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Richard Misrach, 1998 courtesy of the artist and the Fraenkel Gallery, SF. Nature's Proscenium "Richard Misrach: Berkeley Work" captures the sky's many moods By Peter Crimmins Gallery 2 at the Berkeley Art Museum proposes a surreal challenge: what if there was a room in your house with 30 windows, and every window looked out over the same view, and every view was the Golden Gate Bridge. Richard Misrach's large-sized photographs of the bridge (40x50 inches) suggest such window-framed looks on the Bay Area's most famous object. He spent three years photographing exactly the same view of the Golden Gate hundreds of times from his home in the Berkeley Hills. Which seems perverse. As a tourists' beacon the GGB has been photographed millions of times, and legions of rotating postcard racks along Fisherman's Wharf offer many very pretty pictures of its brilliant red towers against perfect blue skies, right next to cards of cable cars, sea lions, and young women in thong bikinis. Misrach is well aware that pointing a camera at the Golden Gate is a bit cliché. However, his pictures of the bridge are not about the bridge. In these 40x50 prints, the bridge, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, and the sloping topography of San Francisco and the Marin Headlands gliding into the bay on opposite sides of the bridge only represent 5 or 6 inches along the bottom. The other 85% of the vista is sky, an enormous ethereal proscenium of dramatic fog, operatic clouds, and can-cans of color. Misrach has captured our sky in its many moods--its stillness of early-morning haze, like tundra, washing out color from everything, to the psychedelic explosion of impossible color combinations layered and roiled among cumulus clouds. The jaw dropping changes of light and hue from day to day--often from minute to minute--make the subject not just a meteorological abstraction of the Bay Area's freakish weather patterns, but also how unearthly they are when viewed at just the right moment. These undoubtedly beautiful pictures, perfectly composed, can be melodramatic; they have a touch of a Yes album cover painting. UC Berkeley professor T. J. Clark is a neighbor of Misrach; his home shares a similar view. In an essay Clark wrote for the exhibit's accompanying book he announces that people who live in the Berkeley Hills believe that "up above a certain height in the hills, things (Nature) became a bit vulgar." These pictures show Nature in her excesses; she can be showy and gaudy and loud. She can cry over sentimental memories, or drink too much at balcony cocktail parties in the Hills and tell off-color jokes with embarrassing abandon. Misrach's camera was on the ready during the fleeting moments when Nature fawned or howled around the Golden Gate. Misrach said working out of his home was not convenient because he was constantly looking out the window to see if the sky was feeling photogenic at any given moment. Each print is labeled by the date and time and, in the case of time-lapse exposures, the duration of the shot. Long night shots can be a map of trails left behind by the blinking lights of flying objects. 7.04.98 5:35PM - 12:36AM is a great white-orange flash with a tiny, tell-tale hint in the corner: a small fireworks flower. His camera is a clock (as T.J. Clark also wrote) that can hold a moment indefinitely, or compress time into a single glance, to show us inside a frame what we may never have the patience to see in the sky. "Richard Misrach: Berkeley Work" is on view through October 13 at the Berkeley Art Museum, Gallery 2, 2625 Durant Ave., Berk. 642.0808. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]