Daily Archives: December 17, 2015

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Okay, so here we go. Final stretch (!). When turning around in our steps from the diptych “2 Fer 1” on the 4th and top floor of the Boos gallery, this is what we are confronted with on the opposite wall…

Another diptych as I’ve stated, and one called “This Town Ain’t Big Enough”. As with the preceeding collage and also several other in the series, the base is formed from antique photos of Tungaske, this time of the town’s main street taken sometime in the early 20th Century. Here’s a website that shows the used photos.

This is the base for the left side of the diptych, then…

… and here’s the one for the right hand side.

So in looking closer at each photo, you’ll notice that the same side of the main street of town is shown in each case, but looking from opposite directions. You can tell this for sure by the presence of a prominent sign for a hardware store in each. So this is a little different from a lot of my other collage diptychs in that the left side does not directly continue a single base photo into the right side (or visa versa). Instead we have mirrored images, which brings to mind this:

The two photos are roughly cued to each other by matching up the horizon lines, and then, more precisely, by a similar single white line running across the road in the foreground of each, probably marking a walkway — but two different ones, if so. Then the left photo is copied, reduced by 50 percent, and inserted between the two to help bridge them together. That’s our foundation.

What’s then overlaid on top of the foundation? The larger building in the center has been altered by the introduction of a Tungaske grave image here…

… namely the part of the upright monument seen in the photo. This becomes the bottom of the building, making it pentagonal shaped and perhaps hovering in the air a bit. Looking closer, you’ll notice that a smaller version of the same building appears to its immediate right, but otherwise unaltered. When composing the collage, I envisioned these as like two gunslingers of the old west in a standoff, with one perhaps exclaiming the cliche movie line: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

So there’s the source of the title. As the collage evolved, this idea sort of fell into the background (literally), as new images appeared.

And we’ve visited the grave site before in the Boos series. It’s the same one with the rust colored book cemented to the top of the monument, unseen in the above photo. We first find it in “Goodwater Goodland 01” and then in “Goodwater Goodland 02” as well, but two different halves of the book. In the present work, we also find two halves of the same book, but this time split down the middle and not segmented. And just to complete this particular addition, we also have the flat part of the monument appearing on opposite sides of the diptych, or both the lower right and lower left hand corners.

Let’s deal with each side of the diptych separately for a bit. The left hand part is individually called “This Town Ain’t Big”, primarily referring to the diminutive size of Tungaske now.

The base photo presents a gathering of horse drawn wagons. Is some kind of race in progress down the streets of the village? Anyway, more a couple more horses have been added in now, seeming to emerge from the bulging suit coat of Rutherford B. Hayes, our 19th president and who served from 1877 to 1881. They, and the horses behind them in the collage, seem to be heading toward the Tungaske tombstone, but with a smaller, more irregular monument taking the place of the original upright one. This becomes the grave of “Winesburg, Ohio” author Sherwood Anderson.

Blue-green horsey legs appear to its right, and from the same horse we find in both sides of “2 Fer 1” just examined. We find more blue-green tinted legs in outline form in the lower left corner. These are of Bart Simpson, rambunctious brother of Lisa in “The Simpsons”. And you can see the outline of the top of his yellow head just below the pentagonal building above him. The middle part of the body is missing.

In the air directly above Hayes is found the right side of the Tungaske cemetery book, which is also the archetypal “Big Book of Rust”.

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While I’m not sure when the idea entered the picture, er pictures, I decided that the opposite perspectives for the 2 collages of “2 Fer 1” had to be kind of in synch with each other. This means that objects appearing in one had to either appear in the other, or else be explained away as hidden by something. We’ve discussed how in “2 Fer 1 02”, the absence of 12 Oz Mouse’s Man/Woman and toy avatar Taum Sauk seen in “2 Fer 1 01” could be explained this way. But at the same time, 2 *new* characters shown in “2 Fer 1 02” that don’t appear in “2 Fer 1 01” must be explained in similar ways, or Mr. Bean and golfer Tom Kite. If we compare the two collages…

… it’s *possible* that Marge’s hair in 01 hides both Mr. Bean and Mr. Kite in 02. Or it’s also possible that Mr. Bean is hidden by Marge’s hair and Tom Kite is hidden by the blue-green horse. Anyway, that’s the general idea: that the perspective between two must work in a somewhat plausible way.

What is the bigger meaning, then? Sometimes two people can view the same general scenario from opposite perspectives (perhaps one is calm and the other agitated, for instance) and come away with different memories and meanings. For one, a certain relationship with a person or object will be magnified in comparison to the other. It’s all relative. The concept draws ideas from cubism, where the artist attempts to capture all angles of an object like a vase full of flowers or a woman playing a mandolin. Another comparison can be made to the elephant in a room full of blind people, where one holds the tail and thinks it’s a rope, the other holds the trunk and believes it to be a tree branch, and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

In a bigger picture, the dual perspectives of “2 Fer 1” is a microcosm of sorts for the whole of the Boos series, or at least the Tungaske laden aspects that kick in at collage 10 and continue until its end. I’m looking at this artsy Canadian hamlet from all sides, trying to figure out its inner meaning; peer into its heart of hearts. Any one collage provides only a slice of the total — it’s only when you attempt to add them up (read: these *interpretation posts*!) that a true representation begins to take focus. And I think in this topmost, rather cramped room of the Boos gallery is where it all comes down. We are *standing* in the room with the elephant itself now, if I may be allowed.

With that in mind, let’s move to collage 28 of the Boos series exhibited on the next wall, a shorter dimension of the rectangular room holding correspondingly simpler works. I call this one “All Together Now”, and up until about mid-way through my interpretation of the series as a whole, it represented the terminal Boos artwork.

We have the reappearance of the Tungaske baseball team from “Bitter Rivals”, coupled not with flowers this time but a team of guitar players instead we’ve also previously seen in the Boos series (collage 3: “The Rock”). And they’re “all together now” instead of on opposite sides of the picture — a co-mingling. Two groups of players, then, one from sports and one from music or “the arts”, with Texan writer Edward Swift, feet resting on baseball bats, sprawled out between them. We’ve seen Edward a number of times before in my collages, and I’ll give an example here of the final collage of the Embarras series coming earlier this year.

collage 10 of the Embarras series

detail

As I describe in an analysis of the collage at the time, perhaps cryptically in retrospect, Edward Swift is combined with an image representing Kate Swift, a character in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”. As Sherwood shows up in the next collage, along with E. Swift once more, let’s just move on to that one. The diptych “This Town Ain’t Big Enough” is where it all hangs out for the Boos series. If we don’t succeed in peering into the heart of hearts through that perspective, then our mission is incomplete. And of course we can’t succeed completely, since seeing from all angles at once is impossible in practice. It sometimes pays considerable dividends to try, though. Moving on…

(to be continued)