the uselessness of labels, or: the mind's eye

Yesterday I went to see a fine exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Mind’s Eye: Photographs by Koichi Inakoshi, who passed away last February.

There is always something ghostly about photography, but this exhibition had the particularity of having been prepared when the photographer was still alive, which reinforced the eerie feeling as you moved through the chronologically ordered series and came to realize the contrast between his early inhabited cityscapes and the final natural landscapes, blurred and devoid of all human presence.

What struck me, however, as I was walking along the neat walls was that, apart from the sparse titles of the various series - from the first maybe, maybe (1971) to the the final never-seen-before China (2008) and basho-kei - the photographs had no captions (you had to refer to the catalogue to identify the various locations). I was reminded of a recent conversation with an artist friend, who confessed that one of the things that most upsets her is when visitors to her exhibitions focus their attention mainly on the captions, having only a cursory look at the works of art, or virtually disregarding them.

Likewise, Debussy didn't want his listeners to focus on the titles of some of his pieces, and deliberately placed them at the end of the programme, in the smallest type and in parenthesis, so that the work could be taken as music - not as something else...

And I thought this might be precisely why there were no captions under the exhibits yesterday. To encourage each viewer to judge for her/himself, by walking along, being responsive to the images and their worlds, imagi(ni)ng, establishing lines, continuities, differences. Following the "mind's eye", not some pre-arranged script. Refusing ready-made labels. Preferring the soft tentativeness and ambiguity of a "maybe, maybe" to the harshness of biased judgements and snap decisions.

I was thereby also reminded of the hallmark of the best, most powerful works of art: their ability to draw us to a unique world, to extend to us a subtle invitation that is much more than visual, requiring a total response. And, most important to me personally, a timely reminder that in life & love, as in art, labels and rigid scripts do more harm than good, and that there is nothing like an unencumbered intuition allowing information to freely, gradually flow to the "mind's eye" from all the senses, to paraphrase a dear poet.


Maybe, maybe...