Prairie Blues
The title of my latest painting is "Weeds." The subject is a back lot of a three-story apartment building, in an intermediate zone between the city and the suburbs -the Dilapidated Building Belt. Most doors and windows are boarded, many are voids, a structure occupied by an aged owner, here-and-there. Alternate title: "gone to seed."
If the homeless are revenants of a meaningful life these buildings are husks of formerly vital neighborhoods. At one point they became economically viable to build, later, not economically viable to occupy. To put a finer point on it, at some point in the economic cycle the residents either moved up to greener pastures, or were evicted. Values never recovered.
Until now. Not with reference to gentrification, unless a second look artistically be considered gentrification, but nostalgically. I see a late wave of national expansion, as poignant as the wagon trail ruts of the early settlers of the Old West. Where a Marxist sees a Capitalist fault line, I see a gust of changing political winds. That weed-choked yard was a Victory Garden. Give it the respect it deserves.
Alternate title: Prairie Bramble. The overgrowth is a reclamation project of, and by, the wilds. It's not a grand panorama on the scale of 19th Century romances with the new land. I am reminded more of the photographs of Dorothea Lange than of Ansel Adams. The random greenery is relief from the monotonous brick red and concrete gray of human habitation. Don't call them weeds. They are indigenous plants.
It is the solitude of Aaron Siskind, 1903-1991. See his photograph, "Jalapa 35 (Homage to Franz Klein)," 1973. It is a macro photo of a detail of graffiti, of brushed black paint on a side street wall. It looks like, well...like a Franz Klein. Photography imitates art imitating photography. Siskind spawned countless imitators (myself, included). So many, in fact, that the subject is pretty well exhausted by now.
Aaron Siskind's photographic city 'scapes from the 1950s, of sidewalks devoid of pedestrians at noon day, are his artistic legacy to me. Upon first viewing them in a survey of modern photography in school, I was struck dumb, as at a moment of Zen enlightenment. They were explained as the influence on art, at the time they were taken, of the imminent possibility of world annihilation by nuclear war. It can all be over in an instant. Why go on? And, yet, go forward anyway.
These are un-habitable places, places where you wouldn't want to go. They are only to be seen. Think Edward Hopper on opium. Not the stillness of a Sunday morning, but the stillness of the morgue, at 3:00 a.m. It is the grim sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, a confirmed opium user -without resorting to opium use.
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