FORT WORTH — In an era dominated by wave after wave of new technology, two complementary shows at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art offer a look back at media technologies from previous generations.
The first surveys the work of Karl Struss, who established himself as a still photographer in the pictorialist style in the 1910s and 1920s, before becoming an Oscar-winning Hollywood cinematographer. The second centers on a new film installation by the San Antonio-born, Houston-based artist Dario Robleto. The film explores the Golden Record, which is being carried beyond the Solar System by the Voyager spacecraft, intended as a document of human life on Earth for any extraterrestrial beings who might someday find it.
In both exhibitions, the steady advance of technological progress provides essential context for the work on display. For Struss, who was born in 1886, still photography was on the rise as a new art form during his early years, and his career peaked as movies evolved from a new invention to well-established mainstream entertainment.
But both his still photography and his cinematography for the great directors Cecil B. DeMille and F.W. Murnau drew on venerable references from art history. Struss’ pre-World War I photographs of New York City omit any hint of smoke, noise, dirt or urban chaos, instead lifting modern monuments such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the old Penn Station into a realm of tranquility and order.
In Brooklyn Bridge, Nocturne, glowing lights trace an elegant path along the edge of the bridge’s span, and the urban agglomeration in the background is reduced to a single skyline, suggesting an impressionist painting. Pennsylvania Station shows the colossal waiting room, pierced by shafts of light, to be as grand as the monumental Roman baths that inspired it. The businessmen walking under the lofty lampposts seem to be as still as statues.
Struss’ film stills for Male and Female, DeMille’s 1919 desert-island adventure, depict Bebe Daniels and Gloria Swanson in ancient Babylonian costume, with the latter sprawled out beneath the paws of a live lion. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise, for which Struss’ cinematography won an Oscar, goes still further back than Babylon, to a fairy-tale world in which nameless characters — “The Man,” “The Wife” and “The [Other] Woman” — re-enact the eternal human story of love and tragedy.
While Struss proved adept at telling old stories in new media, Robleto’s work addresses scales of time and distance that dwarf human history. The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, are already billions of miles from the sun, but thousands more years will pass until either one approaches another star. Wouldn’t human culture seem infinitesimally small and insignificant against this backdrop, and not worth trying to document?
Rejecting any such reasoning, NASA turned to a committee that included astronomer Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, his future wife, to produce a record that might give future extraterrestrials a glimpse of life on Earth. On a 12-inch gold-plated disk, they recorded greetings in 55 languages, musical selections and other sounds, and encoded 116 images of life on Earth.
Robleto’s new film, Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, is inspired by one of these “life signs” — a recording of Druyan’s heartbeat and brainwaves, during which she thought about the pain that humans can inflict on each other — as well as by the first audio recording of warfare, from 1918, which was ultimately left off the Voyager record. Weaving together montages of historical images, narration and musical accompaniment, Robleto’s film reflects on which face of humanity we should present to the broader cosmos: the noble, or the brutish?
Along with the film, a gallery of thematically related works gives further insight into Robleto’s broader preoccupations with natural history and the scientific measurement of human experience. These works include Unknown and Solitary Seas (Dreams and Emotions of the 19th Century), which renders early sound recordings of human blood flow in lacquer, brass and gold leaf; and American Seabed, which combines fossilized whale ear bones, butterfly specimens and tape recordings of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”
Robleto’s work has been featured across the country, and he has collaborated with a wide range of fellow artists. This show is his first in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In a tech-heavy time and place, his work is a model for artists engaging with science: neither simply with rejection nor celebration, but with thoughtful sensitivity.
Details
“Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood” is on view through Aug. 25, and “Dario Robleto: The Signal” is on view through Oct. 27 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (open till 8 p.m. on Thursdays) and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. Free admission. cartermuseum.org, 817-738-1933.
