Chuck Forsman

Feather River, 1992
Oil on panel
Collection of the NMA, Gift of Volunteers in Art

Feather River, a frequently exhibited piece in the Sierra Nevada | Great Basin Collection, seems to be a favorite of museum visitors. Perhaps it is the unique way that Forsman has painted the river in golden colors with contrasting grey rocks, or the way he has allowed the composition to “spill over” and become part of the frame of the painting.

Chuck Forsman was born in Nampa, Idaho, in 1944, and received his BA and his MFA in 1971 at the University of California. He has studied at Pasadena College and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He has had more than forty solo exhibitions since 1971, and his work is in the permanent collections of many museums throughout the western United States as well as New York. His most well known project is Arrested Rivers (1994), which focused on the subject of dams and water control in the west. Our painting, Feather River, is a part of that project; it depicts the Feather River Dam, built in 1961. The wall text notes that local Native American tribes criticized the dam project because the proposed spillway would submerge a number of pre-historic Maidu burial sites.

Forsman has also done a book of photography, Western Rider, published in 2004. Based in the Denver, Colorado area, Forsman is Professor of Fine Arts and Painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Research note prepared by Kathleen Durham and Lois Smalley.

Albert Sheldon Pennoyer

Bucking Snow in the Sierras
c. 1940’s
Oil on canvas
Collection of the NMA, Gift of Ella Savitt

Born in Oakland, California in 1888, Albert Sheldon Pennoyer was raised in nearby Berkeley, where he studied at the University of California for a year, before moving to Paris to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There he realized that his true interest lay in painting. He gave up his studies and returned to the U.S. when WWI began. He had homes on the East Coast in New York City and Litchfield, Connecticut, but spent almost equal time in California. He had a small studio cabin at his brother’s home at Lake Tahoe, and ventured forth from there to explore the Sierra, Virginia City, and Pyramid Lake. He is especially well known for his winter scenes, as well as his railroad images. He was the author/illustrator of two books, This Was California (1938), and Locomotives in our Lives (1954). He was equally proficient in oils, gouache, and pastels. Pennoyer died in an automobile accident in Madrid in 1957.

The NMA’s painting, Bucking Snow in the Sierras, shows steam engines clearing snow from the tracks near Donner Pass. More recently trains have been equipped with rotary plows that shoot the snow off to the sides. From what we have learned, this painting depicts the old method of bucking snow, which involved a steam locomotive with a wedge plow. The engine would get a running start and slam through the snow. The train also carried men who would jump out and shovel snow. Some of the snow was melted to produce more steam power for the locomotives. There appear to be four engines in the painting, and it always yields a great conversation with guests. Someday a docent will be lucky enough to have an old railroad man on a tour to tell us how it was firsthand!

Research note prepared by Kathleen Durham and Lois Smalley.

Like, Love, Lust: Michael Sarich Tour Blueprint

Introduction
Like, Love, Lust: Michael Sarich consists of more than one hundred paintings, prints, ceramic sculptures, drawings, and mixed media assemblages created by University of Nevada, Reno Associate Professor of Art Michael Sarich over the last twenty-five years. The NMA originated this exhibition, and Ann Wolfe curated all of the works in the exhibition, which come from public and private collections from around the world. The beautiful catalogue accompanying the exhibition is an entirely original production published by the NMA. It contains essays by Robert Sill, Kirk Robertson, and Ann Wolfe, as well as full-color plates of much of Mike’s work included in this exhibition. It’s available at the Museum Store, and represents the work of many NMA staff.

In addition to the rich visual characteristics of Michael’s work, the exhibition lends itself to conversation topics such as Post War American culture, Pop Culture, symbolism, science, religion, and personal histories. Finally, the exhibition provides a rich opportunity to emphasize the depths to which the NMA supports local artists. A feature exhibition of this size represents an extraordinary investment—financially, intellectually, and artistically—in the work of a local artist.


Wall Texts
LIKE LOVE LUST: MICHAEL SARICH main text panel
The letter L appears in triplicate on Michael Sarich’s heavily tattooed left forearm—indelible marks representing the words like, love, and lust. “I like you. I love you. I lust after you,” the artist stated as he proposed marriage to the woman who is now his wife. For Sarich, the function of a mark—whether on canvas, clay, wood, or his own body—is to communicate with those around him. An Associate Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno since 1989, Sarich has instilled in hundreds of students the importance of cultivating one’s own creative voice. This exhibition critically examines the evolution of Sarich’s personal language of mark-making, while celebrating the important contributions he has made—and will continue to make—both in our community and beyond.
Over the course of his career, Sarich’s art has shifted from deeply personal expressions to broadly social commentaries. From the late seventies to the early nineties, his works overflowed with graffiti-like marks that are scribbled and scrawled on paper, wood, and recycled objects—much like the art produced by Chicago’s Hairy Who artists and those affiliated with Art Brut and Outsider Art. As Sarich’s mark-making continued to shift, he became drawn to an assortment of popular and religious symbols, such as Mickey Mouse and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Even today, he combines such recognizable icons with layers of densely-packed, lyrical marks. This technique places him within a loosely-affiliated, largely West Coast group of artists dubbed Pop Surrealists, who are known for incorporating—and personalizing—an eclectic range of visual source materials.
In 2000, Sarich was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and although it has already had a drastic impact on his speech and motor skills, he continues to pursue his work with unfailing passion and commitment. To view Sarich’s artwork is to trace the path he has navigated thus far; it is to know his family and his friends, his secrets and his wounds. It is to deconstruct a lifetime of experiences in hopes that from his story we gain but an ounce of his unfailing courage and honesty, and learn that it is only by taking risks that we might live without fear of regret.

Bruised and Tattooed: The Early Work
Sarich was a Chicago boy. Born in 1955, he grew up in a two-bedroom rambler in the West Chicago suburb of Rolling Meadows. His father was a hard-nosed, barrel-chested man of Croatian stock with a wry sense of humor and a thick Chicago accent. His mother, small in stature, was Irish Catholic and loving. To Sarich, Chicago meant “family:” a locus of pleasure and pain. A place where fond memories collided with nightmares of a Catholic upbringing and overly stern punishments meted out for the slightest infraction fomented deep-seated anger and frustration.
Sarich’s early works are akin to visual diaries overflowing with unrefined, graffiti-like marks that are scribbled and scrawled across paper or carved into wood. Many of these works refer to his childhood, some are love letters to past girlfriends, and others are snapshots of late nights spent at the bar. “I was taking a daily experience and putting it into a visual story on a nightly basis,” Sarich has said of these early works.

The Social Underbelly: Working Outside the Mainstream
As an undergraduate art student at the Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (1973-80), and then a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in Norman (1982-83), Michael Sarich was surely aware of the trends ongoing in the mainstream art world. Sarich chose, however, to eschew the Minimalist and Conceptualist tendencies he witnessed, and instead produced works that were intensely personal and autobiographical.
Sarich looked to the work of H.C. Westermann and Chicago’s Hairy Who artists, as well as Jean Dubuffet and others affiliated with Art Brut, whose raw, aggressive, and unrefined sensibilities were often tuned to the social underbelly—a world seemingly more in line with what Sarich has described as his “blue-collar sensibility.”

