Mad Homes, the spectacle-filled, mixed bag, out-in-the-world installation on Seattle’s Capitol Hill closes this Saturday. My write up and interview with participating artist Ryan Molenkamp about the process of working on this project is on New American Paintings blog.
Mad Homes installation view, image by Bryan Ohno.
Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God would be at home in a window on the Wynn Las Vegas’s Esplanade. The Esplanade is an oversized arcade of designer stores, flanked by flowers and butterflies, bulbous chandeliers and draped satin, all created in highly saturated hues and an oversized scale. In line with the tone set by the resort-casino’s brand, nearly every store and restaurant is merely a name: Louis Vuitton, Stratta, Dior, McQueen, Bartolatta. The Wynn Art Gallery was fittingly replaced by a Rolex store in 2009, due to lack of attendance.
The change of the resort’s name to Wynn aptly demonstrates its relationship to art: originally to be called Le Rêve after casino developer Steve Wynn’s famed painting by Picasso, Wynn changed the name to something more recognizable by his clientele. As a resort intended to shed the themed environments characteristic of the 1990s Las Vegas Strip, “luxury” became the focus of the new casino. This form of luxury differed from the version Steve Wynn created for his earlier Bellagio, which evoked the eighteenth century Grand Tour and included art as one component of the luxury experience though its art gallery (more on the Bellagio in a forthcoming post).
The new Wynn, in contrast, rebranded luxury as name cachet, created for those knowledgeable enough to have an understanding and association with the names comprising the stores, restaurants and hotel itself. Paul Verhoeven’s Las Vegas-based Showgirls (1995) showcases the difference between the various Las Vegas audiences though the lower class character Nomi’s initial mispronunciation of Versace and lack of awareness of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant, in contrast with lead, affluent dancer Cristal Connors’s “in the know” disposition.
Wynn’s reconstruction of luxury’s signifiers was effective in both enabling his new resort to become one of the costliest on the Las Vegas Strip, and contributing to the “de-theming” future resorts, as seen in more recent casino constructions in CityCenter Las Vegas and the Cosmopolitan.
Damien Hirst. For the Love of God. 2007. Image from wikipedia.org.
Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God would be the ideal for the Wynn Esplanade because of its parallels to the developer’s own history and role as a constructed status symbol within the contemporary art field. The sculpture’s surface appearance alone aligns with the overstated opulence that characterizes the most expensive hotels on the Las Vegas Strip; however, the Wynn’s Esplanade supplies the most concentrated collection of high-end, designer shops that serve as status symbols within American society. The inclusion of a Ferrari dealer and gallery in the Wynn brings this brand of luxury to a visual pinnacle, an American status symbol recognizable by almost anyone who walks into the casino; similarly, Hirst’s use of 8,061 diamonds as an artistic medium and noted £14 million in production costs to construct an art object that immediately bestows a status of wealth and extravagance upon it purchaser. The Ferrari dealership makes high-end vehicles instantly available for the Wynn’s high rollers to purchase with their newfound winnings; how fitting it would be for For the Love of God to be on hand for a similar whim.
In reality, For the Love of God resides far away from the Las Vegas Strip, supposedly purchased by a consortium that included Damien Hirst himself, in a performative display of art market manipulation. Reportedly sold at its projected value of £50 million, the purchase of For the Love of God was covered by news outlets worldwide as an authentic sale, despite the questionable lack of documentation and public details surrounding the sale. This maneuver bears strong resemblance to Steve Wynn’s performance-like implosions of historic casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. The casino developer’s demolition of the Dunes in 1993 included coordination with the pirate-themed Treasure Island, then also a Wynn property. The implosion’s constructed narrative included the image of a cannonball shooting from Treasure Island to detonate the Dunes. Unlike many closing casinos, Wynn also opted to include the iconic, 18-story sign in the destruction, demonstrating an overt lack of reverence for the earlier hotel’s cultural significance and clear statement of his view on the future of Las Vegas.
