Tweed’s alter ego is constantly slaving away over academic quandaries and ponderings, many of which involve questions of technology and performance. You can only imagine how the Dr. Jekyll in Tweed was filled with epistemological glee upon viewing the Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910 exhibit at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery.
The relationship between older and newer media has always been plagued by the love-hate aesthetic, which continues to this day with the scapegoating of the Internet and VR technology (think of debates surrounding YouTube or the extinction of the actor in the face of CGI). But it goes all the way back as well: when movable type came to the fore, it emulated calligraphy, newspapers included painted current events, and early photography had painters raging. But despite the transcendental claims, many relied on photography as a useful tool for still models, such as this striking example from Gauguin, taken from a wonderful series of comparisons on Fogonazos. (Yours truly most recently explored the history of theatre and television in PAJ 83, May 2006).
Curated expertly by Nancy Mowll Mathews, the Moving Pictures exhibit juxtaposes the influences that moved back and forth between painting and early film, unnecessarily but cleanly divided into four themes: “Early Film and American Artistic Traditions,” “The Body in Motion,” “The City in Motion,” and “Art and Film: Interactions.” The first does a marvelous job of comparing the early American landscape fascination, such as those from the Hudson River School, and the cue that the Edison Company in particular took from artists such as Winslow Homer, William H. Beard, and William Morris Hunt. John Sloan, George Luks, and William Merritt Chase are also prominently featured. The landscape feature was a comparison of Hunt’s Niagara Falls (1878) with the Lumières’ Niagara, Horseshoe Falls (1898). The gigantic canvas was complemented with a gigantic flat screen television featuring the film, both of which contribute to the dizzying awe they are meant to convey.
The highlight of the show, however, would have to be a makeshift screening room, which featured the theme of interaction, including the classic Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), in which an amazed man becomes overly excited by the various images projected onto the screen, dancing with a can-can girl and 
jumping out of the way of an oncoming locomotive (evoking the story of the terrorized audience at an early Lumière brothers screening). Other pieces to catch include a host of Eadward Muybridge images and films (with the famous racing horse documents) and amazing collection of boxing imagery, including George Bellows’ painting Club Night (1907) and Edison’s A Scrap in Black and White (1903) in which two young boys, one black and one white, duke it out, dramatizing the racial tensions of the early twentieth century.
The Moving Pictures catalogue should also be mentioned here. The disappointing attention given to the images (tiny) is made up for with a stunning collection of essays from illustrious film scholars such as Tom Gunning, Antonia Lant, and Charles Musser, to name a few. It also includes a very cool DVD-ROM, which allows the user to view many of the films and paintings online (alas, not on your DVD player).
Any show such as Moving Pictures should be lauded for its efforts to join disciplines that are conventionally pitted against one another. Despite contemporary lip service to interdisciplinarity and postmodern pastiches, there is still an undercurrent of anxiety about “pure” art. But the give and take of technologies and arts is impossible to ignore, and their conversations need to be acknowledged, examined, even celebrated.
[Moving Pictures will be at the Grey Art Gallery through December 9th. It moves on to the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC from February 17th - May 20th.]
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