La Cathédrale de Michele


In 1999, Sarich undertook a major installation that re-examined his Catholic upbringing. La Cathédrale de Michel questioned the ritualized traditions of the Catholic Church by modifying a traditional altar and the iconography associated with it. Mounted at the Nevada Museum of Art, La Cathédrale was a mock-Catholic altar adorned with ceramic skulls, black-and-white gambling dice, hundreds of dotted dominoes, and a kitschy sculpture of Venus de Milo (the Greek Goddess of love and beauty) in place of the traditional Virgin Mary shrine.
Created just two years after the death of his father, Sarich once called La Cathédrale a shrine to his dad, who, as Sarich explains, “used to play dice in the streets.” The installation seemed to cynically assert that religion is just a game to help people come to terms with their mortality. Sarich’s reconsideration of the symbols he was once taught to revere as sacred would prove crucial to the development of his future body of work.

Looking Inside: The Body Parts
Michael Sarich has spent considerable time investigating the intricacies of the human body. From anatomical renderings of internal organs to ceramic sculptures depicting cellular processes, Sarich’s works invite us beneath the skin’s surface to search for meaningful answers to life’s complex questions.
The organs and appendages Sarich depicts are often detached from the human body, and as such, their fragility is exposed to the exterior world. Having suffered from a collapsed lung as a child and unexplained heart problems in 1993, Sarich has long been aware of the vulnerability of the human body—an awareness that has become even more poignant, given his recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease.

All Mashed Up: Pop Surrealism
Michael Sarich’s most recent paintings and sculptures combine popular icons with recurring personal references. Often a large centralized icon—such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or Mickey Mouse—is surrounded or overlaid with densely packed, lyrical drawings; a combination of marks whose lines and shapes ebb and flow like varying musical tempos. This eclectic layering and combination of influences, often imbued with a dose of political inflection, places Sarich within a loosely-affiliated, largely West Coast group of artists dubbed Pop Surrealists by Kirsten Anderson in 2004.
According to Anderson, Pop Surrealism is:
"an amalgamation of so many things: tattoo, graffiti, retro culture, cartoons, etc., all mashed up and used to create something that transcended its mere visual appeal. Something that spoke profoundly...about using pop culture’s castoff detritus to create something meaningful and beautiful. And if it wasn’t beautiful, well, it was exciting. It delighted the eye and shocked the sensibilities, and was a welcome change from the increasing boorishness of the recycled ideas and stale conceptualism found in most contemporary art."

I used to scream at the viewer. Now I talk to them.
Over the course of Michael Sarich’s life, his relationship to mark-making has become increasingly complex, while his iconography has evolved from the deeply personal to the broadly social by way of symbolic and popular references. “In my early work I was wearing my heart on my sleeve, real gushy,” Sarich recollects.
In the early nineties, shortly after accepting a teaching position at the University of Nevada, Reno, Sarich began to regularly incorporate popular symbols and icons into his art. “Crying in your beer is okay, but you have to get over it,” he surmised. “So I shifted to social imagery as a visual hook: something to draw the viewer in first. I used to scream at the viewer, now I talk to them.” Although his art remains deeply personal, Sarich prefers that viewers derive their own meanings from his paintings and sculptures. “Art,” Sarich asserts, “is a communication that has dialogue with the viewer.”

What the Hell’s going on here? A Postmodern Puzzle
Michael Sarich hopes that his art will elicit multiple interpretations and a range of responses. “What the Hell’s going on here?” he wants us to ask. “Why did this person do this?” Sometimes the symbols he depicts are so dense with historical, social, and political meanings that they seem to become empty—or meaningless.
Within the cacophonous visual stew that Sarich assembles, the definitions of symbols and icons shift freely depending on the sensibilities of the viewer. Mickey Mouse may or may not represent the happiest place on earth, swastika symbols are free to assume the positive energy of their ancient roots, and that perpetual smiley face seen on the side of Wal-Mart bags across the nation does not necessarily represent happiness.
In the end, one’s attempt to explain these paintings and sculptures might be best described as an absurdist game—one haunted, simultaneously, by the attempt to discover meaning and by the lingering suspicion that there is no meaning at all. Postmodern puzzles, they are indeed.

Mike’s Office, University of Nevada, Reno
Since 1989, Sarich has occupied Office #201 in the Church Fine Arts Building on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. Although Sarich is rarely in his office (he prefers to meet with students in the painting studio), it is a treasure trove of postcards, mementos, and newspaper clippings that provides insight into his creative process. This re-creation of Sarich’s office attempts to capture the spirit and energy of one of UNR’s most legendary places.

Orientation
You’ll find Like, Love, Lust installed in the Feature Gallery East and Feature Gallery South on the third floor. The exhibition is largely chronological and organized into three broad categories—“Early Work,” “Body Parts,” and “Late Work,” with spotlight attention on a reconstruction of Mike’s “office” and La Cathedrele de Michel, an installation piece that has been previously exhibited at the NMA. While we don’t intend to dictate how people should experience the exhibition, the exhibition is laid out with a narrative in mind, which is to say that there is a story to be told about Michael’s work as it has evolved and matured over the years.

Relevant Vocabulary
Pop Art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late-1950s in the United States. The coinage of the term Pop Art is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in an essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, although the term he uses is “popular mass culture.” Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend mass culture and Pop Art as a legitimate art form. Pop Art is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular, as opposed to elitist, culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. It has also been defined by the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist. Pop Art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so. Much of Pop Art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend. Pop Art and Minimalism are considered to be the last modern art movements and thus the precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.

Pop Surrealism (also Lowbrow, or lowbrow art) describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comics world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other California subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow was born of underground culture. Lowbrow art has a sense of humor. Sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish and sometimes it's of sarcastic comment, but it is always present.
Most lowbrow artworks are paintings, but there are also toys, digital art, and sculpture.
In an article in the February 2006 issue of his magazine Juxtapoz, Robert Williams took credit for originating the term “lowbrow art.” He stated that, in 1979, Gilbert Shelton of the publisher Rip-Off Press decided to produce a book featuring Willams's paintings. Williams said that he decided to give the book the self-deprecating title, “The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams,” since no authorized art institution would recognize his type of art. “Lowbrow” was thus used by Williams in opposition to highbrow. He said the name then stuck, even though he feels that it is inappropriate.
Lowbrow is also commonly referred to as pop surrealism. Kirsten Anderson, who edited the book Pop Surrealism, considers lowbrow and pop surrealism to be related but distinct movements. She defined Pop Surrealism thus: “an amalgamation of so many things: tattoo, graffiti, retro culture, cartoons, etc., all mashed up and used to create something that transcended its mere visual appeal. Something that spoke profoundly…about using pop culture’s castoff detritus to create something meaningful and beautiful. And if it wasn’t beautiful, well, it was exciting. It delighted the eye and shocked the sensibilities, and was a welcome change from the increasing boorishness of the recycled ideas and stale conceptualism found in most contemporary art.” However, Matt Dukes Jordan, author of Weirdo Deluxe, views the terms as interchangeable.

