Wild: Michael Nichols (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through
September 17, 2017) is an exemplary show for a major art museum in the 21st
Century; “exemplary” but not very satisfying.
Nichols, a renowned
photographer of wildlife as well as a zealous advocate of habitat and species
preservation, is also one brave dude. He
ventures into the most remote, forbidding and dangerous environments throughout
the world. He is also an admired technical innovator whose experiments
and inventions have made possible images previously impossible to realize.
What he is not is an
important artist. But that isn’t the point the Philadelphia Museum of Art
really wants to make though it tries to have it both ways.
Mounting a huge
exhibition of oversized prints of wildlife and habitats seeks to draw a broader
audience than do the usual sanctified works of, say, Impressionism or 17th
Century Holland. Think of this exhibition as part of the PMA’s new
outreach program intended to encourage people not normally disposed to visit
traditional museums of art to visit and find works that are immediately
accessible and pleasing. Nichols’ work is certainly that, but
it is not particularly
challenging intellectually or rewarding aesthetically.
Documentary or advocacy
photography has had a long, sometimes tenuous relationship to the traditional
art world of painting and sculpture. Today, however, Walker Evans, Eugene
Atget, or Sebastiao Salgado among many are revered, exhibited and collected by
both worlds. All of them made photographs on assignment or for commercial
purposes that were later divorced from their original contexts and displaced
into the museum or gallery. Their entry into the pantheon of
artists is secure yet few viewers regard their work in its original terms,
documenting the Farm Security Administration (Evans), making documents to sell
to artists (Atget), or documenting the gold mining industry (Salgado).
As if to lend further
credence to the notion that Nichols’ work fits into that broader tradition, the
PMA shows a number of paintings and sculptures from its own collection
alongside the photographs. Among these are Edward Hicks The Peaceable
Kingdom, Henri Rousseau’s The Merry Jesters or Tommy Dale Palmore’s Reclining
Nude. Yet each of these works is not rooted in advocacy, cataloguing
or the making of documents. (Interestingly, one need only walk down the
hall from the Nichols’ exhibition to the concurrent, magnificent show of Goya
prints to recognize where documenting ends and art begins.)
Nichols’ work is flat
aesthetically. Big cats leaping towards the lens are dramatic while
images of orphan elephants covered by handlers in protective clothing do evoke
sympathy, but they do not excite the imagination the way Rousseau’s dreamy
invented landscapes inhabited by oddly acting creatures do. Nor do his
photographs exhibit the spiritual origins of Hicks’ biblically inspired
painting in which the leopard, kid and children “lie down” together in harmony.
Instead, Nichols gives us a pride of lions devouring its prey as a
matter-of-fact statement about survival. And compared to the high irony of
Palmore’s Reclining Nude, a huge ape assuming the pose of a classical
nude, Nichols’ unambiguous photographs of apes are prosaic.
Photographs of Jane
Goodall, monkeys and apes seek to educate and inform. The series on
elephants revolves around the dire conditions created by poachers, who have
imperiled the population of wild elephants despite efforts to stop this illegal
practice. Nichols does reach the viewer emotionally, challenging our
complacency about disappearance of habitat and the animals living within, but
on a level we associate more with appeals from the World Wildlife Federation or
the huge number of nature shows on television rather than the ways in which we
respond to, say, Durer’s enigmatic and fantastic Rhinoceros. This
is not a bad thing. Indeed, judging from the good attendance I saw on an early,
hot Saturday morning in mid-July, I would say the show is a success. It
just isn’t especially memorable.
A version of this article first appeared in the Broad Street Review
