The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now
SFMOMA: November 8, 2008 – February 8, 2009
Raji Pandya and Alfred Wallace wearing Lygia Clark's goggles from 1968 ("Dialogo: Oculos")
I have given SFMOMA’s interactive show “The Art of Participation” which runs through February 8, a few chances to wow me and it hasn’t. I’ve seen a lot of this art before and its presentation here does not seem very innovative. I have been amazed at how kids respond though–their enthusiasm with being able to explore art in a zone that is normally off-limits to touch is contagious. The purpose of the show is to glance back at 60 years of contemporary art genres and to examine participatory art, looking at situations where viewers have become collaborators in the art-making process. In many cases this is a complex relationship and at some point along the way, some of art objects have become secondary to our interaction with them. We see also see that while the current generation of artists may use new technologies, the antecedents for their strategies are here. The show is presented thematically and includes over 70 works by artists such as John Cage, Hans Hacke, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tom Marioni, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. SFMOMA’s Rudolph Frieling is the curator.
Participatory art is art that requires the collaboration or participation of the viewer to be complete. Its principles rest in a seminal and radical essay, “The Art-work of the Future,” written in 1849-50, by German composer Richard Wagner, just after the failure of the 1848 revolution. Wagner’s translates that movement’s failed political aims to aesthetics. He advocates for gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork which requires that artists put aside their elitist orientations and reach out to the people with works that create a collective experience. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian futurists and Zurich Dadaists embraced aspects of this, followed by the Surrealists, the Russian avant garde, John Cage in 1952, the Fluxus movement, and artists’ collectives and the happenings and performances of the 1960’s.
Emma Scott, Alfred Wallace and Raji Pandya with Raphael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Microphones” (2008).
Since the show’s start date is 1950, John Cage’s score 4’33” (1952) is the pivotal anchor piece. This musical composition of silence lasting four minutes and 33 seconds inspired countless artists to incorporate chance into their artworks. Cage called it the absence of intentional sound, making music a process of discovery rather than forced communication. The piece is played daily in the SFMOMA gallery. What emerges in the silence is a symphony of random ambient noise coming from the environment and the audience which actually become the instruments.
In 1969, Hans Haacke’s “News” conceptually opened up a Düsseldorf kunsthalle to communication from the outside world and raised issues of public access to information by bringing in a live news-spewing telex. The work is recreated at SFMOMA with a dot matrix printer. A growing live sculpture emerges from an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feed that spills onto the museum floor, giving form to a constant stream of processed and discarded information. In its current context, it seems an archaic relic, unable to access and process the barrage of information enabled by newer forms of communication. As a journalist who encountered these old wire-service teletypes in the former East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, I this piece provocative on many levels.
Matthias Gommel’s “Delayed” is an experiment with dialogue that greets visitors as they get off the elevator and enter the 4th floor galleries. There are two sets of headphones and microphones suspended from the ceiling and it requires two people to participate. The communication is delayed so that a normal conversation becomes impossible due to continuous interruptions by previous sequences. You can watch people doing this but actually donning the phones and trying it is where the fun begins.
Rafael Lorenzo-Hemmer’s “Microphones” (2008) relies on vocal input and then recreates it, playing back previous recordings of audience utterances. When I went with my friend Alfia, and her children, we had a blast crooning to each other and quickly encouraged another group to join us, completing the circle of microphones, blending our voices with each others and with those archived. In fact, throughout the galleries, I noticed people communicating more actively with each other and with strangers.
Francis Alÿs (in collaboration with Rafael Ortega), Re-enactments (video still), 2001; two-channel color video installation with sound, 5:20 min., dimensions variable; courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York; photo: courtesy the artist; © 2008 Francis Alÿs
Lygia Clark’s “Dialogo: Oculos” (Dialogue: Goggles) from 1968 is a pair of modified diving goggles which bind two people very closely together as they look at each other through mirrors that fragment and distort their vision. Clark’s “Rede de Elastico” (Elastic Net) 1973 is a huge net of elastic formed from elastic bands that the viewers are asked to weave in to the existing web. It harkens back to days of macramé. While attractive as a proposition, most people I watched did not engage with this piece ,which is part of the hit or miss nature of the show.
The way in which the exhibition addreses the web as an evolving participatory system is unengaging compared to the rest of the exhibition. I found it harder to immerse myself in computer displays and concentrate than with the other media. As I passed by several computer monitors displaying websites that hailed the early days of net acitivism and participation-based strategies, instead of clicking around, I made a mental note–been there, done that–and moved on. In the good-old-days, the emphasis was on being part of a network where one could find tactical allies and ideological engagement. Now, we are so comfortable with the maintream ebay, YouTube,Facebook ,and Skype that we are almost numb to the Internet’s’s activist roots. A stronger linkage to critical Internet culture and media activism linked to the develpoment of Web 2.0 would have helped me focus more.
The exhibition also includes video documentation of past performances both in and outside of a museum setting that required audience participation. I was riveted by Yoko One’s “Cut Piece” performance from 1965 at Carnegie Hall which shows alongside a 2003 re-creation at Théâtre le Ranelagh, Paris. In both renditions, Ono sits as audience members come forward with scissors and cut off pieces of her clothes and underwear until she is completely nude. Some entered the exchange by cutting while others entered as voyeurs. The tension is palpable in the 1965 work as Ono’s vulnerability and discomfort surge in response to various cuts. Ono’s contribution to the Fluxus movement with her performance and concerts that relied on the public’s input to determine the content is well-known.
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole-in-Space (photographic documentation), 1980; live two-way telecommunication event between New York and Los Angeles; courtesy the artists; photo: courtesy Sherrie Rabinowitz; © 2008 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz
Francis Alÿs’ “Re-enactments” (2001) seemed to mesmerize people. The work, shot by Raphael Ortega, shows two separate videos by the Belgian artist Alÿs and addresses the context and broad politics of participation. In both enactments, Alÿs purchases a 9mm loaded Beretta pistol in a Mexico City shop and then carries it at his side through the streets. The first footage trails Alÿs; while the second performance focuses on the people on the street who become hip to potential danger and alert the police who ultimately arrest Alÿs.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Life² (screenshot), 2006–present; online project, dimensions variable; collection of the artist; image capture: Jeff Aldrich, courtesy Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, bitforms gallery, New York; © 2008 Lynn Hershman Leeson
In both cases Alÿs provoked the direct intervention of the police but for the second re-enactment, he enlisted them as willing partners in the enactment of his arrest. Various levels of participation between artist and passersby are required to complete the work.
A number of works address location and the notion of site-specific. A large-scale media installation by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz from 1980 shows their “Hole In Space” live telecommunication event which linked pedestrians at Lincoln Center in New York with those at the Broadway department store at Century City, Los Angeles. Quite novel in its day, the project offered a window on another world but the artists offered no explanations about the large televised images which were visible for two hours per day in both locations. The duo is now exploiting satellite technology for the same purposes.
When I visited the show just before Christmas, I watched a seven year old boy named Sasha engrossed in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s virtual reality exploration, “Life2.” The original version of the work “The Dante Hotel,” (1973-74) proposed that visitors experience a fictional world in real time and space by actually visiting a residential hotel in San Francisco’s North Beach district, checking out a key and entering the room that was staged with remnants of its occupants. When Leeson created this thirty-five years ago, it was groundbreaking as a site-specific public art installation. For this computerized reanimated version, Leeson teamed up with the Stanford Humanities Lab and Metamedia Lab to reconfigure her work as an online immersive experience. The result is enthralling–an avatar chase through endless virtual corridors of The Dante Hotel.