Wynn attempted to solicit footage of the Dunes implosion to cinematic studios, to no avail. Ultimately electing to shoot the footage himself, the filmed explosion afterwards became sought after and sold for use in multiple Hollywood films. Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino featured one of the most memorable inclusions of Wynn’s footage, in which the implosion represents the Las Vegas Strip’s transition from control by organized crime figures to the corporate branding of casinos. As a result of Casino and other media portrayals of Las Vegas’s shift towards family oriented experiences in the 1990s, Wynn’s filmed representation became the reality; his themed casinos replaced “classic,” adult-oriented environments, and Americans bought into the rebranded city enough to start bringing their children to indulge in the pirate ships, tropical waterfalls and oversized castles of the “new” Las Vegas, thus making Wynn’s imagery a reality.
The new Wynn Las Vegas differs significantly from the initial version of Las Vegas he set out to create though the Dunes implosion; the influence the casino developer established through his performative destructions allows his powerful image to proliferate, to the point that his name alone is now enough to attract thousands of individuals to his casino daily. Likewise, Damien Hirst’s performance surrounding For the Love of God brought his name the forefront of the media and American consciousness through a similar medium and a comparable level of success within the contemporary art field. The value of a diamond is only a small fraction of the value of a name; it is safe to assume both Hirst and Wynn know this all too well.
This week, I begin a fifteen day trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, to seek and document art experiences within the notorious mecca of American popular culture. While turning a critical eye to Sin City and its cacophony is far from novel (someone else also happens to be doing a similar project at this exact moment), the motivation behind this trip is to document the art, architecture and visual culture of the current Las Vegas Strip more comprehensively, and with greater reflection, than is possible in the standard three-day visit.
Over the past several months, I have selected and booked fourteen of the most culturally significant casinos on the Las Vegas Strip,* based on their relationships to American history and culture. As I work my way through this experience, Peripheral Vision be turned over to the documentation process, returning to its regularly scheduled programming after April May 29.
Image from wildnatureimages.com
*The “official Las Vegas Strip” refers to the 4.2 mile portion of Las Vegas Blvd. South between Sahara Ave. and Russell Rd.
The last time I visited the Liberace Museum, an older woman invited me to try on a giant, patchwork coat. Providing the requisite opportunity for participation the way almost all American museums now do, this coat allowed visitors to feel the added weight Liberace experienced while parading across the stage in one of his elaborate garments. The woman overseeing the coat was a museum volunteer and clearly a lifelong Liberace fan. As I tried on the 40 lb garment and posed for the camera, she let us know the coat’s cacophony of shimmering fabrics were handmade by another volunteer and consisted of fragments from the ensembles of former showgirls.
The room in which I tried on the coat was the highlight of the museum: the costume gallery. Spread across two buildings in a strip mall on east Tropicana Avenue, the Liberace Museum showcased five primary collections; biographical photographs, a handful of vehicles, and a melange of pianos were displayed in the building nearest Tropicana Avenue, while the space on the other side of the parking lot housed the costume collection and selections of Liberace’s Baroque home furniture.
Costume gallery, Liberace Museum, 2008
This week, the Liberace Museum closed indefinitely. While many news sources have reported on this closure since its announcement in early September, I suspect few people under the age of fifty actually visited the physical space. Dave Hickey’s seminal essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” in 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy provided incentive to visit and reconsider the value of Liberace to American society’s acceptance of the gay community. Likewise, Lady Gaga’s popularity and overt derivations from the piano star’s approach to celebrity suggest Liberace remains relevant to contemporary audiences (see Eric Felten’s “Lady Gaga and Liberace: Separated at Birth?”). Yet, the two instances I visited suggested there was not an enormous body of Las Vegas visitors clamoring to get into the modest space so far east on Tropicana Avenue that the museum ran free, hourly shuttles to and from the hotels on the Strip. The one occasion I took the shuttle back to the Strip (as opposed to taking a $30 cab ride or renting a car; public transportation is reportedly not for tourists) the only other party enjoying the footage of Liberace performances shown on the shuttle’s TV was a group of three from Australia visiting Las Vegas for a week.
Liberace Museum, 2008
In general, Americans do not visit Las Vegas for the form of culture found in museums. Some have suggested that the closing of the Liberace Museum might be attributed to its isolated location, away from the tourist areas of the city. While the free shuttle was one solution to this concern, the closure of museums throughout Sin City over the past decade demonstrates that its site was not the only reason for the Liberace Museum’s demise.
