(continued from)
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)
Sunklands 