Eadweard Muybridge’s motion at Tate

Perhaps we’ve arrived at a place in time where surprise no longer plays a role.  “Here we go again” is our middle name when it comes to natural or man- made disasters, mammoth scale corruptions in business or religion.

And so it seems par for the course that surprise has been squeezed out of life. This can also apply in our attitudes to Technology, where steps forward are rated as a convenience more than as a thing of wonder. If I were to be told that my car could now levitate its way to a parking booth outside a third floor window, I’d probably think – “and about time too”.

Blink back forty years to my grandfather telling his old next door neighbour that man had landed on the moon and the reaction was a derisive snort over the garden fence as she admonished that the moon was far too small to stand on. Go back further and in a similar vein, someone surely did think the moon was made of cheese which for all the good the moon’s done us before, during and since 1969, it might as well be.

“Because it’s there”

Technology breakthroughs have become incarnations of what we have been conjuring up in our minds and reading about for years in comic strips and fairytales.

This is an age of realisation though I wonder if every dream must be manifested or could the dream itself suffice. A challenge to accomplish is in our make up and can be summed up with George Mallory’s answer to why he wanted to climb Everest: “Because it’s there”. Well yes, so was he, for the 75 years it took to retrieve the body.

Inspired Creations

Maybe we’re buggered if we do and buggered if we don’t. In any case, back to the duality of imagination and invention: it’s increasingly rare so my hat is off to the da Vinci’s and Babbages of history who, with 15th C. helicopters and 19th C. computer programming left us “and God created” legacies. No disrespect to their originality but the problem with such an inheritance is that it snowballs through time until the initial flame of creativity can get twisted. I shouldn’t think da Vinci saw the Vietnam “Helicopter War” coming, where his baby was responsible for 5000 deaths (and that’s just the American pilots). On the other hand and to be fair to us, he’d surely pat himself on the back for its use as an aeromedical rescue service.

When the screen siren, Hedy Lamarr, came up with “frequency hopping” it was with the noble aim to prevent the Nazis from intercepting information from the Allies. This formed the backbone to digital and wireless communication. Lamarr, a fiercely independent lady, wouldn’t be laughing at the link between her invention and “silent sound spread spectrum” which theorists say is sending subliminal messaging through an all- digital TV signal to accomplish the subjugation of mankind to a central government.

With a taste for relishing the innocent, it can be more refreshing to look in the rear view window than to crane our necks out to see what’s coming.

Eadweard Muybridge

The Tate Britain is presenting an exhibition of works from the photographer Eadweard Muybridge who, back in the 1870’s was engaged to answer a popular question by proving that all four hooves of a horse left the ground when galloping, otherwise known as “unsupported transit”.

Up until this commission, English born Muybridge had built a reputation as a landscape photographer and where his photography of California, particularly the huge screens of the Yosemite and the High Sierra summarize a tradition, his work on “Animal Locomotion” started a new one where our perception of reality and time were forever altered.

Using a battery of 24 cameras and a special shutter system actuated by a taut string stretched across the track; as the horse galloped past, the camera shutters snapped, each frame accounted for. Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” proved that all four hooves do leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under between "pulling" with the front and "pushing" with the back legs.

To counter disbelief at his findings, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, a glass disc with photographs printed onto it. The disc spun in rapid succession in front of a light source and these images provided the first, albeit, rudimentary form of animation. The zoopraxiscope is the predecessor to motion pictures and caused a sensation at its launch in 1893. This possibility to create variable frame rates is also known as “Bullet Timing” and can be found in today’s hyper slow motion shots of which, scenes from The Matrix blockbuster provide a good example.

Muybridge’s own use of “Bullet Timing” shows us the activities of animals and humans captured at 2/1000 frames per second and the results were revolutionary; the world could finally witness the truth in movement.
Looking for ways of raising research funds, Muybridge pushed the educational value of these results as being a guide for artists to be able to paint ‘what is’. It must have been frustrating for him to open our eyes only to find that the painters he wanted to help were starting to move away from realism. Art following its own path seems like a natural revolt. Who needs a painting of a photograph? It renders the artist defunct.

Muybridge himself progressed through his work from being an artist to becoming a scientist, which supports the notion that inspiration is the catalyst from which technique can develop.

150 years later, I feel enlightened by Muybridge’s resourcefulness and, if only on anthropological grounds, share in the surprise with which the public greeted his discoveries. Should I be ashamed to admit that the 19 C. studio shots of scary be-whiskered men and dour women have always led me to believe that sex appeal started somewhere in the 30’s between Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford? That’s the surprise for me in all of this. Those people were hot back then. Forget Jane Fonda workouts or Men’s Health magazine. Muybridge’s “naked woman walking up stairs” wouldn’t make it past the first floor landing before being asked out today and “man swinging an axe” – well, I’m gonna get me one and chop some logs!

Inspired to dream, my head is craning forwards to time travel. I’m not inclined to meet a one eyed Alien in the year 2280 so, when that machine arrives, I'll know my direction.

Eadweard Muybridge
Tate Britain, Linbury Galleries
Wednesday 8 September 2010 – Sunday 16 January 2011
Admission £10 (£9, £8 concessions) Free for Tate Members
Opening hours:
10.00-17.50
 Exhibitions 10.00-17.40 (last admission 17.00)
Public information number: 020 7887 8888