In some ways, museums seem a natural fit for Las Vegas between of the constant flow of people in and out of the city and the high concentration of resident performers, architects, designers and other creative individuals required to support the entertainment excess for which Vegas it is known. Considering how the shopping, dining, sexual opportunities, spectacle and general branding as a place where one can do anything without regret play a significant role in Las Vegas “culture,” it is easy to forget that gaming is the single reason for the city’s position as a destination in America. Gambling makes all other things Las Vegas is known for possible, and ultimately, all roads in the city’s tourist districts lead to (and are paid for by) gaming. This situation creates an interesting relationship with culture, particularly because Las Vegas has spent so many decades creating a culture around gambling that makes it appealing to a mass audience, as opposed to only those who consider themselves “gamblers.” Contemporary popular culture is essential in Las Vegas’s ability to sell itself, and hence the city is designed to reflect the most present of moments in American consciousness.
In the 1990s Sin City capitalized on the public desires for “edutainment” and family friendly activities through the addition of cultural amenities to casinos. A few remnants of this era still exist, including the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and the Mandalay Bay’s American Zoo and Aquariums Association accredited Shark Reef. The Venetian Casino opened two museums affiliated with the Guggenheim and designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2001: the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage. The Guggenheim Las Vegas exhibited only The Art of the Motorcycle before its closure in 2002. The Guggenheim Hermitage lasted until 2008, showing works from the collection of its namesake Russian institution and the New York affiliate by big-name modern painters, such as Picasso, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Kandinsky, among others.
Guggenheim Hermitage, Venetian Resort Casino, 2001, image from rex-ny.com
When the Guggenheims opened in the Venetian, they made sense in terms of the casino’s theme through their adherence to the American perception of Italy as a place for high culture and artistic mastery. Yet the permanence and preservation that define museums are antitheses to the way visitors approach Las Vegas, as a place without a past, consequences or a future that is definitive; anything can happen with a roll of the dice. Likewise, museums defined by history struggle to find a place in the community (both tourist community and residential community) of such a place; here, “Las Vegas history” is merely a theme equated to the “French Riviera,” “Old West” and “Tropical Islands” represented within the casinos .
The role of Las Vegas’s history is made clear on the Zeigfield Stage in the Bally’s Casino, where Jubilee! continues as last remaining showgirl production on The Strip. Similar to the fate of its museums, Las Vegas has seen a dramatic loss in the showgirl productions that once dominated the city, beginning most prominently with the closing of the Stardust’s famed productions in 1999 and the end of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère in 2009.
Jubilee! perseveres in an almost parodic production that includes an original “Titanic” number that borders on the absurd; when I attended a performance earlier this year I found myself surrounded almost entirely by tourists from Asia. The vintage styling of the rhinestone costumes, pronounced smiles and homemade backdrops now appear more like the “living history” component of a historical museum than a contemporary performance. If the inclusion of former showgirl outfits in the participatory coat at the Liberace Museum isn’t evidence enough, the showgirl production’s relationship to museums is made even more pronounced by the opportunity to take a formal tour of the Jubilee!’s wardrobe and sets on select days of the week.
Jubilee!, Bally's Casino, image from nytimes.com
As a physical manifestation of popular culture and mainstream American interests, Las Vegas is known to exist in a state of constant flux. Even the community-based Las Vegas Art Museum shut its doors in 2009; hence while Liberace’s legacy may have suggested the museum he built would have an endless audience in Las Vegas, the city in which his career was cemented, a part of me was not surprised when the announcement came that it too would disappear. Las Vegas is not nostalgic, only temporal. Popular culture does not remember; if it did, at least a portion of the hoards of Lady Gaga fans that visit Las Vegas annually could be expected to flock to Liberace’s pianos and costumes as a means for better appreciating their favorite star. Instead, I suspect a very small minority of the Little Monsters even know who Mr. Showman was.