Chicago Imagists were a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their work was known for grotesquerie, surrealism, and complete uninvolvement with New York art world trends. One remarkable thing about them was the high proportion of female artists among them. There are three distinct groups that, outside of Chicago, are indiscriminately bundled together as Imagists: The Monster Roster, the Hairy Who, and the Chicago Imagists.

The Hairy Who was a subgroup of the Chicago Imagists (see above). Don Baum curated three “Hairy Who” exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, 1967, and 1968. The name is meant to sound like a rock group. The Hairy Who included: Don Baum, James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum

The Monster Roster was a subgroup of Chicago artists within the larger group of Chicago Imagists (see above), several of whom served in World War II and were able to go to art school thanks to the G.I. Bill. They were given their name in 1959 by critic Franz Schulze, based on their existential, sometimes gruesome, semi-mystical figurative work. The Monster Roster included: Don Baum, Carlo Campoli, George Cohen, Dominic Di Meo, Leon Golub, Theodore Halkin, June Leaf, Seymour Rosofsky, Nancy Spero, H. C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Outsider Art as a term was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as “Raw Art” or “Rough Art”), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates. While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term “Outsider Art” is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as Outsider Artists have little or no contact with the institutions of the mainstream art world; in many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Much Outsider Art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. Outsider Art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992); thus the term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the "art world" mainstream, regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

Art Brut see above.



Prominent Sarich Symbols

• Turtle considered by essayist Robert Sill to be Michael Sarich’s alter ego, this symbol first appeared in his early work after he was invited to join a group of turtle hunters on one of his fishing trips. The symbol has many meanings, but is connected to the idea of inner and outer, inside/outside, and self reliance.

• Fish a symbol of personal significance, Sarich was an avid sport fisherman. You’ll see fish symbols in much of Sarich’s work, but also fishing-related symbols such as nets, floats, and eggs.

• Virgin of Guadalupe a symbol of Catholicism, particularly important in Latino traditions. She is considered an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and is Mexico’s most beloved religious and cultural image. Sarich finds it interesting, in part, because of the vast commercialization of her image.

• Mickey Mouse like the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mickey Mouse is a vastly commercialized figure, which is the reason for Sarich’s interest.

• Beach Ball this symbol carries deep personal significance for Sarich. As a boy, Sarich’s father, who was at times abusive, jumped into a lake to “save” a family beachball from disappearing, despite his inability to swim. The effort had a lasting impact on Sarich.

• Swasktika derived from the Sankskrit word svasktika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su-, meaning “good, well,” and asti, a verbal abract to the root as “to be;” svasti thus means “well-being.” The suffix –ka forms a diminutive, and svastika might thusbe ranslated literally as “little thing associated with well-being,” corresponding to “lucky charm” or “thing that is auspicious.” Probably first used inNeolithic India

• Birds particularly finches, are prominent symbols in Sarich’s work signifying Darwinian science, in particular. The direct relationship is that Darwin studied finches in the Galapagos Islands noting the peculiarly unique shapes of the beaks of thirteen related species.

• Nests in addition to the relationship to birds (see above), nests also signify an important sense of home and security in Sarich’s art.

• Buoys related to fish (see above).

• Skull Sarich is fascinated by the history of skull imagery, particularly in the traditions of the imagery of Tibetan monastics, Dia de los Muertos, motorcycle culture, and tattoo flash.

• Smiley Face the Wal-Mart smiley face signifies all kinds of tensions and uncertainties in Sarich’s work, especially in the relationships between “happiness” and “consumerism” and “commercialization.”

• Body parts are prominent in Sarich’s art, and signify much related to his interest in inner/outer, internal/external, science, and systems (skeletal, reproductive, digestive, neurological, etc.). Of course, this interest is cast into a different light considering his diagnosis in 2000 with Parkinson’s disease.

• Prop this image figures prominently in much of Sarich’s more recent work. Remember that he claims no definition for it; however, it does signify notions of the prop (fishing, fishing boats, power); proposition (e.g., suggestion, question, proposal); as well as an effort to reclaim the meaning of an ancient and powerful symbol from its having been corrupted by the forces of the third reich.

Tour Framework

• Ask guests to think about any symbols, images, or icons that hold some significance for them. What are the symbols and images that they find significant, and why?

• Explain that, as an artist, Mike Sarich has spent his whole career exploring the significance of personal and cultural symbols and icons, and that it is on his exploration of these symbols that part of the tour will be based.

• Explain that “Like, Love, Lust” is a reference to the tattoo on Mike’s left hand and wrist, a mark that he had made on his arm in honor of his proposal of marriage to his wife, Valerie.

• Explain that the three Ls are referents for Like, Love, and Lust, and that he had the word Life tattooed on his arm after Valerie accepted his marriage proposal—signifying his the commitment he was making to her.

• Explain to guests that the exhibition is laid out more or less chronologically, beginning with his earliest work as a graduate student.

• Convey the story about when Mike, on a fishing trip as a young art student, was invited by a group of turtle hunters to join them in their hunt. The experience had a significant impact on Mike as a young man and as an artist, and images of turtles remain in his work today.

• Ask guests to compare the qualities of the turtle drawings on the north wall of the East Gallery with the adjacent drawings called “Stop” and “Cocaine” on the east wall of the gallery. What words could be used to describe each group of drawings? Hints: the turtle drawings are highly detailed, with a very fine draftsmanship quality to them; conversely, “Stop” and “Cocaine” are purposely rough, almost unfinished, and child-like.

• Explain that Mike Sarich is a highly trained artist: he completed his MFA degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1983. The highly refined style of the turtle drawings is a result, in part, of this academic training. Compared or contrasted to the “Cocaine” and “Stop” drawings on the east wall of the East Gallery, we can see a much less refined style—this is on purpose, and is the result of experimentations with the influence of artists in the groups known as Chicago Imagists, The Monster Roster, and, especially, The Hairy Who.

• Explain to guests that Sarich was raised on the west side of Chicago, and that as a young man, he was very interested in the work of The Hairy Who artists, including Don Baum, James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and especially Karl Wirsum.

• Ask guests to consider Sarich’s sculptures hanging on the west wall of the East Gallery. What kinds of words might be used to describe them? Hints: folk, folk art, found object, handmade, natural materials, etc.

• Explain that as a result of the influence of the Chicago Imagists and especially The Hairy Who artists, Sarich took an early and strong interest in found object, folk-art-inspired sculpture. Yet the work is extraordinarily personal: Sarich loves to fish, for example, and the piece titled “Hope” was created by Sarich for a pregnant friend.

• Ask guests to consider what kinds of messages Sarich’s early work in the East Gallery seems to convey.

• Explain that Sarich sees in his early work (all of which is in the East Gallery) an effort on his part to “wear his emotions on his sleeves” and that he seems to be “screaming at the viewer.”

