Real Machines, Imaginary Gardens

Justine Kurland, Erin Shirreff, and Robert Adams

More than thirty-five years ago, Leo Marx described the machine in the garden. Today he might have found a camera—or a steam shovel preparing earthworks.

When Marx wrote The Machine in the Garden in 1964, he tapped into an anxiety within the American dream. The dream involves a uniquely American landscape—and a people with the uniquely American character to possess it. And by doing so, by planting the machine in the garden, they make both unsustainable. Artists have been trying to get back to the garden ever since, even before Woodstock. They include staged and real photographs, but also slide shows and miniature land art. They play with eternity, but they are strongly colored by the edge between nature and community in the American West.

A wry, skeptical version underlies photographs by Justine Kurland. She stages parables of innocence and experience in the great outdoors. Erin Shirreff revises land art from the 1960s within the space of a gallery. "Point to one end, which is always present" uses perceptual changes as echoes of ruins indoors and out. For lovers of ash (and Ash Wednesday), the title even quotes T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton." Twenty-five years earlier, Robert Adams walked the suburbs at night, finding it hard to distinguish Marx's anxiety from the comforts of home.

The camera in the garden

For all his criticism, Marx still sounds downright nostalgic, simply by identifying modern America with a spoiled paradise. Of course, Eden has another notorious spoiler. Artists are mostly more into sex than machines anyway—unless, like Max Ernst, they conflate them. Justine Kurland's photos have the virtue of including both. She all but says as much in the show's title, "This Train Is Bound for Glory." Kurland gained attention by plunking down nudes in the woods. This time, though, Marx's "landscape of the psyche" opens up a bit, people scavenge for clothes, and sex simmers well beneath the surface.

The troubled communal ideal lingers in a fiddler on rocky ground or a couple resting beneath a fallen tree. It lingers in the tawdry sheds and trailers, one decorated with a castoff bar sign: "no cover over twenty-one." Innocence has shifted from nudity to childhood, as William Blake never imagined, but children do not look at all safe. One hides naked on the back porch, while a hobo lures another into water—or something worse. He or another scruffy man has tattoos for two female names, and I had to wonder about their fate.

If Kurland's storyline seems awfully familiar, so will the way she creates it. Jeff Wall remade street photography years ago, as deliberately staged and meticulously casual. He might have searched high and low for the beer cartons and old clothes that line Kurland's deserted railroad tunnel. And she studied at Yale with Gregory Crewdson, whose suburbia lingers like dreams. Along with Cindy Sherman and Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Crewdson has made it hard to picture an American scene without artifice and raw sex. With Hannah Liden and Naomi Fisher, too, every forest becomes a cross between a nudist colony, a frat party, and a fashion shoot.

For all that, Kurland truly believes in both the machine and the garden. She has merely transposed them from Crewdson's automobiles to freight rail—and from manicured lawns to hardscrabble country. She has also spent a long time looking for scenes to stage and scenes to accept. She has also found people other than her friends to act out her dramas. Her perspective makes everything look like collage, but she saw it all. I doubt she added more to the long tunnel than her camera angle.

Kurland shuns Crewdson's magic and Liden's fashion sense. Yet she is as much in love with the land as with the trash. Her deep focus gives the near ground an unnatural crispness, but leaves a hazy light in the distance. A far-away valley seems to restage Frederic Edwin Church with a toy train set. She often comes across as too obvious or too ragged around the edges, but that, too, has a point. The camera itself is now a machine in the garden.

It is not alone. Artists have done more than probe the border between nature and culture. They have recreated both in their own image. Earthworks reacted against the geometric rigor of Minimalism. At the same time, they planted the spare forms of a gallery's white cube in the earth, on a scale that art had not seen even in Baroque churches. Were earthworks the ultimate in outsider art or the first taste of a global art world? Maybe something as modest, comic, and perceptive as Kurland's longings was there all along.

Ash Wednesday

Land art had many beginnings, some of them indoors and in New York City. A single work could have many beginnings and ending, too. In 1968 Robert Smithson displayed a corner piece of gravel and mirrors. And that same year an exhibition called "Earthworks" declared a movement. Outdoors, artists left New York to escape a museum's strictures—including the demand for great art. All they seemed to want was America. Smithson embraced entropy, and his Spiral Jetty has vanished and risen again from the Great Salt Lake.

For all that, land art reaches for eternity. That comes with the surrender to nature's rhythms. In escaping the city, an artist is staking out territory, just like suburbia, and such artists as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy in England have mimed ancient monuments. Michael Heizer has threatened to shoot intruders on his unfinished City, and transforming the Nevada desert does not come cheap. James Turrell has been working on Roden Crater in Arizona—and raising money for it—since 1979. Entropy is a law of large numbers anyway, even in a handful of dust.