The show also includes Tom Marioni’s “The Art of Drinking beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art,” (1970-2008) a free beer salon, which recasts social gathering as art. The salon was part of an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and is in the museum’s permanent collection. Beer is served on a drop-in basis every Thursday evening from 5 to 7 p.m. Geneva Anderson
Martin Puryear
SFMOMA, November 8, 2008 – January 25, 2009
Martin Puryear, Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 1996; Ash and maple, 36’ x 22 ¾” x 3” (10.97 m x 57.8 cm x 7.6 cm); width narrows to 1 ¼” (3.2 cm) at the top; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Gift of Ruth Carter Stevenson, by exchange; © 2007 Martin Puryear; Photo by David Wharton
Retrospective exhibitions often leave me feeling unsatisfied. When large time intervals are involved, it can be difficult to get a feel for the context in which early artworks were created and exhibited and thus to comprehend their full significance. The Martin Puryear retrospective at SFMOMA, the first major survey of his work in 15 years, is a thoroughly satisfying overview of Puryear’s work to date. SFMOMA has installed the show thoughtfully and all the viewer needs to bring along is childlike imagination and the ability to free-associate. The exhibition features 47 sculptures that chart Puryear’s artistic development over the last 30 years, from his first solo show in 1977 to the present. The exhibition was organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, and locally overseen by Alison Gass, assistant curator of painting and sculpture, SFMOMA.
Puryear, 67, is an acclaimed Washington D.C.-born sculptor, who began his artistic career in the late 1960’s alongside a number of post-minimalist artists such as Richard Serra. He currently lives and works in upstate New York. While Puryear has a prolific exhibition history, his primary exposure on the West Coast has been in Los Angeles where his work was frequently shown in galleries there in the mid-1980’s. A piece of his was shown in 2000 in the SFMOMA exhibition “Highlights of the Anderson Collection” and he had a solo show in 2005 at the San Jose Museum of Art. He has also created a number of notable public art works. His 45 foot tall, “That Profile,” was commissioned for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Martin Puryear, Untitled, 1981-82; Painted ponderosa pine, 58” (147.3 cm) diam., 9 3/8” (23.8 cm) deep; Private collection, Atherton, California; © 2007 Martin Puryear
Puryear’s childhood interest in how things work, and why they have the form they do, led him to explore woodworking and other manual crafts, which he later honed as his sculptural techniques. He makes most of his sculptures from wood that he coaxes into a variety of shapes and forms, as well as from unconventional materials such as tar, wire, webbed mesh, rattan and rawhide and found objects. He has lived and traveled all over the world and has deep appreciation for the meticulous process of crafting objects by hand himself.
The SFMOMA exhibition follows a rough chronological order but starts with two newer pieces in the museum’s high atrium with “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” (1996). The thirty-six foot long ladder is made from a single sapling which Puryear split down the middle and joined with rungs. The ladder does not actually touch the floor, but stops inches short, suspended from high. As we glance upwards, it winds upward, narrowing at the top to a mere 1 ¼ inch in width, taking the overall appearance of something from a fairy-tale, like the magical ladder from Jack in the Beanstalk, except that ladder is rooted in the earth. It evokes all sorts of connotations. When I attended the press opening in November, the day after our historical Presidential election, I could not help but think of President-elect Barak Obama’s ascension from humble origins to the pinnacle of power.
Also situated in the atrium is the newest and largest piece in the show… the 63-feet tall “Ad Astra” (2007), which suggests a primitive catapult that stands ready to launch. The contraption is supported at its base by a pair of huge wagon wheels and a giant wooden block that has been finished to suggest a weighty boulder. Much like “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” the work has a strong primitivism to it. Its long tapered arm is formed from a 58 foot long ash sapling that has been further elongated by an additional narrow limb that tapers to a twig suggesting a reach that is tenuous, fragile, at its uppermost limit.
Martin Puryear, Confessional, 1996-2000; Wire mesh, tar, and various woods, 6’ 5 7/8” x 8’ 1 ¾” x 45” (197.8 x 247 x 114.3 cm); Cartin Collection, courtesy Donald Young Gallery; Chicago; © 2007 Martin Puryear; Image courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Upstairs, beginning with his early works, we see an attentive collaboration between Puryear and his chosen material–frequently wood– and the emergence of shapes that present themselves in his mature work. From 1978 to 1985, Puryear created a series of circular forms that he mounted on the wall. He would slowly bend the wood into a rough circular form–working straight pieces of wood into rings without snapping them by using green branches that still had flexibility. This respect for the life force in the wood, rather than domination, is evident in all of his work. In the catalogue, it is mentioned that Puryear intended these circular objects to occupy the same space as paintings do-paintings without centers, paintings that exist on the periphery.
Martin Puryear, Old Mole, 1985; Red cedar, 61 x 61 x 34” (154.9 x 154.9 x 86.4 cm); Philadelphia Museum of Art; Purchased with gifts (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, and Mr. and Mrs. Charles C.G. Chaplin and with funds contributed by Marion Boulton Stroud, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kardon, Gisela and Dennis Alter, and Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd; © 2007 Martin Puryear; Image courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Many of Puryear’s works from the 1980’s suggest a poetic exploration of material, of life force and increasing associations to animal forms. He explores the idea of translucency in wood as a sculptural surface and then in materials that are not wood, such as wire mesh. He crafts forms that frequently explore contradictions such as the play of interior and exterior form or geometric precision and organic irregularity.
“Old Mole” (1985) is a 5 by 5 foot woven wooden form that invites free association—it reminds us of a burrowing animal, like a mole, or maybe a bird head or even an upside down quotation mark. Comprised of slats of red cedar, carefully wrapped and woven, it could also be a container for something, or a shell that has been discarded.
“Sharp and Flat” (1987) is large maple, pear and cedar block with a long neck that is both animal-like and resembles a crude handle. The overall impression is geometric with slightly rounded sloping curves. It is constructed of several flat pine boards that have been finished and joined so expertly that they appear as a single solid mass. Despite its implied heaviness, the piece seems to be imbued with forward movement.
Puryear’s symbolism grew more complex in the 1990’s. He reconsidered elements from earlier pieces and his work began to embody multiple paradoxes related to shape and intention. “Dumb Luck” (1990) looks like a conventional padlock but it is not clear what its purpose might be. Formed of wood and wire mesh that has been painted with tar, giving it a very tactile surface, the piece is bulky at roughly 5 x 8 x 3 feet with a solid base. Unexpectedly, you can see through the mesh, but the transparency does not resolve the mystery of what is meant to lie inside, creating unresolved tension about who or what is being protected from and how.
Martin Puryear, C.F.A.O., 2006-7; Painted and unpainted pine and found wheelbarrow, 8' 4 3/4" x 6' 5 1/2" x 61" (255.9 x 196.9 x 154.9 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Sid Bass, Leon D. Black, Donald L. Bryant, Jr., Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Agnes Gund, Mimi Haas, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Donald B. Marron and Jerry Speyer on behalf of the Committee on Painting and Sculpture in honor of John Elderfield; © 2007 Martin Puryear; Photo Richard P. Goodbody
There is also a sense of potential motion that might occur at a snail’s pace. The title is confusing: “dumb” signifies silence but how does it relate to “luck”? “Dowager” (1990), is another tarred mesh-covered work, amorphous and upright, evoking connotations of a birka-clad woman. Is this an edited version of “Dumb Luck” ?
“Confessional” (1996-2000) is a third tarred mesh-covered work, that has a contour line very similar to one Puryear explored in “M. Bastion Boulevard” (1978-79), which he created for the 1979 Whitney Biennial. That work was a simple bent loop drawn with hickory saplings and Alaskan yellow cedar that could be read frontally as a loop or aerially as a kind of corral. “Confessional” invites a multitude of readings as well. The title suggests the idea of sacred and secret interior space with allusions to the Catholic confessional. The piece appears to have double wooden doors but there are no hinges and there are holes in unexpected places. A rectangular wooden block invites the viewer to step up. From another angle, the work crudely resembles a head. This kind of ambiguity and conceptual push-pull is Puryear’s chosen vocabulary-each work is a mix of overlapping cultural references and forms, leaving us unsure of his intent. According to Puryear, his individual works cannot be connected to a single meaning, idea, history, culture or influence-he is constantly reworking and reconsidering. He offers the viewer the same open-ended engagement he gets in creating them.
