for laurie lange

Guggenheim fellow Michael Berman offers a gallery full of lovely pictures of his walks in the middle of nowhere. These are carbon pigment prints, and the spectrum of textures and shades of grey is rich. The landscape shots are of a piece with the southwestern landscape-as-scenic-icon oeurve. It's a plentiful oeurve. As lovely as Berman's landscape images are---and they truly are lovely---I can't honestly say I think they contribute anything new, except perhaps to point a bit more pointedly to the beauty of and need to preserve our extreme southwestern landscapes, the ones ranchers tend to size up with an assessment such as, “that land could grow a lot o' head”.

Berman also adopts the pictorial idiom of the abandoned object---a TV without innards in the window of an long uninhabited stucco building. We also have a lot of this oerve. They mean less to me, personally, than the landscape lionized as icon: gorgeous landscapes fetchingly presented offer a place for the mind's eye to inhabit, but is there really something in a gutted television to lionize? Such images hold my attention for a minute hinting at something profound in the cultural detritus, but I'm unable to find anything behind that momentary surface tension. It seemed a mistake for 3 images of this sort to be among the few chosen for inclusion as larger prints, 18 x 24 or so, on the wall opposite the couple hundred 8” x 8” prints. Several more landscapes to roam in at that size would have been my choice for enlargements on display.

The most compelling of Berman's images are the handful of closeups of animal life. Rattlesnakes curled peaceably in the middle of a cliff notch ( and some rattlers are this pacific), the remains of rodents and birds skeletonized by their desert habitat. The mummified wildlife speaks volumes about the meteorological extremes our grasslands encompass: inland oceans drenched in solar exposure, whipped bone dry by winds, the creatures both taken down and preserved by the extremes of the place they haunt. One in particular caught my eye: a wasps' nest protruding from the empty space inside a mummy of ?squirrel? or ?rabbit? or? Not possible to identify the animal, nose turned aside toward 2 leaves on the sand as if to speak to them in its state as spirit. Though the image is a bit buried in grey tones, the content here over-rides the greyness. This is one of those visuals to come back to and explore for a long time without losing interest. Some images hold up under prolonged scrutiny. This one is of that sort. I pray for our wild neighbors these days when I see and hear them, and these pictures moved me to that prayer.

Apparently Berman walks at random for days on end to capture his shots. Having just completed our walking piece, and finding nothing especially new about his images per se, I left the gallery thinking that I'd like to have seen his walking practice included somehow in the work. The places he's walked are truly an oceanic subject and the picture plane here embodies so much: auditory vastness, topographic and environmental mysteries, elemental and wild power that goes beyond carbon pigment. Walking practice is both an activity to take us deeper and a challenge to convey in an artform. I'd love to see what Berman might do with an inclusion of how he walks alongside or in his prints.