Exploring the Visual Desert

Let other museums and kunsthalles do conventional surveys of art history. The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art prefers evocative theme shows. Elegantly housed in Montparnasse, in a see-through glass and steel building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the foundation is known for organizing unpredictable compendiums with provocative titles: “Truly False,” “Blue,” “By Night,” “Like a Bird” and “Loves.” Yes, that last one is plural. This is France.

“The Desert,” this summer and fall’s big attraction at Cartier, continues the tradition with an international exhibition of photography, video and film. But the show is also a bit of a surprise. While the title elicits the romantic mystique of desolate wilderness and dangerous beauty that might be expected to appeal to the foundation’s curators, staging a show about barren wastelands in the heart of a city that symbolizes civilized comfort seems incongruous, if not downright bizarre.

Still, the French are historically tied to the desert through colonial interests in Africa and the French Foreign Legion’s adventures. More to the point of the exhibition, the field of photography has a long-standing romance with the desert. What’s more, the advent of Europeans’ interest in the desert and their taste for Egyptology coincided with the invention of photography, in the mid-19th century.

Taking that coincidental connection as its point of departure, the exhibition “puts 19th century photographs face to face with a group of commissioned projects by 10 contemporary artists, who traveled especially for this occasion to the Sahara and the deserts of Namibia, Libya, Australia and the American West,” as an exhibition brochure puts it. Conceived by foundation director Herve Chandes, the show focuses on “the meeting of photography and the desert” in an introductory section, then examines how contemporary artists see the desert and questions the very notion of representing it in photographic images.

As visitors wander through the show, displayed on two floors of the building, they encounter galleries of wall-mounted photographs and darkened spaces where videos are screened. Moving from historic images to a wide variety of works created during the past few months, most viewers are probably as compelled by their own fascination with far-away, exotic-sounding places as by the exhibition’s historic roots and artistic branches. Whether peering closely at a fuzzy image of Luxor, shot in 1855 by John B. Greene--a leading photographer of Egypt in the 1850s who was the son of a Paris-based American banker--or stepping back to get a full view of a mural-sized collage of a fairy-tale wonderland dreamed up by contemporary Egyptian artist Lara Baladi, visitors can see that the desert has a strong allure for artists as well.

The historic segment of the show is based on an essentially European view of the desert. Traveling alone or as members of scientific expeditions, European photographers joined a movement to study and document the desert. Often working as explorers or writers as well as artists, they brought back images and information to a public that was hungry for knowledge. Lugging heavy cameras, glass plates and other photographic equipment on these expeditions would seem impossibly difficult. But the lure and the challenge of the desert--especially in Egypt--were too great to resist for intrepid pioneers.

Among those represented in the show, Maxime du Camp, Felix Teynard, J.P. Sebah and Hippolyte Arnoux worked in Egypt in the 1850s, ‘60s and ‘70s, producing astonishing images of vast, sandy landscapes and ancient structures, and often measuring mere mortals against giant sphinxes and pyramids. Sir Wilfred Thesiger, a British writer, explorer and naturalist, discovered the desert much later, on a journey by camel in 1946, but a group of his dramatically composed pictures from 1948 conveys the same sense of wonder as those of his predecessors.

Other pioneers ventured into Africa and the Middle East, with striking results. Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, a photographer and reporter who worked in Algeria, Palestine, Syria and Egypt, produced some of the first color pictures of the desert in a 1908 series of autochromes, “Visions of the Orient.” Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault, a psychiatrist who was sent to Morocco in 1918 to recuperate from a war injury, became enchanted with the country and began to photograph there. By 1920, he had taken nearly 4,000 pictures of a single subject: Moroccan women completely shrouded in white cloth. Whether pictured as groups of draped towers or as individual sculptural forms, the figures are metaphors for a dignified but ultimately unknowable way of life.

As might be expected at Cartier, “The Desert” does not present a lineup of the usual artistic suspects when it leaps forward to the contemporary component. “We had no specific strategy for selecting artists,” said Francois Quintin, who helped coordinate the exhibition. “We just wanted beautiful images.” The artists represent a wide swath of geography--France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and Israel--but they are not “obvious choices,” as Quintin said.

