3rd of May

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
This is a detail from one of Gohlke’s 1982 pictures of the area near Mount Saint Helens. It’s one of several pictures in which Gohlke presents a dramtically tilted landscape, a la Timothy O’Sullivan. On this week’s MAN Podcast, I asked Gohlke if he was consciously dipping into O’Sullivan’s bag of tricks, or if he was reflexively responding to the landscape he was in.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Frank Gohlke, Looking SW across Blowdown toward Valley of South Toutle River, 8 miles NW of Mount St. Helens, Washington (detail), 1982. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.