ART REVIEW : ‘Photography’ Meets Other Art Forms

“Photography and Beyond: New Expressions in France” is a traveling exhibition of works by seven artists in mid-career. It is currently making its only West Coast stop at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. The catalogue informs us rather breathlessly that since the ‘70s something new, exciting and radical has been going on in French photography.

Well, gee. And just what might that be?

Seems French photographers have blended that medium with other arts to come up with something fresh and challenging.

Since something very similar happened in Los Angeles beginning in the ‘60s, one is initially underwhelmed. Artists such as Ed Ruscha made work out of whatever seemed appropriate to the idea at hand--painting, film, photography, fruit juice. Didn’t matter.

One is rather rudely reminded that French Symbolist poetry is based on Edgar Allan Poe and that in the ‘50s French cinema produced a New Wave of filmmaking based on American ‘40s film noir.

By contrast, however, one is further reminded that Charlie Chaplin got a lot of ideas for “Modern Times” from Rene Clair’s “A nous la liberte.” For that matter a basic source of Ruscha’s thinking was a French guy named Marcel Duchamp.

American and French cultures have been swapping ideas for so long it’s pointless to try to sort that out. What’s more interesting is the way the ideas are transformed.

Here photography’s basic lack of substance is attenuated until it becomes virtually disembodied as a medium. Photographs, as such, don’t count. They turn into ideas and memories. The whole show becomes a variety of intimate, Proustian reminiscence.

Annette Messager (whose work is also the subject of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) shows pieces made of bedraggled stuffed animals with small, framed photographic details attached by strings. They recall Mike Kelley’s art, but carry a quality of delicacy, remorse and longing that’s all their own. A piece involving photos of palms of hands and scribbled words alludes to the importance of personal superstition. The theme turns up several times in this show, echoing filmmaker Eric Rohmer.

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There’s an uncharacteristic occult twist to Christian Boltanski’s “Initiatory Composition”; a pair of shiny leaning planks in the manner of John McCracken are emblazoned with metaphysical symbols. A similar attraction to alchemy seems to inform Pascal Kern’s glowing, iconic photos of common metal industrial parts like flues and pipes.

Anyone who’s fooled around with the distortion filters in a computer graphics program will be disappointed with David Boeno’s light boxes. They look as if he just took the lettered word Image and pushed the “spherize” button.

By contrast with this foray into contemporary cyberspace, Ariele Bonzon makes photographs look like finds from an archeological dig. Transparencies suspended on metal-rod bases depict everything from a classic sculptural torso to a modern athlete. She displaces time, making the present seem the ancient past. Maybe it is.

When this work meanders off into vast philosophical concepts that are hard to visualize it doesn’t do so well. It’s better at distilling feelings from literature or cinema.

Sophie Calle is noted for posing as a chambermaid to photograph hotel rooms or stalking random pedestrians, photographing them like a spy. Here she becomes the voyeur of her own marriage in “The Husband.” Large framed photos and brief text tell the story. She meets her future spouse in New York. He loans her his apartment and vanishes. He’s a year late for their first date. She can’t remember what his genitals look like. In about three minutes you get the sense of having read a vivid, slender novel about a very odd alliance between two wandering souls.

Dark, oversize prints showing a man in trouble make up Suzanne Lafont’s “The Fall.” Her hero leans on a stair railing, somehow stricken. Friends try to help but it’s no good. If she learned anything from Robert Longo, she capitalized on it. She transformed his impersonality into a filmic suggestion of the high sense of drama we feel when visited by such a commonplace event as having one’s lover walk out.

The exhibition, a collaboration between Florida’s Boca Raton Museum of Art and the Museum of Israel, Jerusalem, was organized by their respective curators, Timothy Eaton and Nissan Perez.

* Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego, through Sept. 5, open daily, (619) 239-5262.