• Explain to guests that as he matured as an artist, Sarich felt that he moved away from a heart-on-his-sleeve, scream-at-you style, to a more subtle style that engages the viewers where they are at, asking them to think about things such as American consumer culture, Darwinian science, symbols and their meanings, and so on.

• Explain to guests that the NMA has re-created Sarich’s office at UNR in the gallery for guests to see the creative “melting pot” that is part of his inspiration.

• Ask guests to consider the artwork in the Body Parts section of the gallery. What do they see as Sarich’s interest in this part of his work? At first, guests might see little or nothing that Sarich might be getting at, but ask them to consider what kinds of body parts that are represented: a heart, a stomach, a penis, and a brain in “Fishin’ in the Dark,” for example.

• Encourage guests to extrapolate from this information further…e.g., that not only are these individual body parts, but they are the organs that are central to specific bodily systems—circulatory, digestive, reproductive, and nervous, respectively, in this example.

• Explain that as Sarich’s interest turned to making his work less personal and more widely culturally-oriented, he heard a radio story while fishing on a boat that the cat had become the most popular American pet, surpassing the dog for the first time. As a result, Sarich began to incorporate cat images in his artwork, beginning with “Stewart’s Cat,” and then the “Dice” woodblock prints. The images are an effort on the artist’s part to engage viewers in his art on a broader, cultural level, rather than on the significance of his personal imagery and symbols. As a result of this experimentation with culturally relevant imagery and symbols, Sarich spent more time exploring images--symbols such as birds (symbols of Darwinian science, and Darwin’s famous examination of the beaks of finches), Wal-Mart smiley faces (symbols of low prices or mass consumerism, depending on your perspective), images of the Virgin of Guadalupe (symbols of fervent religious belief or commercialization of religion, again, depending on your perspective), and images of skulls, cathedrals, Mickey Mouse, props, and swastikas.
  

• Ask guests to look at one of the “Primary Prop” paintings. Ask what kinds of meanings they can associate with the image of the prop: boat props, propellers, BMWs, propositions, questions, deals, offers, inquiries, motions, power, etc.

• Explain that Sarich is very interested in the meanings of symbols, and how they come to mean what they do. For example, the image of the swastika is one that has ancient roots in Native American and Hindu cultural activities, but which has a particular, and very bad, meaning for twentieth-century westerners. He is interested in the ways in which the symbol’s meaning came to change, and how to reclaim, or appropriate, the symbol’s meaning from its relatively recent history.

• Ask guests about what they might have thought about Sarich’s artwork as they entered the gallery. Has any of their thinking shifted as a result of seeing it in the light of the information about Sarich’s personal life, interests, and some of the meanings of his work?

• Finally, thank guests for their time and attention, and for their interest in, and support of, the Nevada Museum of Art.

Michael Sarich Dose of Art Lesson Plan

Objectives: After viewing Like, Love, Lust: Michael Sarich, and learning about the influences, art, and stories of artist Michael Sarich, children participating in the Dose of Art will enter a classroom to create a work of their own inspired by the art of Michael Sarich. Students will learn about different kinds of marks used to make drawings, about the elements and principles of art, and about icons and symbols of personal and cultural significance. Students will then learn about the kinds of marks that can be made using different kinds of media, including colored pencils, crayons, and oil pastels. This process will give children the opportunity to experiment with multiple media, to learn about the elements and principles of art, and to create a drawing of their own from simple materials.

Vocabulary: mark, line, shape, color, symbol, icon, shade, value, tone, layer, study

Materials: 7”x22” railroad board; glue sticks; 5”x20” drawing paper; pencils; colored pencils; crayons; oil pastels; scratch paper

Lesson Description:
• When students come into the classroom from the tours, discuss Sarich’s artwork and what students have learned about it and the artist from their tour and the exhibition.
• Each classroom contains a classroom pack of crayons, colored pencils, and oil pastels, plus pre-cut railroad board and drawing paper, and glue sticks.
• Explain that a drawing can be a sketch, or a study, for a larger artwork, but it can also be a finished artwork itself.
• Explain that a drawing can be made with many different kinds of tools and media, including pencils, charcoal, colored pencils, crayons, oil pastels, chalk, and even dirt!
• Explain that each different kind of media conveys a different kind of feeling when it is used to make a mark on a piece of paper or other drawing surface, but that the way the media is used also has a profound impact on the feeling of a drawing.
• Ask students what kinds of feelings Sarich’s artwork makes them feel.
• Ask students to choose a type of media—a pencil, a colored pencil, a crayon, or an oil pastel. Then, on scratch paper, ask them to make one mark on the paper that feels or looks happy, another mark that feels or looks angry, and another mark that feels or looks sad. Ask the students whether there are other kinds of feelings that could be conveyed by the marks in a drawing.
• Ask students what kinds of symbols and icons they saw in the Sarich exhibition. Why do they think he might have chosen these particular symbols to focus upon in his art? What seems important or significant about the symbols to him?
• Explain that students will be creating a drawing using symbols and icons from the Sarich exhibition as well as symbols and icons that are important to them.
• Ask students to use a pencil and scratch paper and to draw for a few minutes. Ask them to think about three symbols or images that each of them feels is important in one way or another, and to draw those symbols on the scratch paper.
• When each student has two or three symbols sketched on their scratch paper, give each student a piece of the 5”x20” drawing paper for their use. Ask them to re-create the symbols across the paper using pencil if they would like, or any other media (be sure to encourage them to make them large enough to cross the entire paper, and to repeat them, if necessary).
• When the initial symbols are sketched in, ask the students to use and to experiment with multiple media—crayons, pencil, colored pencil, and oil pastel—to to create multiple layers of color, tone, and density in their images. Be sure to encourage them to fill up the paper—fill in the white space with marks!
• Encourage students to use numerous colors, but preferably to encourage them to think about the colors used in Michael Sarich’s work: primary colors, primarily!
• When their drawings are complete, give each student a sheet of the 7”x22” railroad board. Explain that they should turn their drawings over carefully and place just a few dabs of gluestick along the border, center it on the black railroad board, and mount their drawings in a “frame” to take home.

Marks on the Land: An Exhibition of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection Tour Blueprint

December 16, 2007-May 4, 2008

Introduction

Edward Burtynksy, Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)

This survey of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection consists of fourteen photographic prints depicting different kinds of human marks on the land. From the impermanent conceptual marks made by Jim Sanborn in his landscape-scale light projections, to the far more insidious and permanent scars on the land made by mining operations depicted in Terry Evans’ and Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, each of the eight artists in this survey grapples with ideas about how and why people make land-marks—and what effects the marks have on our perception, understanding, and relationship to the land.

The exhibition lends itself to discussions of landscape history (à la Jennifer Bethke’s recent Museum School class), how people treat different kinds of landscapes, and how we learn to understand landscapes and identify ourselves in relation to them.

