19TH-, 20TH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHS : VAST INDIFFERENCE OF THE WEST

It’s been a good while since this geography has seen a photographic theme exhibition as coherent and revealing as “Visions of the West: Two Views From Two Centuries,” at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park (to Oct. 4). Actually, it is two exhibitions. Museum Director Arthur Ollman presents works by seven 19th-Century photographers including Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins. The West of our own troubled century is viewed through the eyes of 13 lens persons selected by Terry Etherton and Michael Berman of the Etherton Gallery, Tucson. If the show did nothing else, it would be notable for proving you can have such an exercise without Ansel Adams.

The West is a mythic mental landscape and a real place. In the old days it was a land of danger and awesome opportunity for white European misfits who couldn’t get along in domesticated parts of the country. They went west to realize visions as grand as a transcontinental railway and as shameful as the exploitation of the Asians who built it and the near extermination of the Indians who were in its way.

Today, man sees the Western landscape itself as a phenomenon endangered by both our rapacious exploitation of its products and our suffocating love of its beauties. Our nightmare is that it will be turned into an endless parking lot for RVs.

Actually, none of that shows in the exhibition.

What we see is a magisterial landscape that towers above humankind with the serene and ruthless indifference of a deity. It seems that when man discovered the West, it paid him not the slightest heed. The most striking thing about these pictures, early and late, is that they just swallow man and his ideas whole. Early photographers trekked in with their cumbersome equipment, most often as documentarians for geographic surveys conducted by the government or railway companies. But the same thing happens to a modern art photographer--like Marilyn Bridges, shooting from an airplane--as happened to the German John Hillers, solemnly recording the spectral rocks of Canyon de Chelly from the ground.

The landscape just devours them as if they’d been sucked into a black hole in space. Hello, a minute ago there was a guy standing there in jodhpurs and Boy Scout hat. Now there’s nothing but a tripod and a box. You never have a sense of the point of view of the artist, only the grandeur of nature itself. Subject matter defeats art every time.

When you look at these pictures and think about art, you wonder why Surrealism was not discovered in the 1860s instead of the 1920s.

The scale of the West is even more panoramic than the endless horizons of Salvador Dali, its outcroppings far more magical than works they inspired in Max Ernst. Carleton Watkins’ vintage view of Tower Rock has the fantastic edge of a ruined castle. Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Great Chief, Yosemite” seems a mirage and Adam Clark Vroman’s cliff ruins in Santa Clara County predate Funk sculpture by a century.

Well, this isn’t Surrealism because it is realism. Surrealism is about fantastic dreams that look like reality. The West is about a reality that looks like a fantastic dream. It is way overscaled for the European imagination. It just blows all its mental circuits. You get the feeling some of those guys skulked home with bad cases of horror vacua.

When William Henry Jackson shot railway lines curving around Phantom Rock, they looked like ant trails around a nature Buddha who could just yawn and blow them all away. When Watkins shot a giant redwood with a carriage-size tunnel carved through it, it was a humiliation to the great tree but only the humans look silly.

Naturally the contemporary artists know about Surrealism and abstraction and try to impose these aesthetic ideas on landscape. Even though many of the prints are in color, they carry the beauty of nature rather than art. Man is still not in charge here.

Numerous artists have a knack for showing nature getting back at us for trying to conquer her. Mark Klett shows a snake on a highway who seems to have set an automobile on the run. Richard Misrach catches a boat stranded on a Salton Sea that has inundated several cars. Joel Sternfeld shows a whole backyard effortlessly sheared away by a flash flood that has left a car buried as if it were a toy in a kid’s sandbox.

There is a strong feeling that if humankind manages to blow itself away, it’s not going to take the West with it. The land will simply mutate and become host to more adaptable life--cockroaches maybe.

Nobody beats this landscape. A few pick up its vibrations and blend with it harmoniously. Interestingly, these are the romantics who seem to share some of the visionary understanding of the Indians. Meridel Rubenstein’s extreme sentimentality comes up to nature’s mark. Steve Fitch’s image of fires burning against petroglyphs convinces us that only an awed sense of the magic of the place might allow us to survive in it.