There is an inherent mystery to all human beings that American photographer William Mortensen
(1898-1965) tapped into with the images he produced during the 1920s in Hollywood. Celluloid
Babylon centers around the ones which best capture that enigma through the lens of myths,
legends, and spiritual traditions from around the world. Mortensen allowed them each to bend
towards each other through a heightened sense of sexuality, violence, and madness which he saw
as inextricably linked to the transcendental experience.

The exhibition is set up with the intention of bringing the viewer close to the artist's private world
and does so from two different angles. The first has to do with technique, personal biography, and
the evolution of his art from its purely functional aspect in the film industry (which he'd worked in as
a costume designer from approximately 1924-28) to his private studio practice (which became the
focus of his artistic career in the four decades that followed).

Four display cases are situated in the center of the room, and these include lobby cards from the
various movies Mortensen worked on, as well as published books and articles he wrote concerning
his artistic process, snapshots from his domestic and social life in California during the twenties
(including one of his guru and one of his Persian cats), and several masks which Mortensen made
by hand, and were used in films such as Hell's Four Hundred (1926) and The King of Kings (1927).
The second angle has to do with Mortensen's aesthetic accomplishments and in particular his keen
ability to communicate inner-wonder (as well as terror) through such external aspects as story,
composition, and costume. There are 84 different works displayed on the walls around the
room—their aim being to show the cohesion of this artist's visual approach.

A major aspect of the Mortensen aesthetic has to do with its modularity. The masks and costumes
he made for the silent movies had a narrative function which left little room for abstract thought. Yet
in works such as The Old Hag with Mask (1928) and The Incubus (also '28) Mortensen reused
masks which he'd made for the Tod Browning film West of Zanzibar (1928) to conjure new stories
unrelated to the source film. By utilizing them in a purely visual manner—i.e. as outward
expressions of inner psychology—he freed himself to imagine the other elements lying around his
studio as potential agents of expression as well.

A work such as Salome (1924-26) shows the artist at his most minimal yet unfettered. In the middle
of a completely white space, punctuated only by subtle directional lighting, stands a nude female,
the titular figure, whose hands bear between her legs the severed head of John the Baptist. Her
elongated body is angled and contorted in such a way that the mystery of this well-worn narrative,
taken from the New Testament, is imaginatively reborn. Salome, the beloved daughter of King
Herod, desires the spiritual provocateur's head as a display of totalitarian power over social
agitation; yet Mortensen eschews this entire arc in favor of a violence which doubles as a sexual
stimulant. Salome essentially copulates using the venerated saint's head—her hand-painted red
lips further escalating the notion of the indestructible link between eroticism and death.

Is this merely a genre picture? One could ask it also of the photograph titled Meditation (1925). It
features a bare-chested female as well—in this case the artist's first wife, Courtney—seated lotus
position, her arms and cupped hands raised in veneration. She wears a loin-cloth over her waist,
beads around her neck and on her wrists, and is backed by a few distant hills (though the portrait is
mostly minimal again in terms of detail). This surely must be one of the earliest images depicting
the American interest in Eastern religion, as opposed to Orientalism, which Mortensen also
depicted in his work. (Buddhism, for whatever it is worth, was not discovered in the West until the
late 19 th century and did not become widespread until the 1950s and '60s.) Yet here again
Mortensen's focus seems to be about the confluence of sexuality and religious devotion. The
specifics of Hinduism or Buddhism play no central role in fact; and like almost all of the artist's work
it shows a distinct lack of self-judgment and shame regarding sex.

Photographers contemporary to Mortensen, such as the New Realists Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams,
saw in his work a traditionalism that ran anathema to their non-illusionary approach.
(Adams was quoted as saying: “To us he was the anti-christ.”) It's true that Mortensen was a
pictorialist at heart and somewhat impervious to zeitgeist. That his work pined for a non-rational
past—one filled with a sense of the mystic as expressed in such topics as love, passion, betrayal,
and revenge—made him an anachronism in the era of modernism and the avant-garde. Yet in
today's context, when economic and social disparity seems a foregone conclusion, and when
technology is used as a tool for both surveillance and homogenization, Mortensen's work stands as
a distant warning against the loss of the individual. It also reminds us once again of the
quintessential role the imagination can play in each aspect of life.

Brian Chidester, curator