ART REVIEW : AN EXHIBIT OF MIXED BREEDINGS

Whatever else “Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946” may be, it’s an exhibition about breeding. The show’s two distinguished organizers--Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, photography curator of the County Museum of Art, and Andy Grundberg, photography critic for the New York Times--want nothing less than to clarify the bloodlines of their favorite medium and award it a pedigree.

They don’t argue for purity. Quite the opposite; the curators mean to prove that contemporary art has photography in its system. While early photographers tended to use their cameras to imitate painting, the field has profoundly influenced modern and contemporary art--from Degas’ cropped compositions to Pop art’s emphasis on commercial reproductions to Photo-Realist painting and recent combinations of text and mass media imagery.

Ignoring all this, some people still insist that photography isn’t art--largely because it isn’t always art--but they will have difficulty making that point in “Photography and Art.” In this show at the County Museum of Art (through Aug. 30), it’s easier to find art that doesn’t look like photography than a photo that can’t be justified as an artwork.

Consider Lucas Samaras’ “Photo-Transformation,” a manipulated Polaroid print in which a human eye stares out of a face that seems to have liquefied into a swirl of pigment. Merging photographic technology with human touch and painterly appearance, this little picture sits like an emblem on the cover of the catalogue.

Moving even further into the territory of painting, Holly Roberts all but buries a photograph under thickly brushed oils in an ominous image called “Dog With a Man Inside,” while Naomi Savage’s “Enmeshed Man” bears no resemblance to a photograph. This large relief, containing a head-and-shoulders silhouette with a crazed surface, is made of painted, copper-plated magnesium.

Todd Walker brings such ambiguities into sharp focus in a photo-silkscreen depicting a dry, curled leaf that simultaneously resembles lips and a rocky landscape. Purple type printed across the bottom reads, “A photograph of a leaf is not the leaf. It may not even be a photograph.”

Grundberg and Gauss have chosen to expose the equivocal edge of photography, including mainstream artists who use photography, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and excluding those whose photographs they believe are “primarily documentary in

nature.” The 300 images nonetheless cover a great deal of territory, from eloquent hymns to nature by Ansel Adams, Minor White and Paul Caponigro to Hans Haacke’s scathing social criticism.

In the course of “illustrating the pictorial evolution of photography intended to be art,” the show moves--roughly chronologically through thematic sections--from abstraction, metaphoric and surreal imagery to bold experiments with techniques and processes, to fabricated subjects and combinations of pictures and text.

The first gallery is filled with black-and-white photographs that look conventional now but represent pioneering approaches to abstraction, paralleling the nature-inspired painting of such Americans as Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe and continuing the non-objective geometric inquiries of Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus.

Following Aaron Siskind’s close-ups of textured surfaces and light studies by Henry Holmes-Smith, Carlotta Corpron and Gyorgy Kepes is a rich territory of mostly figurative works, overlaid with surrealistic displacements and metaphoric connotations. Clarence John Laughlin sets a ghostly presence to rocking in a wicker chair and Frederick Sommer seems to compress layers of material into fossils of memory.

Photography’s alliance with strange appearances continues in later works and turns disturbing when we find Jo Ann Callis’ “Woman With Wet Hair” taking on the tone of an interrogation chamber and Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Expulsion From the Garden of Eden” acted out in a bizarre tableau.

The exhibition does not carry on arguments about which came first--photography or art--on a period-by-period or style-by-style basis. That sort of thing can be difficult to prove and it would require a chronological mixture of paintings and photographs. Instead we are presented with a much more general thesis on cross-fertilization.

It’s never more clear than in work that’s rooted in popular culture. As Pop painters appropriated photographic reproductions from the mass media, photographers put pictures within pictures and drew their subjects from the banal world around them.

In Conceptualism, however, photography proved itself the perfect medium for illustrating ideas--often under the influence of John Baldessari. Here we find Baldessari himself instructing us on the “wrong” way to compose a picture, Bruce Nauman impersonating a fountain and William Wegman double-printing images of himself, his father and his mother as androgynous amalgamations.

Other artists create their own reality or play out their fantasies by constructing tableaux, domestic dramas and sculptural environments to be photographed.

In tune with the times, the exhibition ends with worrisome images that echo the despair, alienation and preoccupation with power structures that characterize much recent painting.

“Art and Photography” is so well stocked with good--if generally familiar--work that it’s easy to forget the premise and just luxuriate in the opportunity to see it all together. Nothing wrong with that except that it emphasizes that the thesis is too obvious and well accepted to be compelling. These days it seems preposterous to charge, as the curators do in the catalogue, that “The interaction of photography and art was one of modernism’s greatest repressions.”

Is there anyone left, outside the predictable legions of purists and philistines, who denies photography its rightful position?

Apparently so. As the curators point out in the catalogue, no less a figure than John Szarkowski, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography, has emphasized photography’s differences from other visual art forms and argued that it is a better implement for exploration and discovery than for imaginative expression.

While cross-fertilization has blurred the boundaries between art and photography almost beyond recognition and photography is regularly exhibited in general art galleries and museums, the medium still has its own defensive critics, scholars and designated quarters. Standard textbooks on modern art rarely devote much space to photography and university survey courses often ignore it.

These facts may not make the message of “Art and Photography” radical, but they certainly make it trenchant.