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| John Twachtman, Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone, 1895. Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas |
This fall's "PST ART: Art & Science Collide" has come early to the Autry Museum. Now on view is an exhibition ("Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West") and two installations falling under the PST umbrella.
"Out of Site" explores how the powers that be have used picture-making innovations to document the Western landscape. The high point of a small selection of paintings is American Impressionist John Twachtman's Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone, lent from Texas' underappreciated Stark Museum, east of Houston. Predating Monet's Water Lilies, and in some ways more radical, Edge of the Emerald Pool zooms in on a boiling-hot pool of blue-green bacteria, a Darwinian and literal Origin of the World.
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| Detail of Emerald Pool |
The Emerald Pool was on Gilded Age bucket lists. New York socialite J. Sanford Saltus deemed it
"…the most beautiful thing in the way of wonderland water I have ever seen, and I have seen many wonderful and beautiful lakes, lagoons, ponds, and pools in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Canada Mexico, the Mediterranean and West India Islands… Fill a thin goblet with Crème de Menthe, on the top drop a few 'beads' of absinthe, and you will have a faint, only a faint idea of the glistening green glory of Emerald Pool, which can be compared to nothing unless one can imagine liquefied Chinese fire or the unknown, unnamable tones seen under the influence of an anesthetic or during delirium."
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| Thomas Moran, Hot Springs of the Yellowstone, 1872. LACMA |
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| Frederic Remington, Fight for the Waterhole, 1903. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
I'm not much for Frederic Remington, but his
Fight for the Waterhole is as good a cowboy picture as you're likely to see. In this high-stakes summer of 2024, it's a vision of America as a zero-sum game.
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| John Divola, Blue with Exceptions, 16576 (12_16_2020), 2020. Courtesy of the artist, (c) John Divola |
Photographs span Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan to John Divola and Richard Misrach. I was most impressed, however, with a display of facsimile images of atomic bomb tests by Harold Edgerton. The MIT professor is otherwise known as the van Eyck of stroboscopic photography. "Doc" Edgerton invented a distinct technology, the Rapatronic camera, to photograph U.S. atomic tests of the 1950s and 1960s. These images reveal the Bomb as a death's head wraith hovering over the Western landscape.
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| Harold Edgerton, Nuclear Explosion |
"Out of Site" is a theory-dense show whose more conceptual works require explanation. Unfortunately, the gallery texts are
absurdly hard to read. Object labels are printed on knee-high, dimly lighted, charcoal grey panels. Are near-invisible museum labels becoming a thing?
Christopher Knight complained about the issue at the Simone Leigh show. "Out of Site" (Out of Sight?) is even worse.
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| "Out of Site" label |
"Out of Site" runs through Jan. 5, 2025. Another PST show, "Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology," opens Sep. 7 for a nearly two-year run. Already on view are two related installations, Wendy Red Star's Stirs Up the Dust and Virgil Ortiz's ReVOlt 1680/2180.
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| Wendy Red Star, Stirs Up the Dust, 2011. Autry Museum of the American West |
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| Virgil Ortiz, "ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas" |
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