Storming the Gates of Paradise (24 page)

Landscape is both a composition and a subject. As the former, it is usually a picture of land and sky, organized by a horizon line and further organized by foreground, middle ground, and distance. As a subject, it is about nature, space, location, and other organic and inorganic elements of the physical world as well as about the desires and associations particular places call forth. Throughout much of the history of European and then American landscape, landscape was supposed to be an apolitical genre, a refuge from strife and humanity, a place apart. But in the American West, the wars were always over land until they became wars against the land waged by bombing, dumping, damming, and developing; and it is necessary here to remember that land can mean homeland, battlefield, nation, territory, and real estate. Because the history of a place is largely invisible, representing the visible landscape often ignores history in favor of aesthetics. One of the alternatives is to make works that are landscapes in content but not in form.

Misrach has made some of the most swooningly lovely landscape photographs of the American West, even if they do contain bombs, fires, floods, and ruins. But he has gone on to photograph dead animals and bomb craters below the horizon; bullet-riddled
Playboy
magazine pages from a target range near the Nevada Test Site; paintings that give a sense of the daydreams and hoardings, the cultural aspirations
and brutalities of the western places where they now hang; diurnal clouds without a horizon; and now color fields—the cloudless sky—and night skies of clouds and stars. In the relatively recent
Desert Cantos
series titled
The Playboys
and
The Paintings
, he lets representations stand in for the history of their places, for the Europeanization and conquest that are relatively subtle in the landscape itself. That the paintings are indoor phenomena though they represent landscape, that
The Playboys
are photographs of photographs, begins to open up further questions about documentary and photography: Is a photograph of a representation documentary? What are we looking at when we look at a photograph of a two-dimensional object, since photography is usually used to portray vanishing-point perspective, dimensionality, depth? What about the unclouded sky, which is the opposite of a two-dimensional object, since it is profoundly dimensional but without tangible objects? Can you have documentary photographs without a solid subject, save the color the image shows? What part of a place do you need to show in order to depict the place, since you can never show more than parts? I wrote of Misrach’s work once before that it is “so lavishly, engagingly visual that it doesn’t occur to most viewers that their principal subject is more often than not what remains unseen. He may luxuriate in the visibly beautiful, but he hardly encourages us to trust our eyes alone.” He himself writes, “I wanted to deconstruct the conventions of landscape, I wanted to deconstruct the premises of the camera premised on one-point Renaissance perspective. All three cantos in this sky book are premised on a defiance of the implicit and authoritative dictates of the camera that I have been mindlessly heeding for years. Like the telescope, the camera creates what we can see.”

What can we see in these photographs? They portray the sky as too eternal, too mutable, and too ubiquitous to supply very specific information about time and place (though the visibility of Polaris, the North Star, and the curves the constellations draw as they rotate indicate something about latitude and duration to those who know how to read them). The titles attach the specificity of locale, culture, language to these ethereal color fields and starlight drawings, turning these sublime images into records of two histories: the travels and nocturnal vigils of the artist and the naming of the sky and the American West. The sky is a blankness,
a meditation room of sorts; works in this tradition tend to invite contemplation of the sublime, the void, the pure visual experience. This is their beauty.

But these particular beautiful pictures have titles that are instructions to think about specifics of geography, history, biography, and politics. I remember a tray of bees in a natural history museum in the Rockies, each dusty insect impaled on a pin, with a tiny label floating above indicating where and when the bee was captured. Though the bees all looked alike, the labels made them into a calendar and map of the region and, perhaps, of some entomologist’s peregrinations. Similarly, these photographs are specimens of the sky impaled on language, on the words of location and the numbers of temporality. There is an awkwardness, a disjuncture between title and image; and just as the sky is an open space that invites contemplation of beauty and possibility, so the disparity between title and image is an open space to be contemplated. Here the title can be a set of instructions the viewer can choose to disobey, because when instructions don’t fit our expectations they become noticeable, and what is noticeable can be resisted. The sky is visible here, and so too in a sense is the mechanism of titles nudging the viewer toward one or another interpretation. Among the invisible displays offered by these gloriously visual artworks are the rules of photographic and linguistic representation.

One could imagine the images as a deck of cards that could be laid out according to aesthetics, geography, chronology, or by types of place-names—Biblical, violent, historical, indigenous, descriptive, personal names. Misrach himself has called them a “dysfunctional journal.” The British artist Richard Long has been “documenting” his walks in the landscape for decades with photographs of landscapes accompanied by texts revealing some scant information: how far he went, how many hours or days, what his starting point and destination were. The images do not show a walk, which is, after all, hardly representable in static media; they show unpopulated landscapes in which the text or title invites us to imagine a walk that had duration, location, direction. The texts work like the labels on the bees, like place-names, constellation names, asking us to visualize something that is not visible. Similarly these titles tell us two things the photographs do not quite show: the date of the artist’s presence in places whose names
were their attractions, and the duration of nocturnal vigils as the camera made its slow exposures. A diary of sorts is contained in the titles, not a confessional one but an austere one that, like Long’s texts, gives a few spare facts about an act and its location (and makes clear how much artmaking is about selecting what to leave out as well as selecting what to include).

