Ancient memories and spirits

Our friend David Miller has a really wonderful interview with Hiroshi Sugimoto on the subject of spirituality in his on-line SFGate column "Finding My Religion" this week. Sugimoto divulges some amazing information about the travails and costs of creating his "Sea of Buddha" photograph in the interview, and makes clear his sense of not being a Buddhist artist, at least not in the sense of what Buddhism means to him in Japan. I loved Sugimoto's comment that in the process of doing the conceptual investigations that are his art process, he "sometimes stirs up ancient memories and spirits" (hence the title of this installment). Given the overall tone of the interview, he could've stopped with the "ancient memories" and been a logically consistent skeptic -- but he added the "spirits," whatever those are, into the mix.