Ultimately, the outcry of the press regarding the Liberace Museum’s closure has been surprisingly pronounced for an institution that received relatively little notice when it was doing anything but closing. While there is a natural inclination blame the Las Vegas environment for its lack of recognition of the past, that would be the easy way out. Las Vegas, as a money-driven city, feeds from mainstream trends and culture. In the case of the Liberace Museum’s closure, the question to ask is the following: what it is that prevented us, the Americans who created what Las Vegas has become, from remembering to visit, or simply remembering at all.
“The industry of the Absolute Fake gives a semblance of truth to the myth of immortality through the play of imitations and copies, and it achieves the presence of the divine in the presence of the natural –but the natural is ‘cultivated’ as in the Marinelands.”
Excerpt from essay “Travels in Hyperreality” by Umberto Eco, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1975.
Image: “Water & Oil,” photographed by Steven Meisel, model: Kristen McMenamy, image from theworldsbestever.com.
“No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.”
Excerpt from A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present by Frederic Jameson, New York, NY: Verso, 2002. Print.
Image: “Bruce,” still from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), image from chud.com
The experience of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride at Orlando’s Walt Disney World is one burned permanently into my memory, despite having taken the fantastical journey only once. I recall the ornate, army green Nautilus, with its glaring fish eye windows, approaching slowly in the chlorinated lagoon. We were loaded aboard and seated on in a row of movie-style seats running the length of the half-submerged sub, each passenger assigned the smallest of porthole windows, providing an intimate viewing experience of the man-made, undersea world. The booming narration of Captain Nemo, accompanied by organ notes for emphasis, began the journey, as sprays of bubbles blew past the windows, signifying the our sinking to greatest of depths.
I recall recognizing the bubbles as a special effect, having just spent an hour in line, watching the submarines circulating through the lagoon without ever going below the surface. Once the bubbles cleared and plastic marine life was in view, I suspect every kid on the ship over the age of five knew that we were “pretending,” that none of what we were seeing were actual animals. Yet the theatrics of the ship, the tiny viewing hole, the voice of Captain Nemo himself guiding our viewing, provided all of the spectacle necessary to convince the 40 people aboard the Nautilus that everything through the window was extraordinary and full of wonder; there were things here that everyone wanted to see. The ride was discontinued in 1994 but has been memorialized on YouTube by devoted individuals who filmed the experience in full so that the artificial ocean could not be completely lost over time.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have an affinity for the Henry Art Gallery’s use of the elevator as a video installation location. As a freight elevator, entering its surprisingly large space evokes a sense of transport to elsewhere. During my most recent experience in the elevator, the grand silver doors opened to reveal a rectangular portal into the ocean of Kiki Smith’s Jewel, a video depicting a bloom of jellyfish floating hypnotically in tangled masses. As the elevator shut and started moving in a slow descent, my memory of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea journey was triggered. Bubbles did not flood the screen but the isolated video within this vehicle brought attention to the wonder of the cnidarian in a way similar to the viewing of the Disney attraction’s underwater theatrical experience. In the elevator, there is only the viewer and the crystal jellyfish, the creatures’ forms and anatomies glowing with luminescence.
Typically, I suspect that entering the elevator and experiencing Jewel would lead to consideration of how the video relates to the other works by the artist in the larger exhibition at the Henry. However, in this instance, in the midst of having a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea moment of nostalgia, my mind kept wandering back to the question of what this video would look like if everything was drenched in oil; jellyfish were noted as one of the first casualties of the spill that has become central to the US collective consciousness over the past 40+ days. This past week, more images of the effected Gulf of Mexico sea life have emerged, but for the first month of the catastrophe, visual renditions had been limited to the aerial photos of orange streaks across the Gulf’s surface, which were ultimately more aesthetic than harrowing. While shock is far from the only way to convey information, since the oil spill began there had been an underlying sense that the visual impact of the disaster was being withheld. Consequently, I began seeking it elsewhere. In this context, Smith’s jellyfish appeared more surveillance-like, demonstrating the calm version of the ocean that no longer exists, playing on repeat, now more similar to the pleasantly artificial lagoon of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea than the disturbing reality reflected on the 24/7 surveillance camera of the spilling oil.
