Muybridge Murder: The Musical!
Part 1 of our 2-Part Hit-Piece on Phillip Glass's 'The Photographer'!
Mr. Muybridge Showing His Instantaneous Photographs of Animal Motion at the Royal Society (detail), London News, May 25, 1889, artist unknown.
Phillip Glass is one of those crossroads figures with feet in the avant-garde of many media. Classically trained in the footsteps of Aaron Copland, Glass was attentive to the collision of theater, music, and visual arts into one art experience. Reach into Glass’s bag and pull out a hard-to-classify artifact: the score to the abstract feature film Koyaanisqatsi; a documentary on the sculptor Mark di Suvero; a dance collaboration with Sol Lewitt; musical settings for the poems of Leonard Cohen. A portrait of Glass was one of Chuck Close’s first mature works; Brian Eno and David Byrne make appearances.1
Glass was just right there, in the crossroads — and so when approached to create an opera based on the life of Eadweard Muybridge, one of the major figures in the invention of the motion picture and another artist that stood at mighty crossroads —
“I said of course. Muybridge is someone whose work is very familiar in the art world, and I scarcely know an artist who doesn’t have a Muybridge postcard or photograph on their studio wall, probably because the severe structuralism of his photographic series appeals to a modern sense.”2
Glass’s first pass at The Photographer was performed once in Amsterdam in 1982 before being entirely retooled for a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984. A new playwright stepped in; sections were re-arranged; inevitably David Byrne got involved. The final product shaped the presentation of Muybridge’s career around bits of found text from one of the most dramatic events in Muybridge’s life — his trial for murder.
Not unlike the Cozad Killing that haunted Robert Henri,3 the Muybridge Murder was a matter of settling the facts. Who owns this? Who gets to name it? Get out your red yarn and repurpose your vision board, because everything is connected — and it goes all the way to the top!
II. Tracing the Landscape.
Glass had the Muybridge story bottled in this paradoxical remark:
“Other than the facts, there seems to be very little biographical information about Muybridge.”4
The facts themselves played out in court documents and newspaper headlines, and we’ve touched on some of the formative moments in Muybridge’s career previously — how he suffered a severe brain injury in a stage-coach accident, only to be nursed back to health by the Queen’s personal physician, whom later amateur sleuths have suggested was also Jack the Ripper, and who first suggested that Muybridge take up photography; that he adopted a series of pen-names and identities with increasingly elaborate spellings, stopping over in the identity of “Helios, the Sun God” before taking up the unconventional spelling of his name by which he is known today.5
But if Glass sounds too deep in the cups of his own electric kool-aid, one of the driving features of Muybridge’s work was a belief that the visual language of the day was inadequate to express all the visual truths of the human experience. There was so much more to the story than the written record of “facts” — and Muybridge set out to make the tools of visual language more suited for the task.
By 1867, his wits regained from the unhorsing incident, Muybridge started off in the footsteps of the great landscape painters, bringing his tripod and camera to many of the same sites that Albert Bierstadt had visited in 1863. Bierstadt and other painters of the West had built their reputations on the simple idea that they would show the Urban East the surreal extremes of the landscape of the West: impossibly tall trees! Impossible grand canyons! Impossible mineral springs and geysers and waterfalls — believe what Bierstadt6 tells you or go see for yourself.
People did disbelieve the images that these painters brought back from the West,7 but their incredulity only fueled the mania for all things West. It also shaped the role of the artist: Bierstadt was not tasked with embellishing nature — in fact, his reputation would be sunk if he did. His job was just to copy it down.
What better application of the miraculous new medium, “God’s pencil”?8 Given the limitations of the day, a landscape was an excellent application for a photograph: mountaintops don’t move, so you can have a long exposure time and use natural light of the sun to capture their likeness on your fragile, slow-developing glass plates. Credibility commanded a premium, and what was more credible than a photograph?
What indeed? Muybridge’s hoof-marked brain wondered.