Puryear’s newer work, from 2000 onwards, is represented in 9 pieces which are deeply allegorical. C.F.A.O. (2006-7) resembles a mask. The piece incorporates an enlarged impression of an actual Fang ritual mask from Gabon, West Africa, which has been surrounded by a thicket of pine scaffolding and rests atop an old wheelbarrow. The mask is a heart-shaped face with a long nose and has been painted white. If you were to grasp the handles of the wheelbarrow, you would be donning the mask and essentially peering outward through very tiny eyeholes through the thicket. C.F.A.O. is a reference to the Compagnie Francaise de L’Afrique Occidentale, a 19th century trading company that linked Marseille and West Africa through ports in Sierra Leone. After college, Puryear joined the Peace Crops and spent time teaching in the town of Segbwema, Sierra Leone. Immersed in African culture, he was able to exchange ideas with local artisans and was very impressed with their ingenuity. Much later, in 1993, Puryear spent six months in Sache, France, at the former studio of Alexander Calder and on the grounds, he found the wooden wheelbarrow. The piece is imbued with the mysticism of secret societies and rituals and acknowledges the traditions of colonialism that link France and West Africa.
In all, Puryear keeps stretching, distilling and tinkering with the forms he embraced in the 1970’s. The question is offered again and again to himself and to the viewer…. what shape would you be if you could take on any shape?
The exhibition began its tour at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in November 2007 and traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and concludes at SFMOMA.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Martin Puryear, that includes an excellent interview by Richard J. Powell of Duke University.
Geneva J. Anderson
Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
Asian Art Museum, October 24, 2008 – January 25, 2009
Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970
de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 24, 2008 – January 18, 2009
Tseng Yuho (b. 1925, Beijing), Western Frontier for Golden West Savings and Loan Association, San Francisco (detail), 1964. Nine-section mural of multi-paneled sections; palladium and gold leaf, handmade paper, tapa cloth and acrylic paint mounted to pegboard masonite. 114 in (height) Wachovia Bank.
Now in my late forties-yikes!, I am old enough to remember that when I started school, forty-odd years ago, we did not know or use the term Asian American. Instead, there were Orientals, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and other ethnic groups whose lives and experiences were not emphasized as an integral part of the fabric of America. The phrase Asian American was coined in Berkley in 1968 and was adopted gradually, in an awkward transition to a mind-set that considered and later came to honor diversity and cultural awareness in America. “Asian/American/Modern: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970” reflects on the vital and unrecognized contribution of Asian American artists to America modern art and should serve as catalyst for further scholarship. The show presents nearly 100 works of art by over 70 artists of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Korean ancestry and is co-curated by Daniell Cornell, deputy director, Palm Springs Museum of Art, and Mark Johnson, professor of art, San Francisco State University. The project emerged as a collaboration between the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Stanford University’s Asian-American Art Project, and San Francisco State University. While this is one of the de Young’s most important exhibitions to date, due to its complex subject matter, it has not received the critical attention that it deserves.
Rather than defining an aesthetic of Asian American art, the exhibition highlights the diversity of expression that emerged from major artists such as Chiura Obata, Yun Gee, Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik and Carlos Villa and in artistic working groups such as Japanese camera clubs and from artists who were previously ignored or unknown. While several thematic areas are explored that flush out stylistic influences, the two major areas of emphasis are the modernist matrix of the early twentieth century and the post-WWII era. The term “shifting currents” in the context of the conventional categories of “American” and “Modern” art suggests the need to include and further explore this rich legacy.
The exhibition also points to the pivotal role of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco in developing the careers of Asian American artists. Beginning in the late 1920’s and continuing through each subsequent decade, the de Young has hosted several important exhibitions of artists of Asian ancestry. Tseng Yuho had solo shows in 1947 and 1952, and Ruth Asawa and Gary Woo had solo shows in 1960. More recently, there have been exhibitions for Chiura Obata (2001), Ruth Asawa (2006), and the current “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes.”
A new style with many influences
The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the incredible energy, manifestos and organizing activities of the 1920’s and 30’s undertaken by Asian American artists which were sometimes embraced but often misunderstood by the mainstream American art establishment. Chee Chin S. Cheung Lee’s “Mountain Fantasy,” (1933), is a lush California landscape of a small nude woman peering up at a waterfall gushing down a cliff face comprised entirely of nude figures. It was first exhibited at the de Young in 1935 in conjunction with an exhibition of the Chinese Art Association. The original review of the show lamented that the Chinese had thrown away the lessons of Sung Dynasty (China’s third golden age) and were mimicking Western art. “There was this idea that people had to paint one way or another,” says Mark Dean Johnson. “Lee is really painting the living qi of the earth, the dragon vein, but in a Western style,” says Johnson.
Chiura Obata’s “Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley,” (1925) is experiencing a homecoming: it was first exhibited 84 years ago at the Legion of Honor in 1925.
Chiura Obata (b. 1885, Okayama, Japan–d. 1975, Berkeley, CA) Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley, ca. 1925.
The silk scroll pulses with a turbulent firestorm of vivid orange rays and exemplifies Obata’s ability to depict nature as powerful enough and universal enough to contain and subdue man’s divisiveness. When Obata came to California as a teenager, he had been schooled in nihonga, a blend of traditionally Japanese and late-19th century European modernist painting. “No matter where he was,” writes critic Jerome Tarshis “he subordinated the topography of the Far West and the American ideal of expansiveness to conventions rooted in animism and Buddhism. Consciously bridging two cultures, he depicted stylized, at times phantasmagoric landscapes that bear comparison with the finest painting done in American between the wars.” (Art in America, 4.2001) By the early 1930’s, Obata had become a leading cultural figure in Northern California, a respected teacher at UC Berkeley and after the war, working from behind the barbed wire fence, he turned his powerful expression to documenting the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Yun Gee (b. 1906, Kaiping, Guangdong, China–d. 1963, New York, NY) Where is My Mother; 1926–1927. Oil on canvas. 20 1/8 x 16 in. Credit line: Estate of Yun Gee, Courtesy of Li-Ian.
Yun Gee’s “Where is My Mother” (1926-27) clearly shows a cubist influence and a mastery of bold color that resonates with the high emotional tension that accompanies leaving loved ones behind to pursue one’s dreams. Gee, Chinese, is one of the best-known Asian American artists. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, he was celebrated in San Francisco in the 1920’s and went on to form the groundbreaking Chinese Revolutionary Artists Club and the radical Modern Gallery.
Japanese camera clubs flourish on West Coast
Throughout the period before WWII, artists of Asian ancestry grouped themselves together intentionally and formed clubs and art associations to exhibit and promote their work. Japanese camera clubs, all over the West Coast, thrived and Japanese-American photographers, created highly innovative photographs that were integral to the emerging modernist photography movement, which had similarities with the European avant-garde photography. “Although many of these photographers stressed the pictorial quality of their work,” said co-curator Mark Johnson, “there were strong and very interesting elements of abstraction evident too.” Shigemi Uyeda’s “Reflections on the Oil Ditch” (1924) shows simple pools of water that have formed after a rain storm, a very elegant and abstract rendering of a natural phenomenon with a reference to machine-age production with its repetition of shapes and reflection of an oil derrick. Asahaci Kono’s “Perpetual Motion” captures motion abstractly and innovatively with light spirals, spinning and receding like coils, strongly referencing the spiral forms that appear in Man Ray’s Rayographs.
