the entire North American continent in a time before living memory—this enormous sprawl of land, sheathed and cloaked and brilliantly arrayed with names. Names covering the terrain like an unbroken forest. Names that wove people profoundly into the landscape, and that infused landscape profoundly into the people who were its inhabitants. . . . I imagined how these names had dwindled with the deaths of elders, beginning five hundred years ago; a steady impoverishment of names, as the Europeans spread west, knowing too little of the land and its people to realize what was being lost. Many parts of the continent were plundered of their names, left desolate, emptied of mind and memory and meaning. But all is not lost. Many Native American names survive, others are now being recorded, and some are finding their rightful places on maps.
He mentions Denali, which means “the High One” in Koyukon, a more apt name than McKinley for the highest mountain on the continent.
Monument Valley is a formalist name, drawing attention to the aesthetics of the place, the way the abruptly rising buttes stand like pillars or pedestals, articulating the depth of space and perspective that makes the place so spectacular. Since ordinary monuments commemorate something other than themselves, this name makes the place a monument to nothing but monumentality. The individual rock formations have names that are clearly imported: along with the famous Mittens, there’s an Elephant Rock and a Camel Rock, though neither of those beasts has been native to this continent since the last ice age. But Monument Valley has another name. A Navajo medicine person, Mike Mitchell, says,
Monument Valley’s Navajo name is Tse Bii’Nidzisigai (White Rocks Inside). The story is that the valley is where “Rocks Are Pointing Upward” (Tsenideezhazhaii). Before that it was called White Rocks Inside. As they tell the story there used to be monsters out there. The monsters were the enemies of the Navajo and used to be somewhere in White Rocks Inside. There are Holy People who live there now and they say that important Holy Way ceremonial stories were originally formed there. The valley is protected. . . . Now for some, the valley’s purpose is sightseeing. For others, its purpose is to produce good minds and good thoughts, and hogans are built here and there.
The place looks different under this name. Tse Bii’Nidzisigai is clearly a place where people lived and history unfolded long before John Wayne scowled across its distance for John Ford’s movie camera, a place that tells us there is more there than we can know.
VI. LOOKS LIKE
When it comes to naming, clouds pose a different, almost an opposite, challenge than that posed by constellations. While constellations are unchanging over millennia, so that they can be collectively named and assimilated into the culture, clouds are evanescent, changeable. They function something like Rorschach blots, suggesting private resemblances that individuals can read to themselves. (In the 1960s, the comic strip Peanuts had a recurrent episode in which Charlie Brown and Linus displayed their personalities through cloud interpretation; Charlie always saw the simple and obvious, Linus the elaborate and arcane.) For something to be named, it must have a distinct and durable identity, but clouds appear, metamorphose, and vanish too quickly. Only storms with the force or speed to do permanent damage are named, at least since 1938, when meteorologists began to give them women’s names, beginning with A and moving through the alphabet each season. Probably something about Euro-American gender politics could be found in the idea of storms labeled with women’s first names sweeping over mountains given men’s last names (though as I write, Hurricane Dennis is menacing the Carolina coast—about fifteen years ago the meteorological authorities decided to give men’s as well as women’s names to storms).
Because clouds themselves cannot be named, nomenclatural passion has focused instead on classifying and naming their standard formations. Though knowledge of the weather had previously been the province of shepherds and sailors, meteorologists latinized the formations: a cirrus, for example, is “a form of cloud, generally at a high elevation, presenting the appearance of divergent filaments or wisps, often resembling a curl or lock of hair or wool. Particular varieties are known as cat’s or mare’s tails,” says the Oxford English Dictionary. Cirrus is a word that itself means “a curl-like tuft, fringe or filament.” Like Linnean plant names, the cloud names create a metaphorical structure: an information tree. There are four principal forms, according to this system—cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus—meaning, in English, heap, layer, curl of hair, and rain; and these can be classified in various groups according to altitude. Further names describe cloud types that do not fit into these four groups, a category of the uncategorizable, suggesting something about the amorphousness of clouds and the tenaciousness of the desire to order the world through language and representation—and not the language of mare’s tails that relies on metaphor and resemblance, but the language of science in which the stories and analogies are hidden in a dead language. Clouds and cloud terminology are an acute and comic form of the pervasive gap between words and things, between the particulars of experience and the universals of classification.
VII. NAME: UNTITLED
At workshops for more than twenty years, Richard Misrach has been presenting an exercise in which the participants are invited to write down their interpretations of a photograph that has been given three different titles—for example, a Charles Sheeler industrial-modernist photograph that is first introduced to them as “Industry,” then as “Five Hundred Tons of Airborne Pollutants a Year,” then as “Untitled.” Each title inflects the image differently, tells the viewer what to look for, what to ignore. “Untitled,” Misrach remarks, always means art, high and disassociated. Names are one of the most important and overlooked sites of visual art, guiding people as powerfully as place-names do. Titles are hypnotic suggestions, operating instructions, associational links, pedigrees, home addresses, credentials, and disclaimers. They constellate a work of art: the title changes the way the image is seen, and the two together describe something in the outside world, whether a place, person, event, idea, or value, differently than either alone. Titles undermine the idea that most visual art is purely visual.