So which is it, modesty or overreach? Most art movements run a course from one to the other, just like conceptual art and installations since 1990. Erin Shirreff reverses course. She brings earthworks into the gallery, on a human scale. In fact, they take the old-fashioned form of sculpture, still images, or a slide projection. Yet they glimpse at something beyond.

"Landscapes, Heads, Drapery, and Devils" even sounds haunted, but it stays down to earth. Angled planes have the awkwardly human poses of public sculpture by Joel Shapiro. And Shirreff has made them of compressed ash, like human remains. Photos of what look like fossil relics capture models of wax and clay, not unlike the studio constructions of Sara VanDerBeek. On video, phases of some planet's moon slowly brighten, darken, or turn. These, too, start with studio objects, and they will add a much-needed austerity to "Greater New York" as well.

The slide show tackles Roden Crater itself. Turrell planned the two-mile impact crater as a nexus of chambers, tunnels, and natural light. Shirreff's images stick to an exterior profile and the play of light. Like the videos and photographs, it feels a little too familiar, like public television. However, the changes in light and color tell a story, and Turrell has been trying to tell it for thirty years. Maybe he should settle for the off-white textures of ash and clay.

Like Shirreff, Shana Lutka in "Point to one end, which is always present" photographs models, but of perspective flooring that pauses abruptly on the edge of infinity. Will Rogan and Lauren McKeon evoke urban clock towers, with cyanotypes made by the light of sunset. Dan Attoe's mapping of Old Faithful gives nature a mathematical structure that Smithson would envy, though it looks more like a cover for Boy's Life. A column fragment between mirrors by Allyson Vieira combines Smithson's floor pieces with echoes of an actual ancient monument, the Parthenon, while other plaster evokes its weathered entablature in another way. Bob Linder simply screws a steel cane into the gallery floor, though the gallery insists that it is Eliot's "still point of the turning world." But could another still point lie in the present—and on the edge of the American continent?

Smiles of a summer night

In 1976, nearing forty, Robert Adams could not lie still and rest. He began taking photographs on summer walks at night, and through 1982 he assembled a very personal record of a Colorado suburb. But what did it reveal?

For starters, it revealed a photographer close to home. In "Summer Nights, Walking," Adams never exaggerates. Take a few step backs, and the prints almost fade to black. Yet the darkness has a remarkable range—from the glow of a street lamp to the depth of shadows within bushes. Light glistens on leaves like dew. He takes things one at a time, like a front porch or driveway, without a formalist's symmetry or an expressionist's cutting off subjects before the edge, but houses and cars clearly emerge from the distance. Slowly, as one looks, a picture of America takes shape.

Interpreting that picture is another matter. Adams spoke of capturing the "timelessness and peace of summer evenings," as the gallery sums it up. The gallery itself sees mostly foreboding, though, and one can make a strong case for both. Simply by walking, he put aside aerial views and superhuman vistas for thoughts of home. Nothing breaks the quiet. Close shots immerse him in the scene before him, as if in touch with both earth and community even in automobile culture.

Yet close shadows, unnatural lights, starless skies, empty spaces, looming masses, and uncertain distances leave their impression as well. A carousal ride looks unstable and abandoned, although a tiny silhouette beside it gives the fifty photos practically their sole trace of life. One can credit the ambiguity to the photographer's objectivity—or his mixed feelings. Marks includes a wider range than in the series' first show, in 1985. Adams himself said that a fuller display would have been "less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety, and stillness." That includes the experience of a man entering middle age and too restless at night to stay home.

The ambiguity could also belong to a place between the American West and suburban sprawl, like Lee Friedlander without a highway or Crewdson without color and special effects. The Rocky Mountains, although not far to the west, hardly make an appearance, unlike power lines and convenience stores. One could be anywhere, in suburban anonymity, but somehow one knows that this is the edge of the American landscape. Like the Hudson River School before him, Ansel Adams shows the mark of the imagination on wilderness. This Adams shows the encroachment of landscape and community on each other.

That encroachment can be real, like a newspaper crumbled on the ground—its headline, a sale on "body fashions," further proof of a physical and cultural imprint on the soil. It can be visual, like a tree's broad shadow on white siding, or metaphorical, like artificial lights that flare out into open flames. It can be downright surreal, like a window that appears cut into the woods, under skies and a crescent moon out of René Magritte. Either way, the edge of nature and community has melted for good. Cities suffered in the 1970s, with only glimmerings of the dissatisfaction that fueled gentrification and a return to inner cities a decade later. Adams offers one last look before turning home.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Justine Kurland ran at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through November 14, 2009, Erin Shirreff at Lisa Cooley through December 20. "Point to one end, which is always present" ran at Small A Projects through February 14, 2010, Robert Adams at Matthew Marks through April 17.