ART REVIEWS : A Chronicle of the American West’s Betrayal

For more than a decade Richard Misrach’s art has been doing a slow burn across the American West. Chronicling man’s obscene defilement of the deserts of the Southwest, his images of ravaged stretches of land stand as a brutally frank inquiry into what he describes as our “failed stewardship” of nature. His work seems to get more politically aggressive with every passing year and his recently published book, “Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West” (with text by his wife Myriam Weisang Misrach), will surely stand as one of the most powerful indictments of environmental abuse in the late 20th Century.

The current exhibition at the Jan Kesner Gallery in Hollywood offers an unusual look at Misrach. Sifting through eight years of Misrach’s work, gallery director Jan Kesner selected 12 images of populated landscapes; though the residue of human presence is always central to Misrach’s work, man himself is rarely present in his pictures, so this show casts a very different light on him. Whether or not it was intended, the exhibit underscores the lyrical aspect of Misrach’s sensibility--these have to be some of the “softest” pictures he’s ever shot. This is the Misrach show for viewers who want to like him, but find much of his work simply too tough to take.

Almost all the pictures employ a similar approach to composition (a low horizon line and a vast expanse of sky), and half of the images involve vast bodies of water punctuated by swimmers, blurry and far in the distance, dwarfed by becalmed waters. The water pictures are executed in soft focus and muted pastels, both of which serve to intensify a heavy sense of atmosphere. Time is slowed to a narcotized pace in these eerie pictures, and you can feel the weight of water and air. The show also includes pieces from Misrach’s critically acclaimed series on fires in the desert, and the shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base.

More important perhaps is the Los Angeles debut of work from “Bravo 20,” on view in the upstairs gallery. In 1986, Misrach stumbled across a parcel of public land in Nevada known as Bravo 20 where the government began conducting illegal bombing practice in 1953; these pictures document the results of years of military rape. Plants and animals native to the region are long since gone--all that’s left in this land of the dead are rusting war toys and brightly colored ponds of poison chemicals.