

the basement has sky-lights that make it feel like you are in a pool that holds no water

only gravity and history and time and space and the absence of everything

This is a short film I made in the basement

These painted boxes on the heavy steel fortified basement doors made me think of Amy White's wood and Joy Drury Cox's grids and ordered projects

This is a view out of the 2nd story window of the bank - you can see the old German trolley still running and right behind the white spiral staircase that takes you up and down to the pedestrian bridge is my favorite thrift shop Book Off

The basement ceiling paint is cracking and peeling like skin

and I find emptiness and fullness everywhere

scratches circles marks remnants indentions embossed architecture

grooves glitches rust cracks

even the old windows breed modernism

reconstruction

a retrofitting with new and old technology

the windows cast jail cell bar shadows

lone nails carry the light weight of wire electrifying nothing

A detail from a historical display of Hiroshima then and now and all the years in between

Antoni Tapies marks on the bank floor

And the basement houses videos as part of the show - this one What About the Atomic Bomb by Hans van Houwelingen

The bank vaults, the safes that survived but kept no one safe, made in New York City once upon a time, stand open and empty and dark, deep chambers of horror and a deafening silence and thick echo, apertures, orifices, ocular lenses, telescoping portals

mouth masks, muzzles, speaker shield, guard rails, protective cage

doors to nowhere and everywhere

These two chairs make me remember Felix Gonzalez Torres and then Gray Swartzel

I was very bemused by these crazy videos by Judith Cahen and Masayasu Eguchi - I'll try to upload some videos here too

this building is scarred and bandaged

stripped and redefined

even the carpet houses shadows and dust

things are removed and kept

layers are revealed and coded

forgotten ghosts dangling

hammered tile, ripped paint

buckling emulsion

layers of skin

maps of archipelagos

maps of almost Japan

the siren phone

for some reason this stairwell in this light reminds me of Kurt Schwitters Merzbau

When I look at these before and after / then and now / the past and some point closer to now, I feel loss and a deep disappointment in "progress, growth"

from rubble to banks

Walking home I find my old friends - sad bear and lonely lion

the bench outside of the World Friendship Center

a lovely tarped wall of shadows

to watch these men perform a suspended washing of windows

is to be in suspense in the morning

and then to find these glowing blue statues of plastic

on the way home in ate afternoon

this broom is used to sweep off the memorial to Barbara Reynolds - the only American with a memorial in peace Park. She founded the World Friendship Center and claimed solidarity with the A-bomb survivors by saying, "I am a hibakusha".

I plan to make cynaotypes of these brooms - brooms used to sweep Peace Park, memorials

the lonely bulletin board outside of my room

I was transfixed by these orbital sanding marks, mirroring each other even though they are perpendicular to each other, one on the window trim/wall and the other on the window sill, concentric layers of paint, the covering up of history