W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #richardmisrach, #blue, #negative, #mirrorsandwindows 

Trust your feet. They will always point you towards what you like.

I can’t think of a clearer, more immediate way of learning your taste. Look down. Your feet will keep walking you up to art you respond to, that resonates with you, down to your tippy toes.

Several years ago — 2010 probably — my feet kept delivering me to a Richard Misrach exhibition in Chelsea, and, in particular, to a large, very blue landscape that mesmerized and challenged me. On first, second or fifth viewing, it startled and pleased me; it required some decoding.   

What was I looking at? It was a water-scape, large enough to make me feel swallowed up by its size and mystery. The piece behaved like a cave or garage door opening up to admit me. Enter. The perspective and scale felt true and real.

But what was it? Black was white, and up was not down. Why was it blue? We were not in Kansas anymore. 

The artist had reversed color values by outputting a large format chromatic negative as a pigment print. Got it?. I’m still not sure I do. How does he get these blues? On the color wheel, the opposite of true blue is something between yellow and red. I understand that but don’t trust that I know what I’m seeing. This is a cloud-filled scene from another dimension. 

Further where is the horizon? Does the piece divide horizontally? Yes. But then there are branches curiously sticking out of the water and being mirror reflected. The colors seem like smudged blocky thumb prints. It feels Impressionistic. It’s not representational but a photographic report delivered in an unfamiliar language.

It’s a lot of things, and it is overwhelmingly original and compelling. The size helps.  

There it is. John Szarkowski, legendary curator at the MoMA, did a show and catalogue in the late 1970s, “Mirrors and Windows”. It questioned whether “in metaphorical terms, the photograph is seen either as a mirror — a romantic expression of the photographer's sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world; or as a window — through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality”. A photograph “is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?”*1

The Misrach is both, a Gordian knot to be untied and an intense yet pleasurable journey of looking and thinking. 

*1 Both statements are from the press release, “Mirrors and Windows: American Photographs since 1960”, Museum of Modern Art, No. 56., June 1978.

© 2021

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