This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments

The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection

As you know, The Altered Landscape Collection is the largest collection within the museum—numbering more than 600 pieces—and is made up almost exclusively of contemporary photography, beginning with The New Topographics, and more contemporary work that has grown out of that movement. Historically important twentieth-century photography—that of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in particular—has been added to the collection to contextualize the work within the collection, as well as within the history of twentieth-century photography in general.

If the NMA is known nationally for its collections, it is known for The Altered Landscape Collection specifically. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the museum began acquiring photography for a new signature focus collection. The museum’s motivation was to gather landscape works that would address audiences across cultural boundaries and, over time, to position the Museum as a unique visual and intellectual resource. The NMA sought to highlight environmental issues, already emphasized in other areas of the Museum’s collection, and provide a forum for the study and appreciation of land, environment, and environmental thought in art. The NMA’s goal was to recognize the tremendous contribution that photographers have made to our understanding of place and environment, while building its collection in a new direction.

The Altered Landscape is, at its core, about the American west, especially the Great Basin. As the eastern landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School painters gradually disappeared through conversion to human settlement, the west assumed a greater role as the representative of the idea of “wilderness.” For generations, photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter played a leading role in how the landscape was perceived. Their imagery projected and reinforced a romanticized view of the environment in which landscape is an expression of a beautiful and sublime ‘nature.’

By the mid-1970s, however, a small group of photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke began to challenge this traditional view. In the influential exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975 titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” these photographers focused on contemporary industrial culture—land transformed by human presence. Collectively, they rejected the approach of viewing landscape as beauty, for the “sake of art,” isolated from the context of culture. For the New Topographics photographers, as they came to be known, landscape photography needed to reveal a new artistic viewpoint in response to the specific content of the images. For them, and those that followed, landscape photography needed to challenge traditional notions about land and landscape, beauty, and the nature and purposes of photography. It is in this context that we find the newest exhibition of works from this collection.

The current exhibition’s images depict landscapes in the American West and elsewhere that have been marked in some way—physically, conceptually, artistically, irrevocably— documented by photographers such as Richard Misrach and Terry Evans. The critical edge to some of the works in the exhibition is very clear: Robert Dawson and Edward Burtynsky subtly characterize marks on the land caused by dams and mining operations, for example. Others, such as Jim Sanborn and John Pfahl, photograph other kinds of marks: impermanent light projections of which the only record is the photograph, and more physical, yet still temporary, marks made on the land in the conceptual photographs of John Pfahl.

Orientation

You’ll find the exhibition hung in the Altered Landscape Gallery. The east and north walls feature photographs of much more physical marks on the land: Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings in the surface water in Ontario, Canada, for example. On the south and west walls are photographs of marks that are more conceptual in nature: John Pfahl’s photographs of temporary but still physical lines on the side of a shed, images of Christo’s monumentally-sized landscape installations, or Jim Sanborn’s photos of light projections on geologic formations in the west.

Vocabulary

Silver Gelatin print
Photograph on paper or plasticized paper coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, printed out or developed out, and fixed. Came into general use in the 1880s; the developed variety remains the standard black-and-white photographic process.

Dye Transfer print (e.g. Polaroid).
Self-developing color photograph. The complex process, first described by Edwin Land in 1947, has been popular among amateurs and artists since the early 1960s.

Chromogenic print (also chromogenic dye coupler or C-Type print)
The most common type of color photograph, printed from a chromogenic color negative; consists of dyes within gelatin layers on a plastic-coated paper base. Subject to fading and color shifts in dark storage and on exhibition. Developed in the 1940s as an outgrowth of chromogenic color transparencies (Kodachrome, invented in 1935). Used by amateurs and artists alike. (Also called "C-print" or referred to by various brand names.)

Tour Framework

• Explain that the Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection is the largest collection in the NMA permanent collection, and that it contains almost 700 photographs that depict landscapes changed at the hands of humans, primarily from the second half of the twentieth century forward.

• Ask guests what they see in Robert Dawson’s photograph “Spillway, Lake Berryessa, California.”

• Explain that Robert Dawson is a San Francisco-based photographer whose work deals primarily with altered landscapes of the west. This photograph depicts a dam on the Putah Creek in Solano/Napa Counties in California.

• Ask guests what kind of message(s) Dawson’s photograph conveys about the spillway.

• Invite guests to look at James Turrell’s photograph “Roden Crater Low Aerial Oblique Looking Toward N.E.”

• Ask guests what they think they are seeing in the photograph. Does anyone know where the Roden Crater is located, or why it exists?

• Explain that Roden Crater is a volcanic crater located at the edge of the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Arizona. James Turrell is primarily a sculptor and installation artist, who has a mining claim on the Roden Crater. He has spent more than twenty years opening caverns in the interior of the crater, creating an open air observatory for viewing stars without the aid of a telescope.

• Ask guests to compare the Turrell image and the Dawson image. What are the differences between the human-made marks on the land in the images?

• Explain that Richard Misrach’s photograph “Battleground Point #21” is an image of a part of the Carson Sink, northeast of Fallon, Nevada.

Richard Misrach, Battleground Point #21, 1999.

• Ask guests to consider Terry Evans’ photograph before they look at or learn its title. What do guests think they are seeing in the image?

• Explain that the image depicts a gravel pit north of Kanopolis, Kansas. In her artwork, Terry Evans has photographed sites all over the Midwest, particularly in and around Chicago.

• Ask guests what kinds of things the artist might be choosing to emphasize by taking an aerial photograph of a landscape instead of a “traditional” landscape photograph?

• Ask guests to consider Edward Burtynsky’s photographs before their perceptions are directed by the wall labels and the works’ titles. What do the images appear to be of? Do they look anything like, say, the Yellowstone National Park mud springs or something similar?

• Explain that the images are Burtynsky’s depictions of the effects on the landscape of dangerous nickel tailings near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The tailings have polluted both the ground and surface water of this area near Lake Huron in the Great Lakes region.

• Ask guests to compare the marks on the land in Evans’ and Burtynsky’s photographs. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?

• Ask guests if they thought of the photographs as beautiful initially. Why? Does the information about the subject of the photographs affect their beauty? Why or why not?

• Ask guests to consider how the photographs by Burtynsky, Evans, Dawson, Turrell, and Misrach are different from the photographs of Sanborn, Pfahl, and Volz. How are the marks made on the land different between and among them?

• Explain that one of the ways the marks are different has to do with documenting the relationships people have to land. For example, Burtynsky and Dawson document mining and hydroelectric marks made on the land, whereas Pfahl, Sanborn, and Volz document temporary or ephemeral marks made for a very different artistic purpose. Why? What are the artistic purposes or intents of the different photographs?

• Ask guests to look carefully at the grid of John Pfahl photographs on the west wall of the gallery. What does Pfahl focus the viewers’ attention upon in the image? How can you tell? Why would he choose this as a subject?

Pfahl explains the images this way: “The added elements suggest numerous mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans an diagrams. On different occasions, they may pointedly repeat a strong formal element in the landscape…; they may fill in information suggested by the scen….; they may depend upon information external to the photograph itself…; or, finally, they may be only arbitrarily related to the scene….”