Photography was accurate but failed to represent all the facts. Colors, most obviously — but other things like the clouds in the sky were uncapture-able. Unsolved problems with the wavelength of the light of blue sky bedeviled early photographers. One of Muybridge’s first innovations was a process for adding skies back into photos.9
There was also the matter of two dimensions: human beings have binocular vision, but paintings are a single-point representation. The camera allowed the possibility, really for the first time, of a binocular image, and Muybridge filled this gap with stereoscopic slides of the American West. You might doubt a Bierstadt painting, but how could you doubt a ViewMaster reel — a machine’s transcription, from the Sun God to you.
III. Settling the Score.
There was a problem looming, and it left hoof-prints on the mind — in this case the mind of former California governor, businessman, and race-horse aficionado Leland Stanford. Stanford had big money — $25,000 — riding on the question of how a horse trots: do all four hooves leave the ground at once? The wager part is possibly apocryphal, but it’s true that Stanford had no way to know for certain. Painters and sculptors made good guesses; anatomists measured marks in the dirt — there was a fact of the matter, but no way to demonstrate.
Muybridge offered a solution.
He proposed to build a track with a series of trip-wires, each connected to a camera. As the horse traveled down the track, it tripped a wire, activating a camera, thereby taking a series of photographs of every stage of the horse’s gait.
Stanford backed Muybridge’s idea and began pouring money into it — far more than the alleged bet, but no matter — Stanford emerged with an answer. (Yes, they do.) And Muybridge emerged with something no one had ever seen before: a flip-book of photos, which, when shuffled rapidly, presented a moving picture. By 1879, he had developed a machine to project these iterating images. The London News called it “a magic lantern run mad (with method in the madness),” but Muybridge had another name. Behold: The zoöpraxiscope!
The name didn’t stick, but the philosophical point was made: Muybridge was developing a new language, a visual record to capture truths that previously could only be hypothesized.
Thanks for reading — but we haven’t even gotten to the betrayals, the backstabbing, or the murder yet! Full-frontal male nudity, death, and a trip to Philadelphia in Part II of the twisted tale of the first motion pictures. Special thanks to Corey Eastwood, a great writer and bookseller and author of the podcast Penknife — a very writerly story of writers that murder and murderers who write. It also pays special attention to a matter close to my heart — how the notion of the artist’s life came to be what it is today — and clearly all the true-crime binge-listening has inspired this and the last several posts here at Hanging Papers. Thanks and tune in next week — the story gets weirder!
Jonathan
Gallery News:
Leonard Rosenfeld’s series of works meditating on nuts and bolts will be exhibited at Patch & Remington in Marcellus, Michigan this September 11.
Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art will shine a spotlight on four Art Students League student-artists at this fall’s Affordable Art Fair in New York.
There’s still time to catch the revelatory retrospective of the films of Neelon Crawford at MoMA — through October 10th!
Set phasers to stun! New maps by Kieran O’Hare will debut this September at Art on Paper.
From an interview with John Howell, “From Literal Words to Metaphorical Dance,” On the Next Wave, October, 1983, p. 7, full text here.
Which we discussed last week in “Robert Henri’s Brush with Death!”
More from the Howell interview, 1983.
See “God’s Pencil and Other Infernal Machines” for a fuller account of Muybridge’s early years.
— And Thomas Moran, and Frederic Church, and Martin Johnson Heade, and William Bradford, for that matter — quite a lot of the great landscape painters were artist-explorers, and perhaps not surprisingly, they all worked out of the same studio building — on Tenth Street in New York. Sounds like an interesting article for Hanging Papers? Our thoughts exactly.
Color was an especially tough matter to verify for the consumers back East — Thomas Moran got pushback from the electric palette of the hot springs of Yellowstone when his watercolors were reproduced in chromolithograph by Prang — how could these colors be right? Moran himself started to wonder, and years later he returned to Yellowstone to attempt a more accurate likeness — this time, he brought a camera. Still no help on the color proofing, though!
More on the late-nineteenth century view of photography in “God’s Pencil and Other Infernal Machines.”
This process was really more of a collage process than anything else — and the departure from literal truth seems not to have bothered Muybridge from adding in anything that he felt a landscape needed — even the occasional volcano, as Bryon Wolfe observed in “Eadweard Muybridge’s Secret Cloud Collection: Is it possible to rephotograph a scene that never existed?,” Sept. 2017, full text here.