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Take Baladi. At 30, she’s the youngest participant and was probably the least known until her 9-by-27-foot collage “Mother of the World” (La Mere du Monde) made her the star of the show. Bigger and brighter than any of the other works, the vividly colored collage--composed of hundreds of small color prints--is also the most surprising piece because Baladi is so at home with the desert that she is free to let her imagination run wild.

“One should never forget to play,” she said, describing a process of setting up models on the desert and combining those images with prints taken elsewhere. The sky above the vast stretch of sand in her collage doubles as an ocean, scattered with fish as well as clouds. Below the sky, costumed creatures inspired by “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Little Mermaid” portray life in the desert as a fabulous day at the beach.

A citizen of the world, Baladi was born in Libya to Egyptian parents, but grew up mainly in Paris and studied business administration in London. Disenchanted with that career path, she decided to follow her artistic muse and now lives in Cairo.

The desert is neither forbidding nor strange to her. “It’s an essential state of being, without a past or a future,” she said. “A place where one can be enveloped in silence and magical light.” But it’s also a grand stage for enacting her fantasies, she added.

The two Americans commissioned to produce new work for the show, Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston, are internationally renowned photographers but surprising choices because they are not known for images of deserts. Eggleston, who was born in Memphis, Tenn., and still lives there, is a celebrated colorist who favors ordinary subject matter, while New York-based Friedlander photographs the American social scene in black and white.

Ever the Southern gentleman, Eggleston turned up at the press preview in a proper suit and tie, but said he had “fun--a lot of fun” in his unaccustomed role as a desert rat. Just as his predecessors braved the wilds of the Sahara, he explored sparsely populated deserts of Arizona, California and Utah. Even though the territory was new to him, the results are vintage Eggleston: pictures of rusty signs, tacky roadside businesses, cactuses growing under electrical wires and other evidence of man’s graceless determination.

Friedlander’s commission led to a series of pictures in the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona. Quintin sees “a kind of Jackson Pollock feeling” in Friedlander’s close-ups of snarled, dry plants. A printed statement by the artist says he became fascinated with the “mini-jungle” of trees and brush that manages to survive in extremely harsh conditions. No matter how his body of work is interpreted, it appears quite radical at Cartier because it’s an unusually intimate view of the desert. Rather than trying to represent vastness or emptiness, Friedlander focuses on a screen of plant life that blocks out the surroundings and nearly obliterates the horizon.

In sharp contrast to Friedlander’s work, Swiss artist Balthasar Burkhard’s sweeping views of sand dunes in Namibia hark back to the historic images in the show. Shot from the air with no sign of human life or intervention, these dramatic landscapes are timeless oceans of sand, affected only by powerful forces of nature.

Another Swiss artist, Beat Streuli, also takes a broad view of the desert, but his is firmly anchored in a particular place and time. Well known for images of urban life, Streuli used his commission to document his journey through an Australian desert. The result is a panorama that unfolds in a sequence of 230 slides, projected on opposite walls of a darkened room.

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Visitors who take in the entire exhibition see several videos and films creating a dream-like atmosphere that drifts through unspecified space and time. Andrei Ujica, a Romanian writer and filmmaker who lives in Berlin, created a montage of works by other filmmakers. “Visions of the Desert,” a film by Italian artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, is largely extracted from a French explorer’s travel film shot in Africa in the 1920s.

Raymond Depardon, a French artist and filmmaker, made a film linking desert images from many different parts of the world. Depardon’s images also turn up on gallery walls, as photographs overlaid with paintings of a journey to Timbuktu, in Mali, by Moroccan artist Titouan Lamazou.

In addition to these commissioned projects, Chandes selected related works by five other contemporary artists, including videos by California-based artists Bill Viola and Michael Light. Viola’s 1979 work “Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat)” juxtaposes winter landscapes in North America with scenes from a desert in Tunisia.

Light, whose work is on view at the Craig Krull Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, is represented at Cartier by a 1999 video, “Drift: 29 days, 18 hours, 2 minutes.” The black-and-white images may look like crusty desert surfaces on Earth, but they are actually pictures of “a desert in space,” as the exhibition catalog says. Light compiled the work from images in NASA’s archives documenting trips to the moon.

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“The Desert,” Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, 261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris. Ends Nov. 5. The show also will be presented at La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona from January to April 2001.