• Explain to guests that Pfahl photographs scenes in which he, the artist, has inserted temporary visual aids to create his photographs: string, tape, or wire, for example, that heighten the visual characteristics of the photographs.

• Explain that Jim Sanborn is a sculptor and photographer who is very interested in conceptual understanding in art, as well as physics, light, and landscape.

Sanborn explains: “My original intention was to recreate in some way the work of the nineteenth-century cartographers and photographers who were hired to map and photograph the monumental western landscape.[…] Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists were doing large-scale installations in the natural environment. Those projects affected the land tremendously, and not always with a pleasing effect on the environment. Bulldozers were brought onto the land, and the land itself was manipulated. I decided to counteract that in some way and still do very large outdoor installations. I had completed several in the early 1970s in which I placed objects in the environment, and the end result was photographs of the outdoor installations.

• Explain that Sanborn built his own large-scale projectors to project light onto geologic landforms. He then photographed the projections, leaving no trace of the large-scale artwork that he had created; the only record of the work is the photograph.

• Ask guests to consider the Wolgang Volz photographs of Christo and Jean-Claude’s “Running Fence” and “Valley Curtain” projects. In what ways are these photographs different from others in the exhibition? What kinds of marks on the land do the photographs document?

• Ask guests to consider the multi-layering of artistic decisions in the photographs. Not only does the photographer-as-artist decide how to frame and compose his image of the subject, but Christo and Jean-Claude have also made artistic decisions regarding the placement and purpose of their installation of cloth and anchors in the landscape.

Conclusion

Art facilitates learning by engaging the senses, bypassing conditioned patterns of thinking and allowing other ways of knowing to come forward, sometimes subtly, and sometimes forcefully. All of the photographers in this exhibition engage our senses—but for very different reasons and purposes. Whether the works focus on natural, cultural, or political aspects of the environment, artists have always been sensitive to environments and responsive to our relationship to environments.

Robert Beckmann :: The Body of a House Tour Blueprint

Introduction
Robert Beckmann’s The Body of a House Displayed as it is in (1993) is an anchor work for the NMA’s permanent collection. the Installation Gallery, which was designed specifically to hold the works when the new building was constructed, The Body of a House invites visitors to an up-close-and-personal encounter with an emotional and highly-charged period of American—and Nevadan—history. The Body of a House is an eight-canvas series of images depicting 2.33 seconds of real time during the March 17, 1953 detonation of Annie, a 16-kiloton atomic bomb that was part of Operation Upshot Knothole at the Nevada Test Site. One of the primary objectives of the test was to determine the blast effects of an atomic bomb on the “typical suburban home,” so the test included the construction of two model homes, filled with the dummies and the stuff of contemporary life. The military built one house 7,500 feet from ground zero; the other was constructed 3,500 feet from the detonation site. An automatic motion picture camera encased in a two-inch-thick lead sheath recorded the effects of the detonation on the model home at 24 frames per second. The resulting 55-frame film was broadcast on television and then used to “educate” children in schools about nuclear fallout and air raid drills. The house closest to the detonation was completely destroyed. The impact of the film and its still frames on the artist’s psyche can be felt through his depiction of the event.
This exhibition lends itself to discussions of Nevada history, the nuclear legacy of our state, and both the impact and power and the desensitizing anesthesia of photography in American culture.

Wall Text
As a young boy during the Cold War era, Robert Beckmann remembers watching documentary film footage of the United States military testing a 16-kiloton nuclear bomb nicknamed “Annie” at the Nevada Test Site. Before the experimental explosion in 1953, the government constructed several houses—outfitted with furniture, automobiles, and human mannequins—just 7,500 feet from ground zero.

Beckmann, who now resides in Las Vegas, painted this series of large-scale, iodine-hued paintings titled The Body of a House in 1993. His imagery is based on still frames taken from the films he saw as a child, and the eight sequential scenes represent a mere 2.33 seconds of real time. Each painting focuses on a different stage of the menacing destruction, a mood that Beckmann heightened through his dramatic use of fiery orange and red coloring.

Beckmann joins a long line of artists who have depicted scenes of real and imagined apocalyptic destruction. Most notably, The Body of a House recalls the serialized imagery of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened print Atomic Bomb (1965) that featured an exploding mushroom cloud against a deep red background. The darkened skies and mysterious eerie glow in Beckmann’s paintings are a frightening reminder of the devastating effects of nuclear explosion.

Orientation
The canvases are arranged in the Installation Gallery in the order of their creation and the narrative of the event, beginning with The Body of a House, #1, to the right of the wall text.

Tour Framework

• Ask adult guests what they believe they are looking at when they look at Beckmann’s paintings. Guests of a certain age may know immediately what they are seeing; others will need some guidance to understand the significance of the paintings in terms of the Cold War, the Test Site in Nevada’s history, serialized images, photography, etc.

• Ask children what they see in the paintings. A house? A fire? A house on fire? A rising sun? A strong wind? What in the paintings makes them think these things?

• Ask guests what kinds of feelings and reactions the paintings evoke for them.

• Explain that President Harry Truman was the thirty-third President of the United States (1945-1953), having assumed the Presidency upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Following his approval of the Nevada Test Site—part of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range—for continental nuclear weapons testing on December 18, 1950, more than 1,000 nuclear bombs were detonated on this piece of Nevada land.

• Explain that the tests ended in 1992 with the passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

• Ask adult guests if they know what the Cold War was, and if it’s appropriate, what they remember of the Cold War themselves. What kinds of feelings do they remember experiencing during the Cold War? What was the political climate like?

• Ask children if they have ever heard of the Cold War before, and if so, what they know about it.

• Explain that the Cold War was an extremely complicated, largely political war waged primarily by two countries, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (and their allies), from the end of World War II until the 1990s. One of the features of the Cold War was a nuclear arms race between the two countries that led to a very serious game of one-upsmanship about who had the largest, most powerful arsenal of nuclear weapons.

• Explain that as an eleven-year-old child, Beckmann had seen an American military film of a bomb called “Annie” exploding at the Nevada Test Site. The 2.33-second film (55 frames long at 24 frames per second) documented the impact of the nuclear blast on a model home constructed 3,500 feet—two-thirds of a mile—from ground zero. “Annie” was part of a series of tests called “Operation Upshot Knothole,” that occurred at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. The tests’ purposes ranged from nuclear weapon design to atomic combat training to, as in the case of “Annie,” testing the blast effect of a thermonuclear bomb on “typical” suburban homes.

• Explain that Beckmann gained access to the eight original still frame images of the “Annie” test through the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society in Las Vegas. He re-photographed the original images and then made slides of the images, projected them onto the large scale canvases, and sketched in the shapes and lines before applying the paint.

• Explain that the canvases average ten layers of paint, and some have as many as fifteen. This is how Beckmann is able to convey the brightness of the explosion in #1 and the chaos of the complete destruction of the house in #8.

• Ask guests what story the eight sequenced canvases tell. What makes them think of the story in this way? What kind of an ending does the story have? Is there a moral to the story?