Jewels is not inherently about oil or environmental devastation. Yet I couldn’t avoid seeing it in these terms because of the oil spill’s physical drenching of the collective consciousness. It is a disaster that has caused a unique level of universal helplessness among the government, the Gulf coast residents and the American public. Experiencing the images seems to provide the opportunity to interact with the situation on some level, albeit a superficial one; since the release of more graphic depictions of oil-soaked marine life, the proliferation of photographs across art and media online resources demonstrates a common desire to view and expose what had been discussed extensively but not seen until this point. The images are now becoming something of a spectacle themselves, but there is some sense to this, considering how the American desire for excess and spectacle is ultimately linked to the consumption of oil. People have an innate desire to see what cannot be seen, including both the pleasantries of a constructed attraction’s excessive spectacle, as well as the very real consequences of living the excessive and spectacle-filled lifestyle reflected in the magical world of Disney.
I.
“What’s so special about this thing, again?” a younger cashier asked to her older coworker.
After a short pause, the older coworker replied, “Nothing.”
The object in question was a matted pair of playing cards and $500 poker chip I was in the process of purchasing for $2.99 from the Bonanza Gift and Souvenir Shop on Las Vegas Boulevard. One of the playing cards is an ace, mounted with its face value revealed; the other is glued face down, a Dunes Hotel logo printed in red across its reverse. The poker chip includes the Dunes’s signature sultan and the dates of the resort’s lifespan: 1955-1993. There were stacks of these mounted cards and poker chips inside a locked case at the Bonanza. It was not clear whether these were objects actually used in the Dunes or just leftover souvenir items that someone had come across in the back room of the store after the hotel’s implosion.
Dunes Hotel, Las Vegas, 1950s. Image from the Online Nevada Encyclopedia.
The young cashier pressed on, “No, I know there is something about it. What is the Dunes? You know I’m not from Vegas. I don’t know about all of that old stuff.”
Old things do not sell here, except in the pawn shops at the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard, past the Bonanza, the aging Sahara and the trademark drive-through wedding chapels. Las Vegas is a city founded and sustained on the absence of memory and remorse. By early 2009 many of the major casino corporations dominating the Strip felt the impact of the recession; chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp. (former operator of the Sands Hotel; now the corporation owning the Venetian and Palazzo resort-casinos) Sheldon Adelson had lost $36.5 billion. Yet when Joel Stein of Time asked Adelson how long it would be before he seeks additional loans for expanding his casino properties, “…[Adelson] sits up, widens his eyes and smiles, ‘As soon as someone wants to lend it,’ he says. ‘I’ll be first in line’” (“Less Vegas,” Time 24 Aug. 2009).
Failures and losses instantly left behind, this mentality can be applied to Las Vegas in myriad forms: the casinos that continue to be blown to pieces and replaced with new incarnations of their former selves; the gamblers feeding fresh winnings back into the system in an effort to win more; the supposed reinvention of the Strip from gangsters and luxury, to tourist kitsch and simulated themes, to the architectural and art-filled CityCenter. Between these transitions from old present to new present, rarely is anything salvaged from the past. Hence, the employees of the Bonanza need to know nothing about history in order to sell their merchandise; there is nothing special about a historical object.
II.
Mark Dombrosky, Neverland, installation view, image from Platform Gallery
The first time I visited Platform Gallery’s window this month, I kept walking, assuming it was undergoing installation. Upon remembering it should contain Mark Dombrosky’s Neverland, a response to the artist’s recent relocation to Las Vegas, I backtracked and realized what had for a moment appeared to be installation debris was the installation. As I walked inside, the ravaged cardboard boxes, moving blanket and paper scraps spread throughout the space evoked Ed Ruscha’s vintage typewriter parts scattered along Interstate 15 during his 1967 Royal Road Test.
Initially, Dombrosky’s found objects seem to wait somberly for retrieval or a mere second glance. A “for sale” sign made from a flattened box sells nothing, a pink paper fortune-teller resides in a box for ornaments, and a framed to-do list contains only two items: “Get signatures” and “Drop tub.” Upon closer inspection, the careful stitching the artist added within the preexisting words and images conveys a sense of permanence to these otherwise ephemeral curiosities; painstaking renderings of handwritten script and the finest of thread lines transform generic notes into prolonged experiences.
