CHRISTINA ROSENBERGER
IN A 1992 ESSAY, Rosalind Krauss registered her surprise that Agnes Martin had created a film: “Agnes Martin? A film?”
Gabriel has always been difficult to classify within Martin’s oeuvre. The artist produced the work in 1976 using a preowned professional camera that she described as “temperamental.” Martin filmed Gabriel in California, Colorado, and New Mexico, where she worked with architect Bill Katz. She chose Ektachrome Commercial reversal film, which was used for nature cinematography due to its saturated color and sharpness. Martin hired a “little hippie boy,” Peter Mayne, as Gabriel, who climbs a mountain and walks beside a river. There was no script; Martin said that she “went around looking for what was beautiful, to take a picture of it.” Filming took three months, and Martin edited the film herself. “When I found out about the sensitivity of photography as a medium,” Martin recalled, “it was very exciting!”
Martin called Gabriel an “art movie” to distinguish it from the “deceit and destruction” of commercial movies. (Martin, legend has it, used to watch westerns for their scenery when she moved to Manhattan in the late 1950s.)The artist’s position on Hollywood cinema may explain her approach to the plot, which is nearly nonexistent. The film is a bare hour and eighteen minutes long, and much of that time is spent quietly, observing nature or watching Gabriel walk through the landscape. Martin’s extended shots of countryside—showing a stand of birch trees, a mountain, wildflowers—can often last more than ten seconds, making the viewer restless. For an artist who lived on a mesa in the desert, there is also a surprising amount of water: lakes, ponds, oceans, and rivers all capture Martin’s attention. Gabriel “is no great cinema,” Jonas Mekas observed, “but it is a very beautiful film.” Martin’s paintings are also deemed beautiful, but the artist discriminated between the two mediums: “It takes your mind to take pictures with a camera, but it doesn’t take your mind to paint . . . It’s much more difficult with a camera, with subjects and all that. . . . It’s not the same experience.”
Gabriel is the rare work in which Martin allows her mind to enter the creative process. While many critics approach Gabriel as an extension of Martin’s painting—it is similarly a meditation on “happiness, innocence, and beauty,” she told Joan Simon in 1996—others, like Krauss, remained skeptical. Criticism of the film has been split between interpretations that hinge on the abstract sublime and phenomenological readings.
What if, for a moment, we consider Martin’s film as part of a pastoral tradition? In 1953, Joseph Krumgold directed . . . And Now Miguel, a documentary about a boy, Miguel Chávez, who dreams of climbing the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico to put his family’s sheep to pasture. Structurally and thematically, the film provides a precedent for Gabriel—the slow-moving film depicts a young boy near Taos, was shot without sound, and includes extended images of nature. Both films can seem endless. There are differences: Krumgold’s film is plot-driven, confidently shot in black-and-white, and focuses on Miguel’s character development. Most strikingly, there is a simplicity to both films that appears almost contrived today.
. . . And Now Miguel is a deliberately pastoral narrative. The United States Information Service commissioned the film, which was to document Hispanic workers in rural states, for “overseas distribution”—i.e., as postwar propaganda. Although USIS films were intended for foreign audiences, . . . And Now Miguel was shown in Taos in 1953. It is possible that Martin saw the documentary while living nearby or read Krumgold’s children’s book of the same name, which was based on the film and won a Newbery Medal in 1954. A feature film, adapted from the book, was made in 1966 and shown throughout Manhattan, where Martin was then living. In its many guises, . . . And Now Miguel illuminates the broader historical context in which Martin’s art was created.
When asked about the name Gabriel, Martin sidestepped the allusion to the archangel. “Oh no,” she responded. “I meant that [Gabriel] was innocent like an angel. You climb a mountain to get out of this world.” You use the concrete, in other words, to reach the abstract.
Christina Rosenberger is an art historian living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her book Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2016.