• Explain to guests that the paintings are of course about nuclear bombs, their use and destructive power, the Cold War, and the Nevada Test Site.

• Explain that Beckmann is also interested the power of film and photography in American culture. The artist notes that Americans consume photographic (or film/video) images with an insatiable appetite, to the point that we become desensitized to violence, poverty, consequence, war, and so on. But even when a painting is based on a photograph, it conveys a very different sense of the material in the photograph.

As writer William L. Fox writes about Beckmann’s work, “The paintings restore our ability to respond because we take them as a primary, involved, direct witnessing of an event, something that took hours and days and weeks and months to create. They are not only images, representations of an event, but are themselves their own events.”

• Ask guests if the paintings move them in some way. Do they experience anger? Fear? Resentment? Sadness? Surprise?

• Explain that some viewers see the paintings as a more-or-less straightforward protest against nuclear bomb testing in Nevada, and the resulting health effects—cancer, skin and respiratory diseases—on the “downwinders.” However, critics also see the paintings as metaphorical: perhaps seeing the destruction of the house by the bomb is cathartic in some way, that creativity can come from such destruction in the form of the paintings, and the feelings that the paintings evoke in viewers.

Finally, another statement about the work from writer William L. Fox: “Art such as The Body of a House does not allow us a passive role; it throws us back into the emotional intensity of that moment when, cowering beneath a desk, we imagined our house and family being blown to smithereens around us. Such feelings, even when recollected in the peaceful and deliberately isolated setting of a museum or gallery, bring us back to responsibility, as do the etchings of Goya and Picasso’s great, transcendent painting-as-mural, Guernica. Art’s ability—manifested in so many different ways late this century—to pierce through the ever-so-cynical media we face every day deeps us alive to our own senses.”







Robert Beckmann, The Body of a House, #1 (1993)

The two YouTube videos embedded below contain some of the actual footage of the 1953 Annie test depicted in Robert Beckmann's The Body of a House.

Docent Depot Documents

Following the Docent Meeting on November 27, 2007 and the discussion of the availability of Docent Depot posts as printable documents, I have learned a new way to post Adobe PDFs (Portable Document Files) of docent training materials on the blog. You will now find a link in the column to the right for "Docent Depot Documents." If you click on the link, you will be taken to a new web page in which a list of documents will appear. From now on, you will find printable PDF files of all docent training materials on this page, with the most recent items listed first. Clicking on any of the documents listed will produce a PDF of that particular training material. You can then save the document to your own computer or print it as you desire! Check it out! If you think of something that should be in the list and you don't see it, send me an email describing what you were hoping to find, and I'll see what I can do to make it available.

The Legend of Tu-Tok-a-Nula a.k.a. El Capitan

Dear Docents-
Here’s a treasure I found in a book in the Yosemite bookshop last month. I thought it would be a perfect story to tell in front of the Struth or Kondos pieces. To me, it gives the children a little window into the culture that existed in Yosemite before everybody else arrived, and shows some of the magic that is lost when stories are forgotten and names are changed. I hope you can use it!

--Kathleen Durham

From A Day with Tupi: An Authentic Story of an Indian Boy in California’s Mountains, by Fran Hubbard, Fredericksburg, TX: Awani Press,1978.

The Legend of Tu-Tok-a-Nula

While they worked, Tupi coaxed his grandmother to tell him the story of the measuring worm, Tu-tok-a-nula, and how he saved the little Indian children. She had told him the legend more times than she could remember, but she was always glad to tell it again.

One upon a time, long ago, two little Indian boys went swimming in the river which flows through the valley called A-wa-ni. When they tired of swimming they climbed up on a warm rock on the bank and went to sleep. While they slept the rock began to grow. It grew and grew until the top was in the clouds and the little Indians touched their noses against the moon. And still they slumbered on. Finally the children awoke, and seeing how far it was down to the valley, they began to cry. Feeling sorry for them, the animals tried to get them down. First the white-footed mouse and then the wood rat tried but they could only jump a short distance up the smooth rock. Next came the coyote, who went higher, then the grizzly bear, who gave a great leap but fell back. Finally the mighty lion tried, jumping farther than any of the others, but he also failed. When all had tried and failed, the little measuring worm, Tu-tok-a-nula, began to inch his way up the cliff. For many sleeps he climbed until at last he reached the top. Taking the little Indian boys on his back he made his way carefully down. By staying with his task the measuring worm succeeded where the great animals failed. In his honor the Indians named the great rock after him.*

*Today Tu-Tok-a-Nula is known as El Capitan.

An author’s note at the back of the book:

Speaking in 1877 of the legend of Tu-tok-a-nula, Stephen Powers said: “This is not only a true Indian story, but it has a pretty meaning, being a kind of parallel to the fable of the hare and the tortoise that ran a race. What the great animals of the forest could not do the despised measuring worm accomplished simply by patience and perseverance. It also has its value as showing the Indian idea of the formation of Yosemite.” (From Heizer and Whipple’s, The California Indians: A Source Book, Berkeley: U of California P, 1951.)

A / Part :: Constructions by Jeremy Mayer

Jeremy Mayer constructs figurative forms—what he calls “reassemblies”—using defunct typewriters. A testament to his steadfast attention to detail, these sculptures involve an ongoing process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Mayer dissects the typewriters he collects, inventorying their parts and studying them in relation to human anatomy; to him, a “Q” key mimics a particular nerve or bone. Like the typewriters Mayer takes apart, the human bodies he constructs represent an elaborate interplay between part and whole.

Mayer is acutely aware of the multiple layers of meaning that exist in his works. He steadfastly resists the association of his sculptures with common robots, and instead looks to classical art, anatomy, and typewriter history for inspiration. For example, though Nude III (Olympia)—on view to the left—takes its name from a literal reference to a prominent typewriter manufacturer, its title is also a clever nod to Éduoard Manet’s seminal painting of the same name.

Mayer’s sculptures reflect the passage of time and our tendency to relate emotion with objects. As symbols of a bygone era, typewriters evoke a sense of nostalgia. While Mayer dismantles typewriters, he maintains their original mechanical nature, never welding or soldering any components of his sculptures. Mayer’s works, then, lament the loss of visible technological processes—which in today’s world have largely shifted from mechanical to digital.

Margaret Whiting :: Laws of the Land Tour Blueprint

Introduction

Margaret Whiting: Laws of the Land consists of sixteen multimedia sculptures made from discarded law books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, natural history books, combined with natural objects such as shells, leaves, and bones. Whiting alters the books dramatically, tearing pages from their bindings, cutting the books into sections or strata, creating collages of legal texts, and highlighting keywords and phrases. Many of the book and paper pieces are then juxtaposed with natural objects or images from natural history texts. The works yield an interesting commentary on the relationship between American land use and laws, and bring to our attention the complex history of land use and the laws governing use of land in the U.S.


