May 25 – September 1, 2008
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
A fine series of some of Richard Misrach’s beach photographs are currently on display at the National Gallery of Art, sandwiched cozily on the ground floor of the West (i.e. the “old”) Building between the massive, scattershot “Medieval to Modern: Recent Acquisitions of Drawings, Prints, and Illustrated Books” and “Crosscurrents: American and European Masterpieces from the Permanent Collection.” Thus situated, “Richard Misrach – On the Beach” is a contemporary thought-piece thrown into the middle of a sea of old treasures. Most of the people who shared the room with me seemed happy to have found a still, dry room to escape the freak thunderstorm that just broke outside. Others, including a woman and her child entered, let out a collective “oohhh, ahhh,” and flatly walked out.
Untitled 214-04, 2004. Image from http://www.aperture.org
These photographs, most of them named with the precise “Untitled” followed by informatic serial number, are pretty and accessible. They have lots of evident meaning—if you consider yourself “that” sort of person who decodes art, looking for hints, clues, and feints as to the who, what, where, when, why of the world—but need not be approached analytically. The scenes are familiar to Americans and fit the crowd pleasing aim of the summer art season (like the “summer movie season,” the summer art season does a bit of blockbusting, seeking-bodies-in-the-gallery with the tenacity of Hollywood pining for butts-in-the-seats). Misrach has photographed several beach and ocean scenes from above, sometimes approximating the “God view” of real time strategy video games like Sim City, Populous, and Starcraft. The extra-textual reference points are key, since the pictures are starkly original, yet easily breath points of comparison with known referents. Whether approached as an errant scene from Google maps on steroids, or as a snapshot provided by the pantocrator, these pictures do a bit of friendly defamiliarizing. Most people have seen the ocean, the beach, and the sickly pale bodies that accompany, but few have seen it with such omniscient precision or technical zeal. Misrach’s camera and its “eye” (its wide, inclusive lenses and calculated focus) give us a privileged view.
Though photography as a field has undergone revolutionary changes in the digital era, I find myself continually impressed by some of the simpler things. For one, the photographs in this exhibition are big, on the human scale and certainly far in advance the Polaroids of yesteryear. The somewhat failed scope and haunting litany of Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970) yields a strong comparison. Yet while sized to suggest vastness, the photos abound in detail. Even when abstracted into views of water with little else accounted for, the photographs take on a baffling quality somewhere between Magic Eye composition and minimalist pattern. In one photo, a man is seen splashing from (dropped in? emerging from?) the water, his action captured amidst a calm tableaux.
After seeing something like half of the photographs, I found my mind wandering out of the immediate gallery-space and onto other views I had seen. The work of Andreas Gursky, German superstar photographer of impossibly big spaces, came to mind as a crutch for contrast. In Misrach’s photos, human beings are the unnatural interlopers into the pristine, organic vistas of the sea. Gursky, by contrast, displays people as a natural grounding for the ungodly, massive scale of mankind’s creations (apartment buildings, office parks, supermarkets, etc). Many of Gursky’s pictures suggest a fixity or an overwhelming stasis—how could a massive apartment building represented on the scale of a Hollywood film do otherwise?—while the human element in Misrach still allows for the spontaneity and movement of the human agent.
These Misrach photos are certainly worth seeing, and as I have said, form an interesting comparison with the surrounding work in the museum. If the curmudgeonly homeliness of the nearby tapestries or Holy relics in sliver and gold do not float your boat, seek refuge across the way with a different type of beach.
