EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AT THE TATE BRITAIN

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AT THE TATE BRITAIN, PIMLICO, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2010 

This is a major retrospective of the Anglo-American photographic artist Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was born Edward Muggeridge in Kingston on Thames in 1830, departing for the US in 1852. His changes of name possibly chart an attempt to distance himself from supposed, yet to us unknown, painful events of his past, or to chart a new artistic beginning. Muybridge was one of the first pioneers of photography, very quickly realising that the new art form belonged not only to a new century, but also to a new continent. In France the Impressionists had adapted photography into their work, realising that so-called photographic realism was a separable aesthetic that needed to be integrated into their practice. For Muybridge photography meant commerce and the place for his commercial activities was America, more specifically the west, with its great unexplored vistas, rising cities, railroads, Indians, settlers, buffalo. Muybridge was a combination of artist, scientific explorer and confidence man purveying snake oil and much else. 

Muybridge's commercial and scientific activities offer us insights into his character and identity. Muybridge was prone to constant misrepresentations due to his salesman's aplomb. Being self-dependent on a continent that encouraged independence Muybridge had to sell his product, initially using the nom de plume Helios, the sun god of Greek mythology. The name has clear mythological yet also sexual reference. His own name went through many permutations. Eadweard came from his reverence for Saxon Kings, who had a historical connection with Kingston. In the UK he is known as Muybridge, pronounced Mybridge, but in the US as Muybridge, pronounced Moybridge. The name on his tombstone is Maybridge, but it is only a salient point because Muybridge represents a European entrepreneur intent on establishing a reputation in America. His name changed because no one knew anything about him in the USA. Furthermore, no one knows how he became an adept photographer, but it’s believed that he learned the craft in London. 

Muybridge resembled Moses or Jehovah in later depictions, with flowing grey hair and a great grey beard. His self-proclaimed role as artistic aborigine and Old Testament prophet is underlined in photographs of the artist as an athlete in his 60s, but again Muybridge is exaggerating for at the time he was only 54 (possibly looking a lot older). Later he was to shoot dead his wife's lover, a theatre critic called Harry Larkyns who supposedly sired his daughter. However, she also appeared to strongly resemble Muybridge. Muybridge was acquitted at the subsequent trial. The jury, composed of married men of Muybridge's race and class, agreed with his defence of 'justified homocide' but Muybridge also used insanity as a defence. His images of himself perched somewhat precariously in Yosemite were used at the trial to convince jury members of the irrationality of his behaviour. Subsequently Muybridge had to lie low in Guatemala for a year or two while he ostensibly completed a new photographic commission, calling himself Eduardo Santiago Muybridge. 

While there he created a compulsive, elegiac portrait of Central America. Muybridge contrived, quite sensibly, to avoid the American Civil War, since he had to return to London after being injured in a riding accident. He spent six years in London from 1860 to 1866, known as 'the lost years' since little is known about his activities at this time. Muybridge completed panoramas of San Francisco, his adopted home, where he was supported by his patron, wealthy Californian and first Republican governor of that state, Leland Stanford. Although he was later to sue Stanford, whom he accused, quite justifiably, of plagiarism, the two men worked together on his portfolio entitled 'Animal Motion'. This was a project developed in tandem with the University of Pennsylvania, a groundbreaking study in the physics of motion that was to settle various controversies, such as the galloping movement of a horse which actually does 'fly' when all its four hooves leave the ground. Muybridge was the pioneer who compiled the proofs for this and other mysteries, yet his work also evidences a quasi-fascistic fascination with body culture. This is sometimes compulsive, obsessive, homo-erotic, pornographic and even downright odd. 

Muybridge was ostensibly interested in the physics of motion, extended this interest to depict the movements of amateur and professional athletes (but the image that interested Francis Bacon was of a black professional boxer) but his human tableaux are rigidly gendered. Men are athletes, women perform menial domestic tasks. His images of athletes influenced the work of Francis Bacon, but also of contemporaries such as Edgar Degas. Bacon was particularly interested in the image of a paralytic boy who walked on all fours, incorporating this into his painting. (It also resurfaces as a theme in the fading moments of Cobra Verde a film by Werner Herzog, featuring Klaus Kinski as the eponymous slave trader and adventurer.)

Muybridge began his career as a bookseller, importing many improbable sales man's strategies into his photographic work. He began to create portfolios of landscapes, such as his (perhaps somewhat stereotypical) depictions of Yosemite, an 'American Eden', which were nevertheless acclaimed at the time as a landmark and step forward in the depiction of clouds and natural light, which he captured through double exposures. Muybridge also sought to depict minorities and outsiders, demonstrating remarkable and untypical (for the time) sympathy, such as his depictions of Chinese labourers, who arrived in California in their thousands at the time of the gold rush in the Yukon. Furthermore, Muybridge was employed to document the Modoc War of 1873. The Modoc were an Indian nation who managed to leave their reservation moving back onto the colonised land they had formerly occupied. Muybridge naturally enough couldn't get any images of the Modoc but employed pacified Indians instead to pose for him. The Modoc were eventually returned to their reservation after much bloodshed. 

Muybridge's photographs remain a remarkable document and commentary on early America. Muybridge completed other portfolios before his death in 1904, in Kingston, also inventing the zoopraxiscope, a kind of primitive film projector that connected his images together using the illusion of persistence of vision. Muybridge's appearance, the mystery, creativity, sometime ridiculousness of his life, his eventual disappearance and legacy are adumbrated in this exhibition at the Tate Britain, London. It’s a fine adjunct to the previous Francis Bacon exhibition. There might have been more mention of Muybridge's influence, particularly on contemporaries such as Etienne-Jules Marey, perhaps a room devoted to Muybridge's influence and legacy. The exhibition is an excellent survey of Muybridge’s impact on photography, science and early cinema. 

Rachael Whitehead at the Tate Britain

 This retrospective of the work of Rachael Whitehead is an adjunct to the adjoining Eadweard Muybridge exhibition. Whitehead creates stark geometrical surfaces and interior design collages. Typically she uses materials such as graph paper, resin, ink, correction fluid, i.e. materials possessed by most secretaries. Like Jackson Pollock, Whitehead underlines the ordinariness of the artistic artificer, insisting on using commonly found materials, rather than specialised, expensive art materials. There is an architectural unity, mathematical, formal qualities that combine to create a mixture of the everyday and the esoteric. The designs are mainly sketches for her major works, Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz, Wien (2000) and Monument (2001). Her work implies primitive, untutored chaos of a rambling yet fascinated visionary, reminiscent of the work of Cy Twombly. The artist hasn't forgotten her possible pasts and these are integrated through a range of everyday materials into her work on a variety of sites. 

 Paul Murphy, London