Coke 1: Highway 183, Cordell, OK by David Gianfredi
The task of 15 Bytes being to connect artists with the public in Utah, we usually try to choose exhibitions for review that are up long enough to allow readers to go and see for themselves. Even though few of our readers may drive to St. George or Logan just to look at art, some do. Others enjoy living in remote places, and so we consider the calendar, not just the art, when deciding which shows to include in upcoming issues. That said, Constructing Nostalgia — at the Central Utah Art Center in Ephraim until September 5 — presents an approach to art making that has such affinity with Utah and its people that it feels natural and just makes sense. Whether one sees this particular show or not, sooner or later we will encounter art that looks like this.
According to CUAC Director Jared Latimer (see our April edition), fabricated nostalgia responds to both present circumstances and future possibilities. In the present we perceive a national diminution, a loss of cultural prestige and satisfaction with ourselves. Our golden age appears to be past, possibly beyond recovery except in imagination and memory. Looking to the future, instead of anticipating a recovery we see our individuality under threat. The war on terrorism is only one way we are losing privacy and personal rights. Our globalized corporations began the process years ago, using research and marketing to turns complex beings with individual desires into one-dimensional consumers who are caught in an endless cycle of desire for unfulfilling materials goods.
Relique Americana: Vega by Jason Lanegan
A single equation captures what motivates — what drives — all five of these artists. At one point Americans were often said to live in our cars: sleeping in motels, eating in diners we could drive to and through, and witnessing the infinite variety of our nation through our windshields. Today that window on life is found on the electronic display screen of televisions and computers. Unable to travel because of gasoline prices and traffic that are out of control, facing the pressure to stay at jobs that no longer pay a living wage, we are replacing our first-person experience with simulations. One entire industry manufactures “collectible” copies of vintage metal signs abandoned to rust along with the products and services they once advertised. It is the populism of that mercantile nostalgia that is both the target and the goal of these artists.
David Gianfredi’s carefully edited quotations of roadside signage makes the case most directly. Ironically, his nostalgia also points to a less popular mid-twentieth century phenomenon with links to Kansas. Flat, painted copies of flat, two — dimensional lettering reproduce the critical journey through Abstract Expressionism to Post-Modernism: from the pursuit of flatness to the appropriation of commercial art. Jackson Pollock and James Rosenquist are stops along his route.
Jason Lanegan also relies heavily on irony, though a more mocking sort. His Coke bottles in Byzantine gilded reliquaries directly connect the mundane consumer goods he collects with religious veneration, arguably to the detriment of both. In other works his references are to kitchen cupboards and, most subtle and surgically precise, cigar boxes: the primary hand-me-down repository for treasures distinguished by their connection to youthful values and simpler times.
American Eating Habits by Polly Baker
Another artist who braids together traditional nostalgia and art currents, bricoleur Polly Becker collages and assembles pastiches of Americana into figures that she then photographs. Photography always removes its subjects to the same imaginative plane, marked by degrees on a scale that runs from the cerebral to the emotional, where nostalgia operates. But where at one time the photo bore the onus of substitute for real experience, here it partakes of the privileges of evidence. As DNA undermines that most fallible forensic tool, the eyewitness account, the camera — ultimately just another eyewitness — has become the con-artist’s richly ambivalent tool of choice. Becker inverts this, constructing images that undermine (“deconstruct,” like “reference,” being too vague a word to be useful) the projected identities of her subjects.
Baby in Bottle by Polly Baker
The most satisfying works, the ones with the longest reach and greatest capacity, are mixed-media assemblages: sculptures by Robbie Barber and paintings by Marianne Cone. Barber’s rural vignettes recall the books and boxes of his Sanpete County contemporary, Adam Larsen. Both use found objects in part for their visual references to airplanes, buildings, and the conjurer’s arcana of adolescent role — play, but also for the authenticity imparted by their manufacture. Thus Barber’s surreal juxtapositions subvert their fictional origins through the casual credibility of their components. Few things in the landscape are more out-of-place than a grain elevator standing like a skyscraper on the vast expanse of utterly flat prairie, slowly coming nearer as one drives between files of crops that seem to revolvelike giant wheels. By neatly fitting such an elevator into a trailer built from the bed of a pickup, Barber collapses scales of modeling and levels of technology that range from pragmatic tinkering to sophisticated engineering. In so doing, he captures — and arguably celebrates — something in the American character that came before and lies beyond acquisitive materialism.
Portable Rural Landscape by Robbie Barber
If a focus on nostalgia may have prevented the four above from breaking with their various representational traditions, Marianne Cone breaks through hers, presenting rural set pieces that start out as random collections of found objects and rural vignettes, but become vertiginous trips (used here in the nostalgic Sixties sense of a visceral, possibly but not necessarily drug — related experience) from a display of carefully selected, reference — rich specifics to a visionary encounter with visual truth created entirely out of artificial means. One thing good artworks do is reaffirm our faith in the art experience, something Cone does even more effectively than Barber. On first viewing of one of her shaped canvases, the vignette that tops it has something like the impact of a letterhead: it establishes the tone of the piece. The found objects built into the lower part capture the viewer’s interest and rivet the senses on a three-dimensional projection of the wall, perpendicular to the floor, in which perspective is further narrowed by the presence of actual objects that suggest an overall theme of place and time. These iconic bits and pieces make a dry commentary on nostalgia.|5| But as the eye climbs back to the top, there comes a place where the panel hinges visually, tilting backward precipitously into illusory space. The gas station invoked by the quoted Conoco signage in “Last Frontier,” the “Tuscarora Garages,” the farmyard, or the granary, free from the tyranny of flat reality, become far more real in the mind’s eye, and stage sets for the playing out of the narratives triggered in memory and imagination by the objects presented — whether real or depicted — below. Sometimes there is an added suggestion that the foreground represents geological strata lying below, or a barrier standing between us and what we see.
Treasures from the Granary close-up by Marianne Cone
Ours is a sadly deflated time, in which confidence is being replaced by self-consciousness and doubt. Many of us can only feel like the heroes of our own mythology in darkened movie theaters, or while drawn out of ourselves by the multisensory extravaganzas in which our computers immerse us. Nostalgia in the gallery today is for the era when art was the best, most dependable out-of-body experience available. It’s not sad that new technologies have overtaken the old, except that the new media they make possible are not able to invoke the experiences that came easily to the old media. Two celebrated films — “Witness” and “Cold Mountain” — each feature a pivotal scene set at a barn raising, a canonical American activity resonant with the idea of “constructing nostalgia.” Yet bothplay that scene against violence and anxiety over the safety of home and family. Motion pictures do a good job of telling us how to feel and think about the experiences they over-particularize. But at the CUAC, our fundamental experiences of being ourselves are evoked rather than imposed, with the viewer’s memory and imagination invited to play along with the artist’s initial impulse. The icons are present, but we are given the space within these venerable limestone walls to construct our own mood of nostalgia.
Tuscarora Garages by Marianne Cone
Constructing Nostalgia continues at the CUAC through September 5.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
