'SlideShow,' Projecting a Surprising Artistic Depth
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 13, 2005

Vivid colors, glowing brighter than any painting ever could. An image as big as a medieval tapestry but easy to take from place to place. A realism so intense that faces "all but smile back at you." This was the "magic of color slides," as advertised by Kodak in the 1950s and '60s. Sounds like the perfect medium for crafting beautiful, eye-catching art.

It's no wonder that some of the leading artists of that era turned to slides. The wonder is that they almost all ignored the more obvious, superficial virtues of the medium, as touted by Kodak. Instead they looked more deeply into what a slide could do and mean for art. The results weren't always arresting at first glance, but they were gripping once you gave them thought.

An impressive new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, titled "SlideShow," surveys artists' use of the projected photograph from 1966 to 2002. Curator Darsie Alexander has installed it on the museum's second floor in a lavish suite of spaces that give the show's 18 ambitious works the room they need to breathe. (The visit takes some time: To view every slide in every piece demands a full afternoon at least, without even allowing for contemplation or backtracking.)

Incredibly, this is said to be the first major exhibition on the topic of the slide in art, even though the artistic use of Kodachrome has never been a secret. The show comes at a telling moment: Just as it was being finalized, Kodak announced that it had built its last slide projectors. A few years from now, the art in "SlideShow" may seem quaintly nostalgic rather than cutting-edge.

The show's biggest name may be Robert Smithson, the American artist most famous for his "Spiral Jetty," a kind of fiddlehead of boulders extending into Great Salt Lake.

The much stranger Smithson piece in "SlideShow" is called "Hotel Palenque." It has none of the obvious splash of his jetty. Weirdly modest, "Hotel Palenque" consists of 31 Instamatic-style color shots of a decrepit hotel in the Mexican state of Chiapas, which Smithson screened in a 1972 presentation to a class of architecture students. In Baltimore, the slides are projected in sync with an audio recording of Smithson's original analysis of them.

In the 1960s, color photography of any kind was still a sure sign of "low" culture; most art photographers would shoot only in black-and-white. Smithson wanted to see what he could accomplish by sticking to the format of a humble rec room slide show, where someone does a show-and-tell about neat things he's come across.

The artist's job, "Hotel Palenque" seems to say, isn't to put new kinds of fancy stuff into the world, as the era's big-shot abstract artists did. It is to think through the reality already there. In that way the piece foreshadows some of the most important work that's come along since.

The hotel can't have been very old when Smithson discovered it: It was full of the sleek detailing of mid-century design. Already, however, large sections of it were falling apart; other parts were only half-built in the first place. Smithson's slide show walks us through the building as the artist ad-libs on what he sees.

He insists that the hotel's tiled floor is a better work of abstract art than any of the canvases on show in New York. He tries a riff or two on a turtle pool in the hotel lobby.

The original audience laughs nervously throughout. There's a feeling that some of Smithson's off-the-cuff remarks are more or less absurd -- and that he knows it. It gradually becomes clear that the goal isn't only to explain a crumbling hotel in Mexico. The work is also a piece of performance art that shows an artist adopting a new role. It hints at the deadpan humor of one of those Andy Kaufman shticks in which the comedian first puts on some sad-sack persona, then dares us to laugh as his creation flounders.

Rather than crafting objects for critics to spin a tale around, as had always been the case before, Smithson becomes a tale-teller himself. He confronts the world around him -- on the fly, just as he finds it, Instamatic-ready -- and tries to see what kinds of meaningful content he can winkle out of it.

Or maybe Smithson's content and the process of finding it reflect back on each other: There's a sense that the haphazard structure that we see in Smithson's photos is mirrored in the casual structure of his talk. The fractured building could even be a metaphor for the disjointed world that's captured in his new kind of art, and in many other works that use slide carousels. Irish artist James Coleman goes over some of the same territory in his appropriately titled "Slide Piece," another slide-and-audio work from 1972. A banal snapshot of some parked cars on an utterly banal European street appears on the screen, while a posh, Kenneth Clarkish voice goes into an absurdly detailed formal analysis of how the haphazard composition works. The speaker waxes poetical, for instance, about the layout of eight small stones gathered around the base of a scruffy tree. There's a brief pause, we hear the click of the projector -- and precisely the same slide reappears, 80 times in all, with the same voice going on about some totally different, equally trivial aspect of the scene. It talks about the way the light happens to reflect off the dimples on a Volkswagen truck; about the shape of the letters in a gas station's "TOTAL" sign. There's a kind of sendup of how such obsessive formal analysis, the hottest trend in postwar art criticism, manages to ignore most of what matters in a picture. But there's also an acknowledgment of how preposterously much there is to say about even the most routine image of the world.

That sense of coming to grips with the plenty that's out there all around us is probably the single most important thread in this exhibition. It's front and center in the 690 slides projected in Nan Goldin's famous "Ballad of Sexual Dependency."

"Ballad" started life as an untitled presentation that Goldin would put on for friends and peers in the rough-and-ready artistic circles of New York's Lower East Side, circa 1980. It was basically a family slide show, since the people watching were often the same drug addicts, toughs and marginal figures who appeared in Goldin's crude commemorative snapshots. But it wasn't long before Goldin realized that an inventory of her quirky milieu could have an appeal beyond the players in it: The "raw data" contained in what she'd done had a special fascination.

The sheer quantity of information in the images on show seemed to compensate for a lack of quality in any single shot. In fact there is a sense that Goldin's quantity may put the whole idea of quality in doubt. It's as if the aesthetic contemplation of a single virtuoso picture can distract from what it shows, whereas flashing a vast suite of pictures onto a screen can give a better sense of how the world really comes at us. A slide show presents reality as full of undigested stuff, with our job being to somehow try to sort it out.

Even the street scenes of Helen Levitt, an older photographer known for working in a kind of Cartier-Bresson mode, change their meaning in this exhibition. Once they're shown in color, and projected as a sequence on the wall -- as they were first displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974 -- they suddenly stop feeling like traditional, discrete aesthetic objects. They seem instead to give almost unmediated access to a larger world that is doled out to us in bits as they flash by.

The artists in this show realized that something that looks like a minor change of technique -- a switch from reflected to projected light, and from images presented singly to images presented in sequence -- in fact gives radically new results. The kind of leisurely absorption we're used to in paintings or printed photographs, or even in the nearly static loops of art film and video, almost disappears in a slide show. No single image is up long enough to be absorbed in full.

Of course feature films also involve a sequence of projected images that speed before our eyes, but they provide a crutch of narrative to help us manage the flow. The slide shows of Smithson and his peers don't do that. They're carefully structured to force us to confront the radical disjunctions that reality throws up at us. They're like complex collages stretched out over time. At best you can get an overall impression of the way things work -- in the world, or in its slide-show equivalent -- but there's no time to reach final conclusions.

Uncle Bob's slide show of Niagara Falls put us to sleep. "SlideShow" wakes us up to all the good stuff that was hidden in it.

ABOUT 'SLIDESHOW' "SlideShow," which runs through May 15, presents 18 projected installations as well as Louise Lawler's "External Simulation," a billboard-size projection appearing on the facade of the museum during rush hour every evening. It also includes a room of vintage projection equipment and material on the history of slides, with documentary footage on the manufacture of Kodak's last projectors.

An exhibition catalogue, with informative essays by curator Darsie Alexander as well as scholars Charles Harrison and Robert Storr, is available for $29.95 in the museum shop.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, on Art Museum Drive at North Charles and 31st streets, three miles north of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, is open Wednesday to Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $7, $5 for students and seniors, and free for those younger than 18. Call 410-396-7100 or visit www.artbma.org.