We looked at Hitoshi Nomura's Moon Score (above) in my contemporary photo history class last year. While visually it is not the sort of thing that would typically grab my attention, conceptually the project is quite cool, and while clearing out the many image files on my laptop a few nights ago, I cam across it once again and was inspired to look up the rest of Nomura's body of work.
In Moon Score (1975-1979), Nomura photographed the moon on film marked with five lines (like staff paper). The project was supposedly inspired by Nomura spotting the moon moving behind telephone wires. In an early exhibition of the piece, visitors began to hum the "score", and later exhibitions featured a CD with a string quartet or chorus performing the score.
His early work, which could be likened in concept to the work of earthworks artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, discussed "invisible concepts, such as ‘gravity’ or ‘time'", using for example cardboard towers, which were left to such effects, and documented over time. This brand of thinking moved Nomura to begin looking to the skies, as well as the earth (specifically fossils), and his Moon Score came out of this observation of the patterns of the sun and moon across the sky.
His work, which takes on photographic and sculptural forms (often incorporating both), both displays the natural beauty of these processes of motion and time, but explores the concepts and their relation to humanity as well.
In May - July of this past year, Nomura (who is 64, boasting a 40 year career) had a retrospective at the National Art Center, Tokyo. Their write-up on it is quite good, however unfortunately it has no images of the exhibition or his work.
NATC Retrospective page
Review of the retrospective from the Japan Times
Some nice images of Nomura's work (be sure to click "see more artworks by this artist" as well)
images: artcourtgallery.com
source of Moon Score image unknown, but c. Hitoshi Nomura
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