Think how different Robert Motherwell’s abstract-expressionist paintings would look were they not titled Homage to the Spanish Civil War or how Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross would look without a title that refers not only to sequentiality but to suffering and impending apotheosis. Andy Warhol took the opposite tack, with titles that offered to siphon the lifeblood of content away: Lavender Disaster and Saturday Disaster pick at the scabs of formalism while seeming to follow in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s footsteps—for the painting commonly known as Whistler’s Mother is in fact titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, a title requesting that viewers give more weight to composition than to content. On the other hand, Robert Rauschenberg’s famous Erased de Kooning is entirely dependent on its title to reveal the act behind the faintly inscribed piece of paper and thus give the piece its iconoclastic impact. Conceptual artists had fun with titles, making them either amusingly literal—Mel Bochner’s Three Drymounted Photographs and One Diagram, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on Sunset Strip—or aggressively, mockingly instructive—John Baldessari’s painting titled and inscribed Everything Is Purged from This Painting but Art. No Ideas Have Entered This Work. Titles tell us that this is not a janitor but a king we are looking at; that this landscape that could be anywhere is in fact somewhere history took place; that this still life was documented on a particular date.
Titles are operating instructions, telling us how the artist would like the work used, in what direction he or she imagines it can take us, and “Untitled” is as different from “Five Hundred Tons of Airborne Pollutants” as Monument Valley is different from Tse Bii’Nidzisigai. In recent decades, curators and photo-historians have been trying to make the photographers of the U.S. Geological Surveys of the 1870s into artists and their photographs into art. Theirs is an act not unlike Misrach’s exercise with the Sheeler photo
graph; they ask us to look at each picture not as, for example, “rock formation suggesting the validity of the catastrophic theory of geology” or “suitable place to bring the railroad through,” but as “untitled.” Though they are indeed often beautiful photographs taken by men with great visual acuity, to look at them this way is to forget that the camera, like the telescope, has many uses. Galileo’s first telescope was an instrument of political power; it was his second that was dedicated to celestial observation. The cameras of the U.S. Geological Surveys were instruments of national power, just as aerial photography was during World War II and satellite imaging often is nowadays.
VIII. THE SLOWNESS OF LIGHT
The titles on Richard Misrach’s celestial photographs ask you to come back to earth, tugging against the boundless sublimity the visual matter itself offers, tethering it to earthly problems of meaning and political history. All these histories of names are part of his continuing investigation of both the formal vocabularies of landscape and photography and the political grammar of the American West. One could say of these photographs what Robert Rosenblum said of Mark Rothko’s radiant field paintings: “And ultimately, the basic configuration of Rothko’s abstract paintings finds its source in the great Romantics: in Turner, who similarly achieved the dissolution of all matter into a silent, mystical luminosity; in Friedrich, who also placed the spectator before an abyss that provoked ultimate questions whose answers, without traditional religious faith and imagery, remained as uncertain as the questions themselves.” These photographs look like color field paintings, abstract expressionism, Turner’s skies, like painting with its claims to the subjective and the expressive, but as photographs they also can claim the documentary status Stieglitz disavowed in his photographs of clouds. Traditionally, abstract and sublime art invites the viewer to remain indefinitely in the realm of the beautiful, the visual, the emotional. The titles on these yank viewers over to the territories of conceptual and political art. Together, image and title draw up their own constellations—relationships between celestial and earthly names, between eternity and the exact time, between language and visual representation, and, as ever in Misrach’s work, between beauty and politics. This time, the questions are about place and politics too.
Landscape is both a composition and a subject. As the former, it is usually a picture of land and sky, organized by a horizon line and further organized by foreground, middle ground, and distance. As a subject, it is about nature, space, location, and other organic and inorganic elements of the physical world as well as about the desires and associations particular places call forth. Throughout much of the history of European and then American landscape, landscape was supposed to be an apolitical genre, a refuge from strife and humanity, a place apart. But in the American West, the wars were always over land until they became wars against the land waged by bombing, dumping, damming, and developing; and it is necessary here to remember that land can mean homeland, battlefield, nation, territory, and real estate. Because the history of a place is largely invisible, representing the visible landscape often ignores history in favor of aesthetics. One of the alternatives is to make works that are landscapes in content but not in form.
