ART REVIEW : Muybridge and ‘Motion’: A Beguiling History Lesson

Last summer, a battle erupted in Washington when the director of the National Museum of American Art sought to remove an early work by a prominent artist from a newly opening traveling exhibition. The 1964 work by Sol Lewitt, which incorporates photographs of a female nude, was claimed to be sexist and degrading to women.

The matter was resolved when the National Museum backed down and opened the show with the Lewitt intact. Now that the exhibition has arrived at the Long Beach Museum of Art, where it remains through Sept. 13, you might find yourself blinking your eyes in utter disbelief over the teapot-tempest that raged last year.

One look at Lewitt’s “Muybridge I” should dispel any doubts about the artist’s motives or the artistic result. It’s true that our patriarchal society has built all manner of repressive structures on the backs of the naked female form. Yet it’s hard to see how the repression of historical knowledge might end that gruesome practice. “Muybridge I” is not a great work of art, but it is of significant interest within the larger context of Lewitt’s broadly influential drawings and sculpture.

Furthermore, it is a linchpin in an exhibition whose purpose is to identify a very direct connection between the serial photographs of the 19th-Century British photographer and scientist, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), and contemporary camera work. Given Lewitt’s importance to the emergence of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and given an early work in his development that points straight to the 19th-Century forebear, leaving out “Muybridge I” is what would have been appalling.

“Motion and Document--Sequence and Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography,” organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., is the rather unwieldy title of the beguiling show, which pairs Muybridge’s pioneering studies of human and animal movement with photographically based work by 42 American artists. They’re as diverse as Berenice Abbott and Vito Acconci, Nicholas Nixon and Sarah Charlesworth. While most date from the 1960s and after, with the emphasis placed on Conceptual art and its offspring, such notable photographers from earlier decades as Walker Evans and Robert Frank show the way Muybridge’s precedent infiltrated more traditional modes of photography.

Drawing on the exceptional resources of the Addison Gallery’s own collection, director Jock Reynolds has organized the show around three important projects that occupied Muybridge during the course of a decade: the famous “Panorama of San Francisco,” photographed from the roof of Leland Stanford’s mansion in 1877; selections from the 174 plates in “The Attitudes of Animals in Motion” (1881), executed at Palo Alto under Stanford’s patronage and shown here in contemporary reproductions; and selections from the 66 collotype prints that comprise “Animal Locomotion” (1887), made in Philadelphia partially at the urging of Thomas Eakins, the greatest (and most controversial) American painter of the century.

Two of Eakins’ own photographic studies of standing nudes are included, and they suggest the initial impetus behind Muybridge’s attempts to use the camera to stop motion and arrest the flow of time. For Eakins, scientific observation was one basis for art. His startling painting, “The Gross Clinic” (1875), had caused a ruckus because of its blunt description of the medical dissection of a human body, in which a physician peeled back layers of flesh and sinew in an effort to know the delirious complexity of the world. Muybridge used his camera, together with various mechanical inventions, in a not dissimilar way. His pictures examine physical structure by peeling back layers of time.

For both these 19th-Century artists, the highest aim was truthfulness. In order to get at it, they concentrated on the way in which pictorial images could be made. Muybridge concocted a variety of mechanical devices, including elaborate shutters and trip-wires attached to sequential cameras, with which to photograph horses trotting, men walking, women sweeping, children running. These serial images are the predecessors of Dr. Harold Edgerton’s famous high-speed, stop-motion, scientific photographs, such as one from 1959 that tracks the progress of a bullet ripping through three inflated balloons. The mechanical camera can see what a human eye never could.

Muybridge also developed a machine that would “reassemble” his sequences of independent images, thus creating an illusion of movement and a technique that contributed to the invention of motion pictures. One terrific feature of the exhibition is an interactive laser disc in which photography curator and documentary filmmaker James Sheldon, Jock Reynolds’ collaborator in the show, has updated this approach by using digital technology to reanimate Muybridge’s static motion studies. Now we can witness both the original movements of Muybridge’s Victorian protagonists, as well as their frame-by-frame capture. (The Voyager Co. laser disc, “Eadweard Muybridge: Motion Studies,” $75, can be purchased at the museum.)

Because it’s interactive, the laser disc also allows you to move at will throughout Muybridge’s voluminous work, rearranging photographic sequences and shifting randomly between stasis and movement. The active participation of the viewer underscores a principal difference between Muybridge and much of the contemporary work in the show. Muybridge’s concentration on the way in which pictorial images could be made has been joined by an interest in the ways in which pictorial images are received . The contexts within which photographs are seen, and the way the all-pervasive camera literally invents our picture of the world, are prominent subjects for artists today.

In fact, they are part of what Sol Lewitt’s foolishly contested “Muybridge I” is about. The work is a long, black, horizontal, wall-mounted box. Push a button to start the flickering illumination inside, and through a series of 10 small holes in the face of the box, each suggesting the view-finder of a camera, you will see sequential black-and-white images of a naked woman walking toward you.

Through the last opening, you stare at a close-up of the woman’s navel--hole-to-hole, as it were. The device is rather clunky, but Lewitt is attempting to draw a parallel between a camera and a womb. Cameras, this work perceptively implies, do not record the world that modern culture sees so much as they participate in creating it.

Wisely, Muybridge’s pictures are interspersed with the contemporary work throughout the museum’s galleries, rather than isolated at the start to imply a progressive time-line. As an exhibition, “Motion and Document--Sequence and Time” works because it doesn’t try to make a case for a phony genre or school of contemporary photographic work that derives from Muybridge.

Instead, the carefully selected 20th-Century pictures always lead you back to the larger impact of his remarkable 19th-Century precedent. The result is a recognition of how pervasive Muybridge’s perceptual experiments have become, of how they’ve been essential in forming the visual landscape we see today. The exhibition works because the art of the present is deployed as an homage to history.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., (310) 439-2119, through Sept. 13. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.