That’s what first came to mind when I caught the opening
last summer in Buffalo of the opening of “Niagara,” of images of that unique
natural phenomenon (opening January 22nd at the New York Historical
Society). Father Louis Hennepin published the first eye witness account in
1697, the most salient feature of which is his grossly overestimating of the
actual height of the cataract. This exaggeration so charged up the imagination
of his readers that in the second edition he upped his inflated estimate even
more!
There’s another elephantine aspect to this collection of
over 250 paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, photographs and memorabilia
from sixty-eight private and public collections. The Megashow is the esthetic
expression of this American hunger for the grandiose. What has been happening
in the past decade of Megaexhibiting is a display of curatorial logistics that
is a triumph of long distance phone calling over artistic insight. After seeing
such a plethora of Niagara images, I began to understand what Ronald Regan
meant when he argued that when you’ve seen one giant redwood tree you’ve seen
them all. This is particularly apparent in images of what appears to me to be
incommensurate with mere artistic skill: the Niagara is just too overwhelming
to be captured with equivalent power in a static image. Even Frederic Edwin
Church’s “Niagara Falls” (1857) is a disappointing ho-hum, juxtaposed to the
briefest film clip, not to mention five minutes of ogling the torrent in the
round. It has been widely argued (and persuasively disproven in my judgment)
that the Holocaust was too horrible to ever be captured truthfully enough in
word or image. Not so. But my net conviction after seeing “Niagara” is that
it’s simply not meant for static media.
This emerging judgment was snapped firmly in place at the
end of my viewing by seeing a superb half-hour film, “Niagara Falls: The
Changing Nature of a New World Symbol” (Produced and directed by Lawrence Hott
and Diane Garey of Florentine Films). When I wondered (on my bus ride over to
complete my Niagara caper with a reviewing of the Falls themselves) why the
film pleased me so much and the disparate images so little, I concluded that
the film was anthropological, while the
discrete images a mere pyrrhic victory of temporary curatorship. The film is
much better at explaining, for example, the rise of the Niagara tourist
industry, a pre-jet age Honeymoon Central. In short, what the film achieves and
the “art exhibit” misses is that the real story of Niagara was not what was
going on in the studios of artists wowed by its immensities but what was and
wasn’t going on in the hearts and imaginations of the tourists.
A film is the proper medium for bringing together in a
comprehensible way all the daredevilry of going over the falls in a barrel or
tight rope walking across it—to the astonishment of the hyped up tourists and
those who read about the exploits in their hometown newspapers, vowing
doubtless that they would take the train there next summer and see for themselves. The more I think about
it, in fact, the more I wonder whether a really well-edited film about a
painter or a genre or a tradition doesn’t achieve more in purely esthetic terms
than the increasingly “social” significance of the crowds moiling around in
confusion at your typical Megashow. They click in turnstiles for fiscally
beleaguered art institutions, but I’m beginning to wonder how much art insight
those by-ticket-only mob scenes generate.
Another aspect of this exhibition that is much more
significant than the mainly mediocre artifacts assembled is the occasion for
the show itself, namely the centennial of the establishment of the Niagara
Reservation. One could argue that the successful fight against gross commercial
debauching of the Niagara site (and it had become a world-class Mess) was the
first instance of historical preservationism in America, if you stretch that
category to Natural History, restoring a site to its predeveloped condition.
It’s a neglected success story in American cultural history (Jonathan Baxter
Harrison, who was later to distinguish himself with the Indian Rights
Association, joined forces with America’s first art historian—Harvard’s Charles
Eliot Norton—to organize a letter writing campaign in the then fledgling Nation
magazine to save Niagara from commercial
desecration). It was a heartening example, smack in the middle of the Gilded
Age, that those who cared could triumph over the careless if they got smart
politically.
Buffalo being so close to the Falls, I was eager after an
afternoon of image mulling to see if the Real Thing still wowed me the way it
has so many times before—first as an early married, then with the kids, and
later May-Decembering. And how. I chose the highest viewing point—I couldn’t
help but notice it had just been renamed Minolta Tower (with a credible
mini-museum of photography at the observatory level). I gathered these thoughts
in a haze of recollection and rumination, pampering myself with a dinner of
Canadian pheasant and a New York white wine.
By dessert time I had decided that, except for the film, the
best part of the day had been an adjacent exhibition just down the street from
the Albright-Knox Gallery—at the Erie Historical Society, on how Niagara had
been used in advertising campaigns during the last century. Frequently a
cascade of unrelieved kitschiness, still the exhibition was more memorable than
its higher class art expo because, all things considered, Niagara has meant
more to the commercial marketing imagination than to the Muse pure and simple.
The “meaning” of Niagara thus is best approached through the Sunday 2:00 p.m.
afternoon films and lectures (the film, January 26, followed by lectures
February 2 and 9 by contributors to the catalog, $20 at the Museum Store). The
show itself will continue to flow until April 27.
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