War takes its toll
The developing tensions in Asia which led to WWII, broke apart the integrity of the art associations and groups that had formed and ushered in a new era. Many things changed after WWII-Asians were relocated, interned, discriminated against, and trust was shattered. Several works in the exhibition testify to artists’ responses to their isolation and incarceration. Obata’s work from this period was given an exhibition at the de Young in 2001 but an untitled painting (c. 1943) by George Matsusaburo Hibi, that captures the stark and depressing isolation of winter at an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, is displayed at the de Young for the first time.
Along with themes of urban life, industrialization and abstraction, artists of Asian ancestry also addressed the Cold War and conflicts in Asia, such as preparation for the Vietnam War.
George Miyasaki (b. 1935, Kalopa, Hawaii–lives in Berkeley, CA) The Flying Machine, 1961. Color lithograph. 86.2 x 58 cm (image), 91.8 x 66 cm (sheet). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Professor George Miyasaki’s lithograph “The Flying Machines,” (1961), executed in dark gritty shades of khaki and green, is an abstract piece that reflects darkly on the militarization of Laos and Vietnam.
Re-writing Abstraction
When curator Daniell Cornell began researching for this exhibition, he found that art historians had not examined or credited the important contributions of several Asian American artists to the thread of American modernism, particularly abstraction. Asian American artists contributed directly to American abstraction through their own stylistic influences and use of narratives that broached cultures suggesting a much more international dialogue than previously thought. “I had been taught in all my art history courses that abstraction was invented in NY by Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner,” said Cornell, “but they had actually looked at work of Asian influence and appropriated that kind of gestural marking but given it an American identity…. There is a line that goes back historically and that line needs these works by artists from Japan, China, the Philippines, Korea in order to tell the true story of abstraction. That story is one of fusion.”
Cornell is referring largely to Alfonso Ossorio, an artist of Filipino, Hispanic and Chinese heritage, who studied at Harvard and did his graduate work at R.I.S.D. (Rhode Island School of Design). Two Ossorio works are on display– “Martyrs and Spectators” (1951) and “Beachcomber” (1953) and both are critically important, and under-rated, in the history of American abstraction. “Martyrs and Spectators” combines a gestural line that is often attributed to Pollack, elements of Debuffet’s Art Brut, and Ossorio’s own personal take on Catholicism. “Beachcomber,” his masterwork large mural, contains densely layered webs of interlocking fragments and biomorphic forms that have overshadowed a central reclining female form and seem to suggest something like Miro. Ossorio and Jackson Pollack were great friends, became highly interested in each other’s work, and they inspired each other but it was Pollock who received exponentially more attention. One of the unexplored premises of the show is that artists of Asian descent have not been adequately credited and some re-calibrating needs to follow.
Why did the story get lost in the first place? “I could guess,” said Cornell, “that it has a lot to do with dealers and the art market in New York which was trying to establish itself as the center and to define what modern/contemporary art was. A lot of these artists were on the West Coast and were not New York centric. Their entrance to the US came through the West Coast and that was something out of the East Coast purview.
Cultural identity
Carlos Villa is an artist whose ground-breaking work almost defies categorization and as such he represents and transcends the designation Asian/American/Modern. Now 72, he is a first generation Filipino American, born to immigrant parents in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. After his return from service in the Korean War, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts and began exhibiting his abstract expressionist paintings in the late 1950’s within the milieu of the flourishing beat movement. He moved to NY in 1961, where his work took a more reductive turn and when he returned to San Francisco in the late 1960’s, he was consciously developing an iconography that explored his cultural identity. “Tat2” (1969) is based on a photographic portrait of Villa, that was copied on an Itek copy machine. With a felt-tip marker, Villa drew successive curvilinear lines over it giving it a Maori look and linking his identity to the indigenous cultures of the Philippines and to other islanders.
Carlos Villa (b. 1936, San Francisco, CA–lives in San Francisco, CA) Painted Cloak, 1970–71. Painted
His spectacular Painted Cloak (1970-71) is one a series of elaborate cloaks he created in the 1960’s-a vibrantly painted feathered celebration of his existence. “This show is so important because it affirms to the younger generation that they are coming from something substantial,” explained Villa. “A lot of the kids that were in my generation were forbidden to think about think about art as a profession: it could be a hobby but fine art was not in the purview of a Filipino household. This exhibition shows what we have done.”
The exceptional mural “Western Frontier” (1964) by Tseng Yuho that originally hung in the San Francisco headquarters of Golden West Savings is on exhibition and featured as the cover image for the catalog. Comprised of nine giant panels, the work pays homage to Northern California’s beloved redwoods abstracted in rich hues of golden brown and richly textures with layers of handmade paper and natural fibers and overlaid with gold leaf and silver palladium leaf. The work is stylistically reminiscent of Gustav Klimt and its layering is evocative of joss paper which has numerous ritual applications in various Asian cultures.
While the de Young exhibition gives a historical grounding and cuts off at 1970, it has also been organized with community partners throughout the Bay Area who are showing contemporary Asian American art.
The show travels next to The Noguchi Museum, February 18, 2009 to August 23, 2009. Geneva J. Anderson
Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes
de Young Museum, October 25 – January 18, 2009
Maya Lin, 2 X 4 Landscape, 2006. Wood. 36’ x 53’ x 10’. Courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein. Photo by Colleen Chartier.
“Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” at De Young Museum, closes next weekend and while not all the pieces are hits; the show is definitely worth seeing. Maya Lin is the architect who 25 years ago, as a Yale undergraduate, was catapulted to fame with her inspirational design for the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. Her high-profile career has since embraced both public and private commissions of architecture and art all over the world. While she has always been deeply interested in nature, Lin has recently turned her attention to the fragile and endangered state of our planet. “Systematic Landscapes” presents her recent studio work-a series of installations and three-dimensional works based on computer-generated renderings of landscape elements. Lin is committed to getting people to look closely at the landscape but from another angle. She is building nature from her point of view, focusing on what lies beneath the surface. The show is curated by Richard Andrews, director of Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, where the exhibit originated.
The show opens with a gaping guffah. The pivotal piece, “2 x 4 Landscape,” comprised of 50,000 pieces of 2 x 4’s cut at different lengths and standing on their ends in a kind of staggering mound, is severely diminished by its placement in the Wilsey Court, directly under the Gerard Richter work. The two enormous optical goliaths fight each other for our attention, which steals the thunder of both. The piece is also installed in a corner which means that it can’t be viewed from all angles which is critical to experiencing this artwork. Taken as litmus test for the new de Young which, finally, is large enough to accommodate such grand and monumental works, the piece should have been installed elsewhere. That aside, there is something magnetic about the pixilated softness of this sprawling organic wooden form. This is Lin at her finest….she presents a very simple concept-that anyone can read anything into— that is both soaring and transcendent and at 30 tons, materially grounded.
Moving into the galleries, the next big work, “Blue Lake Pass,” is made of roughly two dozen 3 foot square blocks of particleboard sheets sandwiched together in vertical slices. Their tops are rendered in undulating curves referencing/mimicking the topographic line of the mountain range near Lin’s home in Colorado. These blocks stand waist to chest high and are arranged in a narrow grid through which the viewer can walk. The experience evoked a sense of discomfort in me, as attracted as I was to the sensuality of the dune-like tops which give a false sense of lightness to the piece.
Maya Lin, Blue Lake Pass, 2006. Duraflake particleboard. 20 blocks, 3’ x 3’ each; 5’ 8” x 17’ 6” x 22’ 5” overall. Courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein. Photo by Colleen Chartier.
