»The Lake Project

Some sculptors (photographers?) have an obsession with interpreting the implications of environmental degradation.

Like the Spiral Jetty, the physical evolution of the piece is important; as with Andy Goldsworthy, photography is integral.

May 9, 2004
Hell From the Air: California's Toxic Landscape
By AMEI WALLACH
`David Maisel: The Lake Project'
James Nicholson Gallery, 49 Geary Street,
San Francisco. Through May 29.

SAUSALITO, Calif.

RIDING in a steeply banking Cessna four-seater three years ago, David Maisel leaned out into a clamorous, icy wind and photographed the toxic, desiccated surface of Owens Lake. "You feel like you're descending into these layers of hell," he says of the plane's dive from 3,500 feet. "You're a disembodied eye and the lake bed has this corporeal aspect. It's like a body that has undergone surgery, with red veins that seem internal."

As Mr. Maisel renders it, the lake, which has been drained over the last 90 years to green the lawns and ice the whiskeys of Los Angeles, looks scourged and flayed. The red veins are concentrations of bacteria and minerals, making the Owens Valley in southeastern California the country's largest source of particulate-matter pollution when the winds blow. Local residents call the relentless clouds of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, chlorine and iron the "Keeler cloud" in honor of a small settlement at the edge of the lake best known from Roman Polanski's 1974 film "Chinatown."

In Mr. Maisel's photos, the vistas are majestic, terrifying and weirdly beautiful. They seem more intimate than microscopic data, vaster than extraterrestrial space. They are on view at the James Nicholson Gallery in San Francisco and have just been published in "David Maisel: The Lake Project," by Nazraeli Press.

Mr. Maisel, 43, belongs to a growing category of photographers — like Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky and Emmet Gowin — obsessed with interpreting the implications of environmental degradation, often seen from the air. (A more romanticized version of the form was popularized by the French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's traveling international outdoor exhibition and book, "Earth From Above.")

Mr. Maisel was a student at Princeton when he helped Mr. Gowin photograph the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption. He compares his own work to the apocalyptic, mythological landscapes of Anselm Kiefer. Like Mr. Kiefer's paintings, which draw the viewer into a contemplation of history, "The Lake Project" implicates both photographer and viewer in the horror and beauty of what they see. "I want the images to be troubling," Mr. Maisel said recently in his studio here. "You're seduced by the incredible images and their strange unworldly beauty, and then you find out what they're about and you're betrayed. It parallels the ways we are seduced as a contemporary society into believing that how we live doesn't matter."

After graduate school in architecture and landscape architecture at Harvard, he photographed Rocky Mountain copper mines "and the whole miasma of destruction associated with the process," as he put it. But when he processed the film, he found himself unwilling to play the blame game. "Who am I to criticize?" he asked. "I live in the 20th century. I have copper rivets on my jeans." So he dropped the give-away titles, like "Cyanide Leaching Fields," and began numbering his images, so that their hallucinogenic mystery would take precedence. The specifics of environmental decimation, along with images from his many photographic series, are available on his Web site, www.davidmaisel.com.

But the images never entirely resolved into abstract form. "It occurred to me that I could be taking pictures of my studio floor," he said, lifting a foot off the red-stained concrete that was scored with lines left by the glue that once secured linoleum tiles. "It does look like something I would shoot," he noted. "But to me it would be meaningless. There is a way that I'm trying to move back and forth between the content and the process of abstraction, where the image alone can take you in and you can respond to it as metaphor."

He first photographed Owens Lake on Sept. 5 and 6, 2001, concentrating on the creases of salt that ruptured the shallow pools of blood-red bacteria. After Sept. 11, he didn't want to look at those pictures so connected in his mind to the bloodshed in New York, where he grew up. When he returned to the project in 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun flooding the lake to control the polluting clouds of minerals. He started to feel that he was viewing a process of artificial resuscitation, as if the lake were a body under a surgeon's knife. His mother had died in 1998 after a succession of heart operations, and he said he equated his photography to "an autopsy, with the idea that you can assemble the parts of a body and think you might actually reveal a whole person."

Geometry, however, remains the more prevalent theme in his work. It emerges in his latest project, "Terminal Mirage," which chronicles the Great Salt Lake and the re-emergence of Robert Smithson's earth sculpture, "Spiral Jetty." In one extraordinary photograph, the jetty is a diminutive line of coiling white, like a drawing that dissolves into stained washes of amethyst and Pompeiian red.

"I used to make imaginary drawings that were like these images — it's in my brain, and it has to come out one way or another," Mr. Maisel said, lifting photograph after photograph out of a box. "With this new body of work, I don't feel the burden of the history of Owens Lake or the death of my mother." He closed the box. "I'm much more free," he said. "I'm tempted to draw again."

The art critic Amei Wallach has written for Art in America, ArtNews and The Nation.

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