Ed Ruscha with Patrick Blackwell and Mason Williams, Royal Road Test, 1967, image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The interactions between permanence and the ephemeral at work within Dombrosky’s objects occur in parallel to the contradictions of the Mojave Desert. In reality, the famed Strip that most associate with Las Vegas resides outside the city boundaries; the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard is officially located in Paradise, Nevada. However, when one flies into Las Vegas from anywhere else, the gargantuan scale of the hotels on the Strip in contrast to every other structure in sight demonstrates the more accurate relationship between Paradise and Las Vegas: one in which the desert serves as a backlot for the mega-resorts. Likewise, the starkness of Dombrosky’s Neverland, both as a whole and in terms of individual objects, appears more related to this “backlot” than Sin City’s mainstream glamour and glitz.
Aerial view of the Las Vegas Strip, image from planetware.com
William Fox explains in In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle, “Las Vegas is an intense locus of financial activity in the middle of one of the world’s most severe deserts. Like its predecessors, ranging from ancient Babylon to Luxor, and its contemporary counterparts…it is able to capitalize upon that fact by allowing people to imagine and then erect castles on the sand and into the air.” (xii)
The image of the castle in the desert morphs over time on the Strip but does so by simply reformulating Louis XIV-levels of opulent luxury. The Excalibur is the most literal manifestation, but in general most mega-resorts have ties to a castle concept of some kind, with muses ranging from the Loire Valley and the Doge’s Palace to Disneyland. Yet Dombrosky’s Crooked Castle is likely the most enduring over time. It is clear from experience that casinos in Las Vegas will eventually be imploded, dismantled and redecorated, often without any concern for the “original;” the recent morph from the Aladdin to Planet Hollywood is one of the more obvious examples. Dombrosky’s castle is not only embroidered into a lasting existence over its pencil lines, but its framing adds an additional layer of perpetuation, transforming a scrapped drawing into art, something intended to be kept, maintained, preserved.
Crooked Castle, Mark Dombrosky, 2009, Embroidery on found paper, image from Platform Gallery
To be continued in “Desert Ephemera: Part III”
Parked inside in a small gallery of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art is a Heartland Machine. Heartland Machine is a mobile sculpture that began as a speedboat. Conceived by Detroit-based Design 99, over a period of ten days the boat was dragged around the mid-west and interacted with independent arts organizations based in Minneapolis, Detroit, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago. The final sculpture included videos, printed materials, metal signs and other objects from the boat’s journey, assembled inside the Smart Museum. In addition to the work’s title, cartoon-esque speeding lines affixed to the back of the vehicle evoke the animated trail left behind Doc Brown’s famed time machine as it disappears in Back to the Future. The notable difference is, in place of a flux capacitor, Heartland Machine is fueled by artistic fusion across communities.
Design 99, Heartland Machine, 2009, mixed media installation including audiovisual equipment, fiberglass boat, found materials, silkscreened posters designed by Nina Bianchi and printed by Tim Eads; ephemera and video (color, sound) supplied by regional independent cultural infrastructures. Courtesy of the artists. Image from the Smart Museum.
Heartland Machine is part of the Smart Museum’s (whose Adaptation traveled to the Henry Art Gallery last year) group exhibition Heartland, a collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum that focuses on artists working from and responding to the center of the United States. The simple concept behind Heartland is what makes it poignant. The “region” of this exhibition was based on the course of the Mississippi River as a geographical guiding force; in the exhibition catalog, the curatorial team describe the area as “…heart drawn on a map of the United States with its point in New Orleans, extending up to Minneapolis in the northwest and Detroit in the northeast” (Esche, Niemann and Smith 12). This selection, based on the curators’ series of road trips across America from 2007-2009 bypassed the traditional “Midwest” or “Bible Belt” definitions of region, suggesting the arbitrariness of such boundaries in this context.
Regional exhibitions are commonplace, but in the field of contemporary art, rural America in particular can be something of a persona non grata. Although they may have migrated from elsewhere, many of this country’s well-known artists are based on the coasts, with limited exceptions for the larger (Chicago, Minneapolis) or particularly arts-friendly (Santa Fe) cities. The middle of the country is more often seen as a place to escape rather than a focal point for creative inquiry.