Once inside, I felt pressed and uncomfortable navigating the weighty solid masses beneath. All of the artworks in the show went through basically the same design process—Lin created a 3-D model in her studio by hand, then fed that into a computer to get a large-scale model, tweaked that to get the aesthetic representation she wanted and then built the works by hand again for the exhibition. The engineering of these pieces is very complex and reveals Lin’s nuanced position between art, engineering and science. Lin uses technology-sonar bathymetric mapping, satellite and aerial photography and other tools—- to probe and interpret the form of the natural world. She then creates works that re-interpret the natural landscape as sculptural forms. Referring to the other exhibtion at the de Young, “Asian/American/Modern Art…,” Lin said “I really enjoyed wlaking through that show and it struck me in looking at the landscape art, that we are all looking at the land but I am doing so through the lends of new technologies, not just my eyes. There was this quote there on the wall about translating nature into the sublime but for me it;s with this layer of science. I love science.”
“Waterline” (2006), an elegant underwater topography, is one of the most powerful pieces in the show—it successfully fills the small gallery in which it is placed. It refers to an actual underwater volcanic mountain called Bouvet Mountain, which is situated at the nexus of three-mid ocean ridges near Norway. The piece is a network of aluminum tubing painted black, suspended over the viewer’s head and emerging out of the walls and at the same time evokes the simplicity of a meandering line. Lin’s asks the viewer to reconsider the way waterlines emerge, not from the usual orientation of the break between water and air, but from beneath the earth’s surface where the water is sitting on the earth that contains it. Artwise, I cut my teeth in Eastern and Central Europe, writing about art in the early 1990’s, during the transition from socialism. I saw a lot of this type of very simple and elegant work there and am particularly reminded of Polish artist Ludwika Ogorzelec who has been exploring the power of the line to define and create volume for decades.
Maya Lin, Water Line, 2006, Aluminum tubing and paint. 19' x 34' 8" x 29' 2". Photo by Colleen Chartier.
“Waterline” also inspired “Where the Land Meets the Sea,” Lin’s landscape for the West Terrace of the California Academy of Sciences and the first permanent artwork by Maya Lin in San Francisco. The sculpture represents the topography between Angel Island and the Golden Gate Bridge and is the third in a series of large wire sculptures. It was inaugurated at the Academy on October 24th, when “Systematic Landscapes” opened across the concourse. Fabricated from 5/8 inch marine grade stainless steel, the 36′ x 60′ x 15′ piece seems to float in the air, flowing seamlessly like a line from the Renzo Piano building. In actuality, the piece is engineered to the hilt, supported by six columns and suspended by nine steel cables from building’s solar roof canopy. To make the hills and valleys of the terrain more visible, the actual scale of the landscape is exaggerated by five times above the sea level and about ten times below. The evolution of this piece is revealed at the de Young where its models are on display
“Bodies of Water” (2006) is a series of Baltic birch plywood pieces that are topographic representations of the basins of the Caspian, the Red and Black seas, environments all endangered critically by man’s activities. The viewer is directed to what lies beneath the surface, where the damage that is irrevocably altering these once robust ecosystems is occurring. Elevated on pedestals so the viewer confronts them head-on, and balanced on their deepest point, these elegant works, exert a magnetic pull. They are also familiar. I am reminded of a year I spent before graduate school working for British Petroleum where similar-looking sea-bed models were derived from sonar-based technology with an eye to pinpointing oil reserves. Formed from stacking successive layers of thinly sliced wood, Lin has tweaked her model by “pulling layers out” to emphasize certain effects–the depth of the sea has been increased relative to the surface area. “Just like a topographic map, it’s an exaggerated reality and in the end, I pulled out what needed to be emphasized,” explained Lin. “I am not trying to re-create exactly because then, I could just join a science fair. What I am trying to do is to get you to think about what is below the surface that which is going to disappear that we will never know because we have taken out its habitat.” Despite all the technology behind these built landscapes, what sets these works apart is their ability to take us into our deepest feeling about the natural world.
“Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes” will travel next to Washington D.C.’s Corchoran Gallery of Art, April -July 20009. Geneva J. Anderson
The State Museums of Berlin and the Legacy of James Simon
Legion of Honor, October 18, 2008 – January 18, 2009
Restored Lion Relief from the Processional Way in Babylon, Neo-Babylonian, King Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 B.C.), 6th century B.C., Colored, glazed clay bricks, H 91 x W 232 x thickness 9.1 cm., Gift of James Simon, Museum of the Ancient Near East, Berlin
Now in its final two weeks at the Legion of Honor, The State Museums of Berlin and The Legacy of James Simon offers a glimpse into an unparalleled art collection built in a bygone era. Industrialist, philanthropist and collector James Simon, (1851-1932) who was Jewish and a patriotic German, died one year before Adolph Hitler came to power but his remarkable legacy lives on in the art he gave to Berlin before the Nazis seized power. From literally thousands of treasures Simon bequeathed, roughly 140 artworks from nine Berlin state museums are on display at the Legion. The sampling makes most sense taken as a delectable appetizer meant to entice you to go to Berlin and experience the feast. I visited this exhibition last week to gaze once again at the ancient art from Babylon and Egypt. The exhibit also includes classic works by Andrea Mantegna, Andre della Robia, Auguste Renoir as well as Kuniyoshi Japanese woodcuts, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures and folk art including models of Frisian Hauberg farmhouses. It struck me that Simon not only collected and bestowed these objects from various cultures and ages but in many instances, he financed the grand and grueling expeditions which unearthed them.
The credit for spearheading this exhibition goes largely to San Francisco resident Tim Simon (59) whose great-grandfather Edward Simon, was James Simon’s second cousin and business partner. It was Tim Simon who visited Berlin in 2006 with his wife Ann and children and began poking around the museums and encountered the astounding Simon legacy firsthand. A businessman with considerable experience in China, Simon was comfortable with obstacles—organization and financial. After securing permission from the Germans to exhibit the works if the financing came through, he then approached the Legion and agreed to underwrite a large portion of the cost. John Buchanan, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Renée Dryfus, the Legion’s Curator of Ancient Art and Interpretation, were eager to continue the relationship with the Germans that had started so wonderfully in the 1990’s when portions of the Pergamon Altar were displayed at the Legion’s grand re-opening in 1995.
James Simon, great wealth and great vision
James Simon, circa 1914
James Simon (1851-1932) was born into a wealthy Prussian Jewish family of textile merchants (Gebruder Simon) that increased its fortune considerably by stockpiling cotton in advance of the civil war. He became a partner in the family firm at age 25 and along with his second cousin, Edward Simon, guided it to becoming a leading European concern. By 1910, James Simon was one of the richest men in Germany. As a young boy he had been enamored with ancient civilizations and artifacts. As an adult of means, he channeled his passion for art into collecting and began in the 1880’s with an acquisition of important 17th century Dutch paintings. He struck up a close friendship with Wilhelm von Bode, the renowned scholar and art historian who mentored his early collecting and, before long; Simon expanded his collection to include Renaissance works. Working together, Simon and Bode developed a vision of preserving art and artifacts, indeed world culture, for future generations that was tied to the establishment of core collections of exceptional artworks. In 1904, Simon made his first of many substantial gifts to the German museum–his Renaissance collection that had grown to some 450 artworks.
As part of his enduring fascination with early cultures, Simon financed twelve pioneering excavations in Babylon, Asur, Uruk, Jericho, Bogazköy, Amarna and several other sites. “He gave money when no else was financing these digs,” explained Renée Dryfus. “Many of the treasures that he brought back were saved from loss due to neglect, the elements, or, in the case of Buddhist relics, conscious efforts to deface them.” Along with his share from the archaeological finds, Simon stepped up his collecting of artworks from Europe and Asia and donated most of this to the German museums, elevating them to world prominence. Although James Simon was an outstanding patron of the arts, his main philanthropic focus was actually support for socially marginalized people, especially children. He did not limit his support to Jewish causes either but like his father and grandfather provided help where it was needed. World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920’s and poverty of post-war Germany led to the failure of Simon Brothers in 1931 and the end of a golden era of museum patronage. Simon died a year before Hitler came to power and his name and role were largely forgotten in the tumultuous years to follow.