This series is also a journal that has an odd reciprocity with Fremont’s record of traversing an unmapped West, locating latitude and longitude by astronomy and giving coordinates, times, and place-names all together in a kind of constellation whose points are geographical and astronomical location, personal and celestial time, and cultural imposition. These works draw up the same constellations on the open field of exploration, but for the sake of looking back at the project of inventing the American West that Fremont and his peers began. They examine what is constructed by language and what cannot be represented by language. Sometimes the location was clearly chosen to draw out humorous or peculiar relations between celestial and earthly sites, as with “Venus Seen from Virgin Valley.” The conjunction between time, place, and celestial body observed no longer calculates the exact location of a place, as it did for Fremont, but stumbles toward some inexact coordinates: of the relationship between words and images, between the beauty of experience and the information of history, between time and place, between two crucial parts of landscape—sky and location—when the land itself is absent. Stars are made of flaming gas, but constellations are made of stories. These works ask us what stories—and whose stories—have been inscribed on our experiences and what has been erased, overlooked, forgotten. And they ask us if we want stories when we have beauty, if we need meaning when we have pleasure. If names are fossilized language, these pictures perform a paradoxical act: looking skyward to excavate those fossils.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. We come to see the stars arranged as constellations, and as constellations they orient us, they give us something to navigate by, both for traveling across the earth and for telling stories, these bears and scorpions and centaurs and seated queens with their appointed places and seasons. Imagine the lines drawn between stars as roads themselves, as routes for the imagination to travel.

A metaphor is in another way a line drawn between two things, a mapping of the world by affinities and patterns, which is to say that a constellation is a metaphor for a metaphor. And the word
metaphor
in the original Greek means to transport something. So metaphors are, like constellations, navigational tools to travel by. They let us enter a world of resemblances and kinships, in which we can approach the unknown through the known, the abstract through the concrete, the remote through what comes to hand. They measure the route from here to there. The body of the beloved is a landscape, but landscape is also a body; each is traveled in terms of the other, and thus the world is knit together, with those constellating lines of imagination. Aristotle observed, “A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” So metaphors are an erotic force binding together the disparate things of this earth, the language of love, the mapping of relationship, though they do not need to be literal language: “shoulder of a road” is a phrase, but a photograph of a road and of a shoulder can convey the same resemblance, make the same relationship.

The Western Apache, writes anthropologist Keith Basso, understand automobiles in terms of the human body. When cars arrived in their culture, there were no words for the inner workings, and so the mechanically inclined men called the various working parts hearts, lungs, and other things, bringing the car to life not just through language but through the resemblances that language maps. A battery is a heart, and when headlights become eyes, the possibility of a blind car arises (and we forget the metaphor built into the head of headlights, for our own language not only coins but buries in familiarity this imagistic language of constellations: think of the trove of buried coins in this sentence).

An engine does not become biological in this constellating, nor does a heart become mechanical, but a route has been traced that connects the machine and the body. They are still themselves, but the world has been knit a little more tightly together, a path has been trod. A lowrider brings a car to life another way, by making it into a shrine, a coffin, a chapel, a social arena, and a canvas, turning a corporate product into personal and communal expression, connecting a new technology to old cultural practices, and linking together many things. We are constantly drawing the world together in terms of resemblances and recastings, and the job of artists is to draw the lines anew to startle us, wake us up, see the secret route there or where we’ve always been. Same stars, different constellations.

This is different from definition, for a definition endeavors to draw things apart, to draw lines that divide one from another: an insect is not an arachnid, a star is not a heart. But metaphor, this art of drawing constellations, draws them together. A battery
is
a heart. A lowrider car is a chapel with the sacred heart painted on it. A bed is a labyrinth in which you must find your way to the dark center. They are themselves and lovers, and perhaps like love this metaphorization lets them become more deeply themselves. A labyrinth has at its center the Minotaur that came of the Cretan queen’s copulation with a sacred bull. The Minotaur was the Greek mind/body problem—we have the urges of animals and yet have intellects—but this might not be a problem for an imagination that accepts the lines drawn to constellate things rather than to divide them.

The Cretan labyrinth was made to lose things in, notably the monster offspring of that union; but the Christian labyrinth was made to find things in,
notably the route to salvation. Thus the former has many paths, the latter only one, going, with meanders, delays, and turnarounds, to the center. The labyrinth in which the lines we draw between things become tangled, become a network of connections to get lost in. Getting lost, a necessary mode of finding things, the journey into the unknown known as questing. And perhaps, with the arrival at the center, the discovery of not the right answers but the right questions. Childbed, deathbed, marriage bed, dreamspace, cave, camera, cavern, chambered heart. Daedalus builds the Cretan labyrinth like an elaborate riddle in which to hide the Minotaur; when he is stuck in it himself, he escapes on wings of wax and fallen feathers, a route out that is not an answer to the intricacies of the labyrinth but a simple question about larger forces.

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

In Meridel Rubenstein’s photographic image “Home,” four disparate things are stacked and ordered by their visual resemblance, a concavity that cups and gathers and cherishes and invites in. Or perhaps not disparate things, but things whose definitions would not automatically connect them in this four-starred constellation about yearning and destination, which travels from the cosmos to the lover’s loins, which refuses to let the distinctions between the advanced technology of the Very Large Array satellite dish, the animal craft of the swallow’s nest on the porch, the natural forces behind the sacred salt lake of the Zuni mean more than the affinities, to let the stars signify more than the constellation drawn by the artist. More than a metaphor, which links two things, this links four, and thereby implies that more could be linked, that the world could be navigated by this finding of patterns of form and desire. That refuses the distinction between landscape and body, between animal and human, traditional and technological, to find the affinities between them, as the center of the labyrinth is the point at which all the paths arrive.