Misrach has made some of the most swooningly lovely landscape photographs of the American West, even if they do contain bombs, fires, floods, and ruins. But he has gone on to photograph dead animals and bomb craters below the horizon; bullet-riddled Playboy magazine pages from a target range near the Nevada Test Site; paintings that give a sense of the daydreams and hoardings, the cultural aspirations and brutalities of the western places where they now hang; diurnal clouds without a horizon; and now color fields—the cloudless sky—and night skies of clouds and stars. In the relatively recent Desert Cantos series titled The Playboys and The Paintings, he lets representations stand in for the history of their places, for the Europeanization and conquest that are relatively subtle in the landscape itself. That the paintings are indoor phenomena though they represent landscape, that The Playboys are photographs of photographs, begins to open up further questions about documentary and photography: Is a photograph of a representation documentary? What are we looking at when we look at a photograph of a two-dimensional object, since photography is usually used to portray vanishing-point perspective, dimensionality, depth? What about the unclouded sky, which is the opposite of a two-dimensional object, since it is profoundly dimensional but without tangible objects? Can you have documentary photographs without a solid subject, save the color the image shows? What part of a place do you need to show in order to depict the place, since you can never show more than parts? I wrote of Misrach’s work once before that it is “so lavishly, engagingly visual that it doesn’t occur to most viewers that their principal subject is more often than not what remains unseen. He may luxuriate in the visibly beautiful, but he hardly encourages us to trust our eyes alone.” He himself writes, “I wanted to deconstruct the conventions of landscape, I wanted to deconstruct the premises of the camera premised on one-point Renaissance perspective. All three cantos in this sky book are premised on a defiance of the implicit and authoritative dictates of the camera that I have been mindlessly heeding for years. Like the telescope, the camera creates what we can see.”
What can we see in these photographs? They portray the sky as too eternal, too mutable, and too ubiquitous to supply very specific information about time and place (though the visibility of Polaris, the North Star, and the curves the constellations draw as they rotate indicate something about latitude and duration to those who know how to read them). The titles attach the specificity of locale, culture, language to these ethereal color fields and starlight drawings, turning these sublime images into records of two histories: the travels and nocturnal vigils of the artist and the naming of the sky and the American West. The sky is a blankness, a meditation room of sorts; works in this tradition tend to invite contemplation of the sublime, the void, the pure visual experience. This is their beauty.
But these particular beautiful pictures have titles that are instructions to think about specifics of geography, history, biography, and politics. I remember a tray of bees in a natural history museum in the Rockies, each dusty insect impaled on a pin, with a tiny label floating above indicating where and when the bee was captured. Though the bees all looked alike, the labels made them into a calendar and map of the region and, perhaps, of some entomologist’s peregrinations. Similarly, these photographs are specimens of the sky impaled on language, on the words of location and the numbers of temporality. There is an awkwardness, a disjuncture between title and image; and just as the sky is an open space that invites contemplation of beauty and possibility, so the disparity between title and image is an open space to be contemplated. Here the title can be a set of instructions the viewer can choose to disobey, because when instructions don’t fit our expectations they become noticeable, and what is noticeable can be resisted. The sky is visible here, and so too in a sense is the mechanism of titles nudging the viewer toward one or another interpretation. Among the invisible displays offered by these gloriously visual artworks are the rules of photographic and linguistic representation.
One could imagine the images as a deck of cards that could be laid out according to aesthetics, geography, chronology, or by types of place-names—Biblical, violent, historical, indigenous, descriptive, personal names. Misrach himself has called them a “dysfunctional journal.” The British artist Richard Long has been “documenting” his walks in the landscape for decades with photographs of landscapes accompanied by texts revealing some scant information: how far he went, how many hours or days, what his starting point and destination were. The images do not show a walk, which is, after all, hardly representable in static media; they show unpopulated landscapes in which the text or title invites us to imagine a walk that had duration, location, direction. The texts work like the labels on the bees, like place-names, constellation names, asking us to visualize something that is not visible. Similarly these
titles tell us two things the photographs do not quite show: the date of the artist’s presence in places whose names were their attractions, and the duration of nocturnal vigils as the camera made its slow exposures. A diary of sorts is contained in the titles, not a confessional one but an austere one that, like Long’s texts, gives a few spare facts about an act and its location (and makes clear how much artmaking is about selecting what to leave out as well as selecting what to include).
This series is also a journal that has an odd reciprocity with Fremont’s record of traversing an unmapped West, locating latitude and longitude by astronomy and giving coordinates, times, and place-names all together in a kind of constellation whose points are geographical and astronomical location, personal and celestial time, and cultural imposition. These works draw up the same constellations on the open field of exploration, but for the sake of looking back at the project of inventing the American West that Fremont and his peers began. They examine what is constructed by language and what cannot be represented by language. Sometimes the location was clearly chosen to draw out humorous or peculiar relations between celestial and earthly sites, as with “Venus Seen from Virgin Valley.” The conjunction between time, place, and celestial body observed no longer calculates the exact location of a place, as it did for Fremont, but stumbles toward some inexact coordinates: of the relationship between words and images, between the beauty of experience and the information of history, between time and place, between two crucial parts of landscape—sky and location—when the land itself is absent. Stars are made of flaming gas, but constellations are made of stories. These works ask us what stories—and whose stories—have been inscribed on our experiences and what has been erased, overlooked, forgotten. And they ask us if we want stories when we have beauty, if we need meaning when we have pleasure. If names are fossilized language, these pictures perform a paradoxical act: looking skyward to excavate those fossils.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 18