Exquisite Nefertiti and Tiye
It is due to James Simon that the Berlin Egyptian museum holds one of the world’s richest collections of Egyptian art. Simon financed renowned Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt in the 1911-1914 Tell el Amarna excavations and purchased the sole license to excavate Amarna with the finds to be divided between him and the Egyptians. Simon lent the entire share of his finds to the Egyptian Museum in 1913 and then in 1920 designated the loans as gifts. Amarna is famous as the short-lived capital built by Pharaoh Akenatan to the sacred sun-god, the Aten, the only divine force that Akhenaten recognized in his mystical concept of worship. Amarna was abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death in 1332 c. BCE and most of the sculptures he commissioned during his brief heretical reign were destroyed and left in fragments. In 1912, the famous Bust of Nefertiti (too fragile to travel to San Francisco) was found in the sand-filled workshop of chief sculptor the Tutmosis along with several other busts in various stages of completion that had not been disturbed for some 3000 years. On exhibit at the Legion is a striking unfinished limestone portrait of the Head of Nefertiti that still has black chalk lines on it cheeks which would have served as a guide for the artist.
Queen Tiye, Egyptian, Medinet el Ghurob, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, reign of Amenhotep III, ca. 1355 B.C., Yew wood, silver, gold, lapis lazuli, faience, H(max) 32.7 cm., Gift of James Simon, 1920, Egyptian Museum, Berlin
One of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition stands just 9 inches tall and it was not excavated at Amarna by Borchardt but rather was purchased by Simon at Borchardt’s insistence. The sculpture of Egyptian Queen Tiye, ca. 1355 B.C., of carved yew wood with a gold and silver headpiece is a striking portrait executed with sensitive realism. Captured in middle-age with the countenance of maturity and dignity, this regal woman-almond eyes in an imperious gaze— is the mother of Akhenaten and fully aware of her power. Inspecting her head, we note that one of her lapis inlaid earrings is missing. At one time, she had another headpiece but it was replaced (it is not know when or why) and the other earring lays beneath. Tiye’s strong character and intellect endeared her to her husband, Amenhop III, whom she married at a young age. Records indicate that she shared the crown with him and was active in decision-making. We are left to wonder if Tiye’s strong personality influenced her son’s radical metaphysical views.
Allure of Babylon
The illusive mystery of ancient Babylon is tantalizing. A walled city in present day Iraq renowned for its tower of Babel, lush hanging gardens, stunning color, as well as its engineers, mathematicians, and dream interpreters, there is no parallel to Babylon. Whenever I visit a museum that has a tiled panel from Babylon—The Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum, The Pergamon–I vault there first and stand captivated, imagination running wild. In James Simon, I would have found a kindred spirit. Simon provided the main support for the excavations in Babylon, which lasted from 1899 to 1917. His uncle, Louis Simon, had financed the first German expedition to Babylon in 1886 in search of the illusive Tower of Babel. James, who was deeply interested in the Old Testament world, viewed the cuneiform texts discovered there as the key to this rich culture. The Neo-Babylonian empire reached it zenith under the rule of the statesman and conqueror general Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604-562 B.C.) Because stone was rare in southern Mesopotamia, molded glazed tile bricks were used for building and Babylon was a city of dazzling color and splendor described by Herodotus and in the Old Testament book of Daniel. The most important street was the Great Processional Way which led from the inner city through the Ishtar Gate to the Bit Akitu, the “house of the New Year’s festival.” The Ishtar Gate (580 B.C.) stood 47 feet high and 100 feet wide and was made of glazed brick adorned with alternating figures of bas-relief aurochs (bulls) and sirrush (dragons), symbols of Adad and Marduk. To the north of the gate, the processional way was lined with an estimated 120 glazed figures of lions in stride. The lion was the animal associated with Ishtar, goddess of love and war, and these repeating panels guided the ritual procession from the city to the temple.
It was due to James Simon that 400 crates containing literally millions of glazed clay brick fragments were brought from Babylon and painstakingly reconstructed into the famous Ishtar Gate and its processional way in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. The reassembly and installation of the lion reliefs at the Legion was undertaken by Dr. Joachim Marzahn from the Museum of the Ancient Near East in Berlin. There are two reliefs-one is restored and one is not-in the exhibition. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco financed the restoration of the panel on display. It would have been instructive to include a panel explaining how new technology had assisted in the laborious process of reconstructing and restoring these figures.
Silk Road Discoveries
Berlin’s collection of Central Asian art is unrivaled and almost entirely due to Simon’s efforts.
Statue of Eleven-Headed Avalokiteshvara, Toyuk, Chinese Tang Dynasty import, 7th century, Wood, H 38 cm, Museum of Asian Art, Berlin
When no one else would offer funds, Simon supported the first pioneering expedition in 1902 to investigate the northern route of the ancient Silk Road. This resulted in a series of rich German finds that uncovered lost cities, Buddhist communities and countless artifacts that have informed our understanding of the ancient world. The Silk Road was not only the great trade route connecting Asia with the Mediterranean World, including North Africa and Europe but was also an important conduit for cultural and technological transmission. The northern route which ran through the region of Chinese Turkistan and the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains extended to as far as the Black Sea. A stunning seventh century wooden statue Eleven-Headed Avalokiteshvara was possibly a Chinese Tang Dynasty import to Chinese Turkistan (Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjian). The masterfully carved wooden statue evokes serenity and exhibits particularly masterful carving of the drapery. The Sanskrit name “Avalokiteshvara” means “the lord who looks upon the world with compassion” and Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva is the embodiment of great compassion and has vowed to free all sentient beings from suffering. In Buddhist art, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva is sometimes composed with eleven heads which would enable seeing in all directions.
Late found recognition
Just a few years ago, Germany’s greatest patron had nearly been forgotten in his own town of Berlin–there were a few commemorative plaques but nothing substantial. Efforts by the German Oriental Society to a have street in Berlin named after Simon were repeatedly dashed and it wasn’t until 2006 that he was honored with a bronze relief plaque at Tiergartenstrasse 15a, the former site of the Simon family home.
In 2007, the State Museums of Berlin presented the design for the James Simon Gallery, a new central entrance building and exhibition hall on Museuminsel or Museum Island, located right in the middle of Berlin’s Spree River. Museum Island was established in 1840’s when the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, commissioned architects Stuler and Karl Friedrich Schinkel to design a series of extravagant neo-classical museums, envisioned as temples to high culture. In the decades to come, fueled largely by Simon’s cash, German archaeologists returned with vast treasures from global expeditions which built the reputations of these museums. Even when the brutality of Germany’s military state asserted in full power, these museums stood tall. Unfortunately, much of Germany’s art—an estimated 2 million treasures-became war booty for Stalin-and while 1.5 million pieces were returned fifty years ago, after Germany’s reunification, the Germans have been pressuring Russia for the remainders which are believed to be held in secret depots in Russia and Poland. When complete in 2012, Museum Island will become the world’s largest museum complex. How fitting it is that people will enter the museum complex by first passing through the Simon Gallery. Geneva J. Anderson
Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900
SFMOMA, October 11 – January 4, 2008
Brought to Light, now in its final week at SFMOMA, is one of those shows whose riveting beauty and important subject matter has inspired me to return three times.
Edward L. Allen and Frank Rowell, The moon, made at the Observatório Nacional, Cordoba, Spain, 1876; Carbon print; 20 1/2 x 16 1/4 in. (52.1 x 41.3 cm); Stephen White Collection II, Los Angeles.