In the Chicago Reader’s recommendation of Heartland, Noah Berlatsky writes,
“I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the installation by Carnal Torpor, a KC art collective that makes klutzy, burpy grindcore music when they’re not creating collages indebted equally to Pushead and Day of the Dead ofrendas. The group…has an aesthetic I appreciate not so much because it’s weird as because it seems familiar and right. But then, I live here.” (Chicago Reader, “Fall Arts Guide 2009“)
Carnal Torpor’s installation Purifications of the CalmDome is comprised of a white, plastic pod approximately ten feet high, similar in shape to a deformed soccer ball with overlapping circular patterns inscribed in its surface. Viewers can remove their shoes and enter the structure through a small hole in the back. Once inside, the space becomes isolating, the smallest of sounds shut out, the only light coming from the entry hole and a small, silent television near the top of the dome.
Left: Cody Critcheloe, BOY, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009. Courtesy of the artists. Installation view at the Smart Museum of Art. Image from the Smart Museum
I did not want to like Purifications of the CalmDome. Its proliferation of the desire to escape from one environment into another seemed too easy. Yet whenever I try to conceptualize Heartland, I keep coming back to the experience of climbing into the dome. As a former resident of the midwest, something about this piece articulated my determination to escape that part of the country at my first opportunity. Stepping inside the installation feels like a direct connection to the mind of the artist, or maybe to anyone frustrated with the monotony and absence of personality in places like the suburb in which I grew up (Naperville, IL). There is not much to be found inside Purifications of the CalmDome, but there is a sense that the interior is at least distinct from the exterior, if nothing else. As Berlatsky suggested, Purifications of the CalmDome was highly familiar and exactly right.
Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009, Mixed media installation including architectural elements, electronics, paint, soundproofing materials, and video. Image from the Smart Museum.
The northernmost and southernmost boundaries of Heartland are Detroit and New Orleans. The connections between these two damaged cities are readily seen within the photographs by two artists in the exhibition. Slovenian artist-architect Marjetica Potrc portrays scenes of the Lower 9th Ward against the backdrop of New Orleans’s vacant businesses; Scott Hocking documents series of pyramid structures within Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant building as they crumble into their surroundings over time. Seeing these works in the context of Heartland, an exhibition largely focused on the communities of their region, begged the question of why a relevant exhibition like this was not selected to be on view in place of the highly controversial Dreams Come True: Art of the Classic Fairy Tales from the Walt Disney Studio at NOMA.
Scott Hocking, Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.
Questions of finances and ethics aside, one of the most unfortunate aspects of Dreams Come True is its irrelevance to a city struggling to rebuild itself. As a museum limited on staff and resources, the easy solution may appear to be the all-inclusive Disney exhibition that comes at no financial cost to the institution. Yet it still comes at the expense of staff time, gallery space and marketing efforts, among other resources. In place of Dreams Come True, NOMA could have found an alternative solution more similar to Heartland, smaller in scale but providing more content and ideas that are meaningful to the city rather than artifacts from Disney productions associated with with the false promises and imitations of life that led to the term “Disneyfication”; it is difficult to imagine the opportunities for dialogue princess movies bring to a city striving to create a sense of community.
The corporately-created exhibition is particularly disconcerting in a time when the focus should be on recognizing the importance of local culture and creativity to the city of New Orleans. Although not everything in Heartland is equally provocative, the resonance of particular works suggest the show’s more community-based model is successful and something that should be considered more often in place of the impersonal (and often irrelevant) traveling blockbuster exhibitions so common in museum practice. In this regard, Design 99′s Heartland Machine may be seen as a mode of thought, rather than a mere device, sent to us from the future.
“At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E is the quintessential twenty-first-century motion picture. Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, it’s the 2001 of 2008–a postphotographic film set in a posthuman universe.”
Excerpt from “21st Century Cinema: Death and Resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” by J. Hoberman, Artforum International Dec. 2009: 210-29. Print.
Image: Scott Hocking, Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21, 2008, Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI.
