This exhibition features four works: Michelle Dee Tidwell’s The End of the Road, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, A. M. Cassandre’s Étoile du Nord, and Charles O’Rear’s Bliss. All of them involve landscapes and roads, and that shared content forms the foundation of the exhibition’s main message. Pivoting away from the content of the art, the exhibition asks what each work demands of the person looking at it, and how that demand is shaped by the conditions under which the image was meant to be seen.
The works are similar not only in what they contain but in what they don’t contain. Each landscape can be defined by its pertinent negative – the absence of an expected detail within the piece. The four are arranged according to the conditions they were designed to be seen in: how much attention was available, whether the looking was chosen, and whether it was repeated. The exhibition doesn’t organize the artworks by any physical aspect – they don’t share a time period or a medium – but by principle, and by how they are interpreted.
That principle rests on two questions: does the image resolve into a clear interpretation, and was it made as a single object or for mass reproduction? The goal of this pairing is to show that an image’s neutrality, or its refusal, is intentional rather than coincidental – whether it was manufactured for a train platform in Paris or for a computer screen installed worldwide. That reach is a kind of border crossing: Cassandre’s poster sold international travel, and Bliss gave a window into Sonoma County from anywhere in the world.
Tidwell’s artwork is unique and demanding. It was created only once, based on a specific moment in the painter’s memory. Bliss, on the other hand, asks nothing of the viewer; its serenity and blandness lead nowhere. Two further works fill the remaining gaps. Cassandre’s Étoile du Nord is a lithograph held at MoMA that depicts a train track converging on a star at the horizon. Unlike The End of the Road, it offers a reachable goal rather than an unreachable one. It was mass-produced for the Paris railway system, and its message resolves instantly. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty fills the opposite gap. It is a coil of black basalt and earth built into the Great Salt Lake in 1970. The sculpture is singular, like Tidwell’s painting, but its message is completely unresolved: the path it offers spirals inward and stops, and the work has spent most of its life underwater, obscuring its meaning.
Together, these four works trace a single question across four different answers. This exhibition asks visitors to notice that difference the next time an image asks something – or nothing – of them.
Each work is arranged by two questions, represented on the axes. First: does the image resolve into a single clear interpretation, or does it stay ambiguous? Second: was it made once, as one object, or manufactured for reproduction?
The road ends at a closed gate, with a dark overcast sky.
Rails converge on a star.
The path spirals inward and stops.
Rolling grassy hills and an innocent blue sky.
Michelle Dee Tidwell
The road fills the lower half of the canvas and runs straight at the viewer. Its yellow center line and both grassy sides pull the viewer towards a central horizon point. What exists there is a closed gate and a dramatic sky.
The painting is completely unique, and returns its main message as an unreachable destination. Its pertinent negative is everything past the gate: no continuation, no distance, no way through.
It also carries no date, unlike the other three works in this show, which run from 1927 to 1996. This means we can't set up time collisions or comparisons for this piece, which is fine. Instead, it sets up the rest of the exhibit.
A. M. Cassandre
Cassandre uses Tidwell’s device and reverses it. Everything converges on one point, and at that point sits a white star rather than a gate.
The poster was made for a train platform, to be read at a glance by a crowd for a brief second, and it is understood easily; the line runs north, and the star is the destination. Printed in large amounts for the Chemins de fer du Nord, it was never meant be a single masterpiece like Tidwell.
Made in 1927, it is also the oldest work in the show by more than four decades. A lithograph, reproduced by the thousands, meant to portray a simple idea quickly.
Robert Smithson
The work is far different from the rest. It is unique and unmovable, and known almost entirely through reproduction. Submerged by rising water from about 1972 to 2002, it spent three decades available only as photograph. Scale, salt, heat and the drive out to Rozel Point all drop out of the photograph, which is what makes this such a different artwork compared to the rest.
Of the four media in this show – oil, lithograph, sculpture, and digital photograph – this is the one where reproduction did the most work. Made in 1970, it is the only piece built rather than printed or painted, and the one where the gap between original and copy opened biggest.
Charles O’Rear
O’Rear stopped on Sonoma Highway in January 1996 and made four exposures on medium-format film. Microsoft bought the image outright in 2000 and installed it as the default desktop of Windows XP, where it appeared on something close to a billion screens.
Nothing in the frame asks for attention. The crest of the hill sits low, the center of the image is empty sky, and no figure or structure exists within the whole frame. This was chosen entirely deliberately: the picture sat behind other work, seen daily by people who were looking at something else. The green, interestingly, itself has a border history; the hillside had been cleared of vines after phylloxera, an infestation carried to California from Europe in the nineteenth century.
Shot on film in January 1996, the most recent work in the show, and only survives digitally with no physical copies to visit. Installed as the default desktop on computers everywhere, one Californian hillside crossed more borders as a product than any subject in this exhibition crosses as a picture.