Last week, I went with a group of teens who were home on Christmas break and it was a hit. We lingered, mesmerized, for a good 1.5 hours, trying to fathom the influence these stunning images would have had on their original viewers. The exhibition looks at the use of photography in 19th century science. It features some 200 scientific photographs and photographically illustrated books from 1840-1900 that were used to document phenomena that were invisible to the naked eye. From the lacey crystaline delicacy of a snowflake, to the eerie x-ray of a hand with six fingers, to the eruption of cosmic light in the Milky Way, these pictures document the emergence of the camera as an vital scientific tool. The exhibition is divided into six areas: the microscope, telescope electricity and magnetism, motion studies, x-rays and spirit photography. What emerges is a story of interdependence– as a medium grounded in physics and chemistry, photography shaped scientific practice and knowledge as much as it was shaped by them. There is also progression: with the microscope and telescope, photos gradually began to substitute for illustration; by the time x-ray images were developed, the photographic image was the only visible record of phenomena that were invisible to the human eye.
Curator Corey Keller, who earned her PhD at Stanford on the history of photography in science, has skillfully connected philosophical debate, popular press and major developments in science. She spent five years combing through museum archives, mostly in Europe, unearthing images that the institutions had forgotten they owned. Many of these images have never been seen, except by their creators. “A major goal is to get people to see photographically what was seen in the 19th century. You have to understand that this was critical moment in history—everything you learned in 3rd grade science was discovered in the 19th century. When photography was invented in 1839, seeing and knowing were thought to be inextricably linked; science was primarily influenced by what was visible. Photography was described as an act of vision and the camera was compared to a human eye, so the photograph would replace the eye of the astute observer on the scene. There was this idea,” said Keller “that the picture would eliminate the subjectivity and bias of a human observer…that it would be this perfect artist, that there would no be worry about the particularities of the human element.”
It seems evident now, that one of photography’s greatest contributions to science was that it legitimized the scientific method by removing subjectivity-allowing unambiguous recording of observation results as well as unambiguous reproduction of independent results. Even in the late 19th century, however, well after the photograph had fully penetrated society, photography’s establishment as a tool and object of science was controversial. There was no agreement on what evidence would constitute proof that photography captured reality accurately. Maren Groning writes in the exhibition catalog, Photography was “not fully accepted as a means of making precise… images of the visible world and once it crossed the threshold to the invisible, it was thought impossible to prove its scientific basis as reliable and accurate.” With very few willing to embrace or even consider the medium’s heuristic function, it struggled to gain credibility.
Ironically, the ultimate proof of the scientific community’s total acceptance of photography as a legitimate tool of science came 80 years after photography’s invention, when photographs had the credibility to overturn what was thought to be a fundamental law of physics. On May 29, 1919, Arthur S. Eddington’s photographs from Sobral, Brazil, and Principe, Guinea, of a total solar eclipse confirmed the bending of starlight by gravity as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, overturning Sir Isaac Newton’s concept of the universe and 200 years of science. On September 21, 1922, the results were again confirmed with Williams Wallace Campbell and Robert J. Trumpler’s photographs taken during an eclipse from Wallal, Australia.
In the 19th century though, the new visual medium of photography seemed a marvel that revealed dimensions and processes at work world well beyond the secure boundaries of the visible and known. What happens to this metaphor-camera as eye, photography as vision– when the pictures are of things that no one can see, that were previously invisible, no matter how good their eye eight? What would this mean to a 19th century audience? “Remember,” adds Keller, “that science and photography have completely shaped what modernity looks like to us. The photographs here are operating on many levels-they form the very nexus of technology, science and art in the nineteenth century.” They were made by and for those interested in science but they were enormously popular with the general public who would flock to expositions to see them. An entire set of curious and changing metaphors emerged over the course of the century to make sense of this medium. The 19th century also saw an explosion of illustrated press due in large part to improvements in reproducing photographs. ( Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, is a searchable electronic index to the science content of sixteen nineteenth-century general periodicals. )
Artists were heavily influenced by advances in photography…Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was inspired by Etienne-Jules Marey’s motion studies of a man on a bicycle. Francis Picabia cited x-rays as his first inspiration for his famous compositions. Vincent Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night (1889) was based in large part on popular astronomy texts and Van Gogh chose to include something in the sky of his painting that had been discovered just months earlier.
Inventions such as the x-ray worked their way into literature as well. In 1924, in The Magic Mountain , Thomas Mann used the new invention of the x-ray machine to show how Hans Castorp tries to understand life and love in a world that was largely based on common sense and first hand evidence. Hans was one of the first of his generation to ever see his own skeleton and to gain some understanding of the mystery of life via modern medical science. Afterwards, his entire conscoiusness deepens. The tubercular residents of the mountaintop sanitorium Hans visits keep small copies of their x-rays in their pockets, ready to display. These “intimate” photographs are more precious than conventional portraits. Hans pleads with his beloved Clavdia to give him her x-ray print as a memento during her absence from the sanotorium. He pines for her while gazing at the image of her thorasic cavity. When his own x-ray confirms symptoms of tuberculosis, Hans embraces this as verifiable evidence of illness.
Exhibition walk-through: Retina of the Scientist
The first two galleries present photographs made with the microscope and telescope-the two most important optical instruments in 19th century science and to which the camera was always compared. The idea was that photography might relieve the illustrator of the task of having to peer with one eye through the microscope and draw at the same time. The technical challenges of adapting a microscope for making photographs were enormous: the light that hit the photographic plate and the light visible to the eye focus at different points when refracted through a lens.
Lingering among this impressive collection of micrographs (pictures made through the microscope) I realized how these natural forms -specimens from botany, entomology and mineralogy- are fundamental to our present day notions of ideal organic forms.
Austrian physicist Andreas Ritter von Ettinghausen’s daguerreotype Cross-section of Clematis stem (March 4, 1840) was created just one year after photography was invented. A five minute exposure was sufficient to reveal the plant’s exquisite cellular structure and organic symmetry.
Andreas Ritter von Ettingshausen, Cross section of a clematis stem, March 4, 1840, daguerreotype, Albertina, Vienna.
Its star-like center is packed with tiny round globules that seem to pulse. A series of axis lead to larger chambers packed with the same round cells.
There were numerous images taken and exhibited of creepy crawly hairy biting things– everyday creatures that people might encounter in their house. Photographers knew that they had to win public over to get funding. The French amateur naturalist Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch made a portfolio of spectacular pictures utilizing the wet collodion glass plate negative, whose transparency enabled pristine reproduction. Keller discovered his work in the archives of the Société française de photographie and they are on exhibition at SFMOMA for the first time since their creation. Bertsch created specimens and enlarged them up to one hundred times for display at the world fair. His series Birth of a Louse (ca. 1853-57) (albumen prints) relies on polarized light to show the louse emerging from its egg casing.
Wilson Alwyn Bentley’s photographs of crystalline snowflakes reveal their intricacy and delicacy. Bentley, a farmer and amateur photographer, captured snow crystal forms by lifting each flake up with a splint of wood and carefully transferring each flake to a microscope slide and photographing it.
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, Snowflakes, before 1905; Printing-out paper prints; Twelve prints, each: between 2 3/4 x 2 7/8 in. (6.79 x 7.3 cm) and 3 1/8 x 2 13/16 in. (7.9 x 7.1 cm); Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.
He also chased storms and found various correlations between weather patterns and snowflake attributes.
Telescope–race to the moon
Astronomy was most profoundly affected by the telescope and the photography it enabled. One of the greatest questions discussed by leading astronomers such as Dominique Francois Arago who were contemporaries of Daguerre was the size of the universe and the relationship and distance of the stars. An entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to the moon, the closest heavenly body visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, the promise of photography far outstripped its early capabilities and for much of the 19th century, the moon remained tantalizingly out of reach to photographers because insensitive emulsions required very long exposures which could not tolerate movement. The exhibition includes several rare successful daguerrtypes of the moon taken between 1847 and 1851 by John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond (son of the director of the Harvard College Observatory), with Harvard’s 15-inch Great Refractor Telescope. This telescope was equipped with a mechanism that moved in tandem with the earth’s rotation and the images are remarkable in their clarity of detail and mystic beauty. These pictures were exhibited at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition where Whipple won a gold medal for technical excellence in photography and 6 million people would have seen them. Until the development in the 1870’s of gelatin silver bromide negatives (dry plates) which were highly sensitive to light, photography had a limited contribution to astronomy.
