The Wasteland?
"The Wasteland? Stalking the soul of suburbia" by Lorraine Gengo, New Haven Advocate, September 20, 2007
Stalking Suburbia
Through Oct. 26 at Westport Arts Center, www.westportartscenter.org
There was a time in my life when all I dreamed about was ditching the sheltered, culturally deprived, lily white suburb where I was raised and trading it for my own precious little slice of Manhattan, which turned out to be a tiny cockroach-infested walk-up above a raucous gay bar and filthy Chinese takeout in Midtown. Once I had a taste of freedom, I vowed that I would never live in the 'burbs again.
Never say never. During a 20-year period I had become an experienced urban dweller, living and working in New York, Boston, Philly, Washington, D.C., and even Baghdad. During that time, I had also experienced living in the "real" country, on an 80-acre ranch in the wilds of Northern California. But when my son was born, all that changed. Suddenly, it didn't weird me out that I was living in a suburban tract house with a postage-stamp-size lawn that could have been E.T.'s adopted domicile.
From that slippery slope it was a relatively easy slide back to my hometown, where, I had to admit, you couldn't beat the public schools system. People assured me that a lot had changed in 20 years—there was more to do, and more ethnic and racial diversity than there had been when I left. But what I found was the place hadn't changed as much as my needs had. I wanted my son to grow up among his familial tribe, to attend good schools and breathe relatively clean air. I took him back to what I knew because it felt safe.
Ambivalence about one's suburban roots is a popular topic for artists, as anyone who has read the novels of John Cheever (aka, "the Chekhov of the suburbs") knows. In "Stalking Suburbia," the current exhibition at Westport Arts Center, it's the photographers who exercise their angst over the cultural wastelands of their youth. Though guest curator Lauren Ryan makes the claim in her essay for the show that much of the work in it is "neither critical nor judgmental but almost strictly observational," I beg to differ. Any comedian will tell you that some words are inherently funny, while others are not. And "suburbia" is a derisively funny word. Choosing it as one's subject matter automatically implies a judgment, even if the artist's intent is to refute the stereotype.
A series of photographs by Miranda Lichtenstein subtly shook my mixed emotions, setting the tone for how I perceived the rest of the work on display. Her three untitled images were of two suburban ranches and a colonial-style house photographed at night, using only her car headlights for illumination. Viewed from the roadside through sparse woods, these homes with their lights blazing seemed at once so comforting, so safe, like coming home from school in the early dark of winter and seeing a warm house awaiting you—and yet also so isolated. Safety and an isolation that leads to desperation are the yin and yang of suburban life.
While the topography of Lichtenstein's subjects will be very familiar to WAC patrons, Todd Hido's six photos of suburban dwellings appear more exotic. Hido may be the original suburban night stalker. He often shoots his photos from the vantage of the driver's seat of his car, and often through the windshield using only available light and long exposures. It's that quality of light, and not merely the stray palm tree, that make his suburbs feel like they hail from an alternate universe. There's a menacing intensity in the air, what Californians refer to as earthquake weather, which Hido somehow captures in his images. It was Hido's work that inspired Ryan to curate "Stalking Suburbia," and I can see why she found the work so compelling.
However, if there is a progenitor for suburban photography it would probably be Bill Owens, a photojournalist from California whose monograph, Suburbia, 1973, was a seminal influence on practitioners of this sub-genre. Owens, who's almost 70, worked for an indie newspaper in Livermore, Calif., which assigned him the task of photographing the cultural life of his neighborhood. Like Flannery O'Connor, Owens has an eye for morally flawed characters. His "Cookout Couple," a homely pair of suburbanites grilling up some dinner behind the house, are positively sinister. And the children he captures are gun-toting gamins. The most arresting photo of the seven black and white images of his on display is of a young, perhaps 7-year-old, girl holding a 007-style handgun in her left hand, its snub-nose nuzzling her right palm. She's wearing a dowdy, ill-fitting plaid jacket with fleece lining, and her blonde hair is a wanton rat's nest. She's smiling, but there's steel in her gun-moll gaze. I would have pegged her for a Belfast brat, not the issue of California suburbanites.
Not all of the photographers in this exhibit train their eyes on what's there to see on the surface of the suburban landscape. Some, like Suellen Parker and Anthony Goicolea, delve deep into the hive of suburban life. It's scary in there, let me tell you. In "Feastlings," Goicolea constructs a digital tableau using multiple self-portraits of himself disguised as nine very bad boys in prissy prep-school uniforms who are in the process of pillaging a typical '60s suburban feast of baked ham studded with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries, bowls of succotash and the like. One might assume that the punch they've gotten into is spiked, as one fellow has done a face plant into the lima beans, while another is about to pitch a string of sausages at his mate across the table who's prepared to meet the fuselage with a chafer shield. Meanwhile, yet another pubescent prankster is about to catapult a spoonful of limas at the viewer, while the brat next to him spews his milk in a wide arc across the room. This is how Dali might have depicted dinnertime had he been raised in New Canaan.
Suellen Parker's work may be known to some given the recent broad exposure her work received in a photo spread in the New York Times Magazine this past spring. Her images combine the real and unreal in a way that is singularly arresting. She starts out with an idea or image she wants to express, and begins by creating a sculpture of her subject in Plasticine. She then photographs the sculpture against a white background and loads that image into a computer, where she has amassed a library of photographed objects that the character might possess, including environments they might live in. Once all this information is available in digital form, she goes to town with it, painting in skin tones, contours and shading, integrating photos of "real" body parts as she goes. Real and unreal. Isn't that also part of the suburban dilemma? The "real" world is dirty and crime-ridden—the mean streets of urban life. Anyone who lives in suburbia is living a protected fantasy bubble existence. Real life is always outside those parameters.
Inside Parker's world, in "Having a Ball (Keep on Keeping On), 2006," there's a pudgy man working out on a blue exercise ball in his den. He's wearing a wife-beater and shorts and he's draped upside-down on top of the ball, stretching his back. His beady eyes follow you around the gallery. He wants to be Mr. Superfit, just like the guys in the magazines that litter the floor. It ain't ever gonna happen, not in this lifetime. Based on the similarity of the portraits of people hanging on the wall, he isn't much of an artist either. He's probably a sketch-artist cop who keeps plugging away, harboring dreams of glory. The 'burbs are filled with un-beautiful people like him, leading lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau so famously noted.
Yet I refuse to accept the idea that life in the suburbs is a life spent in limbo. There's a hopeful note to be struck, and I found it in the work of Gail Peter Borden, the only non-photographer of the group. Borden's installation, "24 Houses," is an architect's answer to Rubik's Cube. Using hollow, painted basswood blocks in the ubiquitous two-story rectangle and pitched roof triangle shapes, Borden arranges 24 houses in a seven-foot circle. Though each structure is built from the same components, each one is assembled differently, appearing unique among the other structures in the circle. Thus, in toying with the cookie-cutter archetype of suburban architecture, Borden speaks to the variety of what one can do with a rectangle and a triangle.
I guess boring is as boring does, whether it's in suburbia or in the "real" world.