About the Artist
A native of northern Minnesota, Margaret Whiting now lives and works in Waterloo, Iowa. She graduated in Medical Technology from the University of Minnesota and received a BA with an emphasis in printmaking and papermaking from the University of Northern Iowa. Whiting worked as a medical technologist for ten years, and now dedicates most of her time to her art. In addition, she performs workshops and teaches classes in paper and bookmaking. Whiting has participated in regional, national and international shows, and her work is included in museum and private collections around the country. Recently, her work was included in two national traveling exhibitions, American River and Paper Cuts: The Art of Contemporary Paper.

Artist’s Statement
I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.

- Theodore Roosevelt, speech, Washington, D.C., 1900

The laws humans develop must instill respect for the land. Through my art, I reference our need to recognize the laws of nature and the interconnectedness of all living things on this earth. I collect old law books, science books, encyclopedia and dictionaries that have been discarded, utilizing them as raw materials in my art. I am particularly interested in law books that reference land use and property rights, because they contain decisions that have shaped our past and continue to impact our lives and the world around us. American society was founded upon the opposition between humans and nature. As Americans, we view ourselves separately from the environment. In reality, this conflict of man versus nature is an illusion. We live in, depend on and are part of an ecosystem.

While reading these old law books, I sometimes circle words in the text and create new statements regarding land use and the fundamental need to protect it for future generations. I incorporate found objects from nature, images of animals in old science books or drawings of the land in geological surveys with the law book pages. I juxtapose the written word with seeds, leaves, fossils, shells and other materials collected from nature to create a dialogue between human behavior and the environment. Incorporating texture, I tear, crumple, pierce, fold or bale the books into landscapes. These alterations often reveal landforms within the book itself.

The layers of pages simulate the sedimentary rock deep within the earth’s crust. My manipulation of books is not meant to destroy them or to refer to the destruction of our laws. Instead, I transform them into objects that propose new relationships.

All laws are dispositions for the future… protect the land… it is one estate of inheritance.

- Margaret Whiting, altered text taken from a law book

NMA Text Panel

Margaret Whiting combines natural objects such as leaves, seeds, fossils, and shells with discarded law books, science books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Her artworks explore contemporary issues related to land use and encourage thoughtful consideration of the definitions and laws that regulate American society's impact on the land.

In her mixed media sculptures, Whiting does not intend to destroy legal documents and environmental laws, but instead aims to provide new contexts for the information they contain and the authority they possess. According to Whiting, law books, in particular, reveal society’s entrenched cultural priorities; the volumes with which she works often contain legal judgments that have significantly shaped history and that will continue to determine our collective future.

By interacting with and altering the language of the law, Whiting offers her perspective on the complicated relationship between humans and their environment. “American culture seems to have been formed upon opposition between humans and nature,” she has explained. “In reality, man versus nature is an illusion. We live in, depend on, and are part of an ecosystem.” Taken together, the sculptures in this exhibition remind us of the fragile balance that exists between human law and the laws of nature.

This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA’s Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments.

Orientation
You’ll find the exhibition installed in the Feature Gallery North on the third floor. The majority of the pieces are wall-mounted, but a few large pedestals and platforms stand in the middle of the space as well. With these, it is important to take every precaution to ensure that the pieces are neither bumped nor moved, as they are extraordinarily fragile.

Tour Framework
Explain to guests that Margaret Whiting was raised in northern Minnesota in a small, rural mining community not unlike many communities in Nevada.

Ask guests to consider why an artist from such a community might be interested in art that has to do with environmental and land use law.

Ask guests to look at any one of Whiting’s pieces. What do they notice about it? From what does it appear to have been made?

Explain that Whiting’s background is in papermaking and book arts, the mode of artistic expression that takes the traditions of bookmaking, papermaking, letterpress printing, and printmaking as central forms.

Ask guests why they think that the artist might be interested in the relationship between the natural objects she uses—the seeds, shells, leaves, and rocks—and the pages of law books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and natural history texts.

Ask guests what kinds of messages Whiting conveys by juxtaposing pages of law books and dictionaries with shells, seeds, and images from natural history texts.

Ask guests to look closely at the piece called There is Ground for Consideration but don’t convey to the group what the piece’s name is…yet.

Margaret Whiting, There is Ground for Consideration, law book pages, binder boards, objects from nature, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Ask guests what they think are some of the notable characteristics of There is Ground for Consideration. What do they notice about the piece right away? What, if anything, do they notice differently or additionally after looking at the piece for a few moments?

Point guests’ attention to the fact that Whiting circles key words on each page of the book from which the piece is made. What words does she circle repeatedly in the pages of the book?

Ask guests why they think Whiting chooses these particular words as opposed to the many others she could have chosen to emphasize.

Ask guests what the words ground and grounds mean as legal terms. In contrast, what do the words mean in terms of place, space, or environment?

Listen to the responses offered to these questions, and offer encouragement to anyone who offers a response to your questions—this is difficult artwork with which to grapple.

Explain that Whiting’s artistic interests lie in book arts and papermaking, but also in the plays on words and double (or more) meanings inherent in the language used in “official” texts such as laws, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. For Whiting, there is a very interesting interplay between American history, land use, land law, and language.

Ask guests to look closely at Analysis.

Margaret Whiting, Analysis, 2006, rolled law book pages in test tube racks. Courtesy of the artist.

Ask guests what kinds of meanings or messages can be derived from a piece of art in which the artist wraps pages of law books up into “tubes” and places them into a chemistry test tube rack.

Ask guests if they can think of any ways in which science connects people to the natural world. Can they also think of ways in which science seems to separate people from the natural world?

Encourage guests to think about the privileged status categories of knowledge such as “Science” and “Law” inhabit in our culture. For example, within our culture, scientists, judges, lawyers, and politicians enjoy a certain cultural “status” because of their work. How do such categories of knowledge compare to, say, “Art” or “Literature,” “Education,” “Carpentry” or “Farming?”

Explain to guests that Whiting is interested in these different “strata” or “levels” of knowledge, and the ways in which science and law often enjoy a higher status than art and humanities, and that her artwork raises questions about what are the “highest” or “best” ways to develop knowledge.

Encourage guests to look at the Law of the Land pieces in the gallery.

Explain that Whiting’s art, in addition to being examples of book arts and conceptual artwork, are also examples of abstract landscape artwork. Whiting cuts the books she uses laterally, and places the cut pieces side-by-side. The effect is a sort of silhouette or profile representation of a landscape, and harkens back to her interest in the words she highlights in the pages of the law books she uses: ground.

Ask guests to consider the piece entitled By Putting in More Cattle than the Pasture Can Sustain Both the Land and the Right of Common are Injured.

Ask what the guests make of the artist’s meaning.

Explain that the work references the ancient idea of the “tragedy of the commons.” This theory—largely based on ideas about economics—deals with conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good.

Explain that this is an idea that has roots in Aristotelian philosophy, but also in much more contemporary science writing—though it is not without controversy.

Explain that Whiting’s By Putting More Cattle […] gets at the problem of the use of common space—in this example it might be a cattle pasture, or Yosemite National Park—that suffers overuse because of unregulated use of the pasture by cattle, or unregulated use by National Park visitors.