Photography became integral to astromony to observe, measure and document the far reaches of the cosmos. As early as 1889, George Ellery Hale conceived of the spectroheliograph, an instrument that allowed the Sun to be photographed at a particular wavelength. Hale also designed an appropriate telescope to which it could be attached. In 1908, he found that some of the lines in the spectra of sunspots were double. Hale realized that this demonstrated the presence of strong magnetic fields in sunspots, being due to the effect discovered by Pieter Zeeman in 1896, and was the first indication of an extraterrestrial magnetic field.
Electricity and Magnetism
Although electricity was an ongoing topic of curiosity in the general population during the 19th century, most serious research was conducted in laboratories where photography aided in understanding electrical phenomena. Taking pictures of electric sparks, lightning and magnetic effects gave scientists tools with which to study and interpret electricity. These photographs, often visually stunning, were tremendously popular, giving visual form to phenomena that had never been observed clearly. A photograph of an electric current running through the hand was revolutionary….the person would hold some type of electrode and a very mild electric current was sent through and they would put their hand in contact with the plate.
Lightning was a very popular subject for amateur photographers and a curiosity among the general population who had heard stories of people being struck dead by lightning.
William N. Jennings, Ribbon Lightning, ca. 1885, gelatin silver print, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, gift of 3M Company, ex-collection Louis Walton Sipley.
Artists had long depicted lightning as a zig-zag bolt coming out of the sky, probably because the human eye could not move fast enough to actually process what was happening. William N. Jennings was thought to be the first to photograph lightning in 1882. His photographs showed that lightning took many forms but none of them were a zig-zag. Ribbon lightning was caused by wind moving across the path of lightning in space.
The Franklin Institute archives contain a fascinating 1922 essay “The Work of William N. Jennings in the Photography of Lightning” along with his photographs and findings and many responses to Jennings’ work.
Even after 120 years, Etienne-Leopold Trouvelot’s “Trouvelot figures” are so seductive that they were selected for the exhibition catalog cover and t-shirts.
Etienne-Leopold Trouvelot, Direct electric sparks obtained with a Ruhmkorff coil… ca. 1888, printing-out paper print, Musee des arts et métiers, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris.
Trouvelot used photography to illuminate the mystical and invisible world of electricity. Drawing on the earlier experiments of Eugene Adrien Ducretet and of George Christoph Lichtenberg, in the late 1880’s Trouvelot used a photographic plate with its emulsion side in contact with a electrode and was able to create stunning sinuous lines and branches of actual electrical currents that instead of being in air were visible on the plate.
Motion studies
Before the 1870’s and the invention of more sensitive dry plates and mechanical shutters that moved more rapidly than the human eye, moving things showed up poorly in photographs. Early daguerrotypes frequently have headless children. Both accomplished photographers and trained scientists saw motion as a means of further expanding photography’s capacity in artistic and scientific applications and were intent on improving the technology to enable this.
When railroad baron Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet about his horse and to test his hypothesis of unsupported transit, which held that when all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground, they were tucked under his belly rather than splayed out like a rocking horse, Muybridge failed several times. In 1878, he succeeded in freezing the motion of horse in mid-stride.
Eadweard Muybridge, Bouquet with rider, ca. 1887; Collotype
Using trip wires and a battery of cameras with automatic shutters, he was able to document the movement of a horse across time and space. He published his results and gained great fame as a lecturer in America and abroad. His continuing work with motion eventually led to his invention of the “zoopraxiscope,” a moving picture machine that showed a rapid succession of images. With the help of Thomas Eakins, Muybridge found sponsors at the University of Pennsylvania and continued to take thousands of locomotion studies of men, women, children, animals and birds. The results were published in an epic portfolio Animal Locomotion, 781 folio prints after his photographs.
The French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey was heavily influenced by Muybridge. Marey’s chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of film that passed automatically through a camera of his own design) had an important influence on both science and the arts and helped lay the foundation of modern motion pictures.
Etienne-Jules Marey, Flight of a heron, ca. 1883, albumen print, Joy of Giving Something, Inc., New York.
Marey’s stunning Flight of the Heron was made with his “photographic gun.” A forerunner of the motion picture camera, it had a sight and a clock mechanism and made 12 exposures of 1/72th of a second each. Marey’s observations about the changes in the shape of birds’ wings in relation to air resistance were vital in understanding the phenomenon of flight. Marey’s subsequent findings regarding motion were used by the French government to improve military training and by the American efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor to streamline industrial production.
X-ray and spirit photography
The discovery of x-rays at the end of 1985 by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen came at a time when medicine was increasingly linking specific diseases to changes in the body’s internal organs. The stethoscope had enabled examination of the chest using sound, but x-rays provided an image. Rontgen stumbled upon the discovery while investigating cathode rays with Crookes tubes. He sent a copy of his findings, “On a New Kind of Rays,” along with copies of an astonishing x-ray of his wife’s hand-all that was visible were her bones and her wedding ring–to six of the most important physicists in Europe. A media frenzy ensued extolling the ray’s ability to penetrate opaque substances.
Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, Chamaeleon Cristatus, 1896; photogravure
Within a month of this discovery, Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta published a text and 15 photogravures made from x-rays with pictures composed for maximum aesthetic impact, immediately popularizing these magical rays.
The cultural impact of the x-ray was enormous–Victorian morality was challenged by the indecent ray which cut through clothing and was rumored to be capable of capturing impure thoughts. By 1897, x-rays were used on teeth to identify remains, to distinguish natural from cultured pearls, and to inspect an Egyptian mummy. In 1898, The Emperor and Empress of Russia had their hands x-rayed to see their own bones. In medicine, however, the x-ray was quite slow to take off because it required a doctor to put faith in a document that neither he nor she could corroborate in any other way. Surgery was performed and the x-ray was compared to what had actually been observed. Up until WWI, x-rays were not used regularly for diagnostic purposes.
The x-ray’s influence on artists was widespread and grew as time passed- Frantizek Kupka (1871-1957), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1976), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) are among a number of artists whose work was heavily influenced by the x-ray. Now, a century later, we are still mesmerized, consumed, by images of our body’s interior.. and it is these images which still have the power to embed themselves in our consciousness.
Spirit photography
Many of the people involved in or researching the occult movement were also leading scientists of the day. What we see in the pictures on view in this section is an aesthetic relationship to many of the scientific pictures seen elsewhere in the galleries. The 19th century science posed a tremendous threat to the authority of traditional religion. Spiritualists found inspiration in photography’s invention. They recognized the power of science and co-opted both its language and its techniques to lend credence to their own claims that even the supernatural-human auora, spirits or even thoughts– could be verified. Photography bridged the gap between different times and places (the past and the present, the distant and the near), analogous to the bridge between heaven and earth.
The idea of taking photographs of spirits burst into public notoriety in 1868, when William Mumler, a Boston engraver whose wife was a trance medium, exhibited what purported to be photographs of spirits. He had been experimenting since 1861, with varied results. Mumler began charging his customers for a séance/photo session and made a lot of money. In 1872, he was found by the courts to be a fake. His efforts did not take place in a vacuum. By the 1890’s, spirit photography was a fad and darkroom tactics such as double exposures were routinely used to create deliberate pictures of ghosts, readily acknowledged by their creators to be the product of their darkroom manipulation. In parallel to obvious attempts at trickery, other photographers were capturing unexplained images for the sake of serious research on the occult and the trend continues today. Geneva J. Anderson
The exhibition travels next to Vienna’s Albertina Museum from March 20- June 6, 2009.
ARThound 