Monthly Archives: December 2015

(continued in)

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”.

(to be continued)

(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)

(continued from)

Up we go to the top floor of the Boos Gallery via a teleporter again. In the room’s more confined space, viewers are confronted by what amounts to two diptychs on opposite, long walls, both rather unusual in design in comparison to others of this kind I’ve created. These are the only 2 multi-panel works of the Boos series. On the 2 perpendicular, shorter walls are hung smaller, simpler works both based on more antique Tungaske photos. And the 2nd and last diptych is also based on same.

Let’s start, then, with collages 26 and 27. Here’s how they appear in the gallery…

The unusual aspect of this “diptych”, collectively called “2 Fer 1”, is that it shows the same 2 older Tungaske buildings, even most of the same collaged-in characters placed around these buildings, but from opposite directions. We’ve seen these similar white clapboard/ green roofed structures before. They appear in the background of “Comparative Heights” two collages back.

In “2 Fer 1 01”, we’re simply changing angles a bit and zooming into the matching buildings. We have a former school of the town on the right, and a former church to the left. Both stand on the same property, which at present time is up for sale. Like with all the miniatures of the Boos series coming before it, I used photos found on realtor’s sites as a base to build up from. I didn’t alter the dimensions of either of the two selected photos for the collages.

“2 Fer 1 01”

The 2 tall green alien thingies of “Comparative Heights” have now disappeared or either moved off camera to the right. In their stead appear new images. We have, front and center, the head of Marge Simpson — who is, of course, Lisa’s mother in “The Simpsons” show — atop a female human body of taller dimensions, it seems. I believe this represents both Marge the mother and Lisa the daughter in one, perhaps when Lisa is all grown up and a mother herself. Two her left (our right) comes a blue-green 6 legged horse that we’ll also see in the second diptych of this floor. Here it trots on the boundary between shadow and sunlight, but its body remains shaded. Contrast this to sun bathed toy avatar Taum Sauk sitting on a rust colored car to Lisa’s right. Bright vs. shade, then; light against dark. Also in the foreground (far left) is another 12 Oz Mouse character we first saw in Collage 03 (“The Rock”), who again appears in female form here but is actually half man, half woman, harking back to Lisa’s androgynous state. She appears to be in lit the sun as well. And then two more collage-in images appear in the background of “2 Fer 1 01”, which we’ll see better in the second part of the dipytch. These are Baker Bloch himself, alongside a reclining Chef Dick Halloran culled from the epicenter of The Shining movie.

In “2 Fer 1 02”, we’ve merely swiveled our viewing angle basically 180 degrees and moved it to the edge of the woods just behind Baker Bloch. From this adjusted angle toward the old school and church we see most of the same objects from “2 Fer 1 01” but also a couple of new ones. There’s of course Baker Bloch and Dick Halloran again in the foreground, then we can spy the blue-green horse in the background, which appears to be in the same position as in “2 Fer 1 01”. Then Marge headed woman stands beside it still, but with her blue hair queerly merged with the long snout of the blue-green horse. Both she and Halloran still face the camera, as if they’ve swiveled around in position with us. Then absent from “2 Fer 1 02” is Taum Sauk and 12 Oz Mouse’s Man/Woman character with the red ball, apparently hidden from sight now by the rust colored car and white clapboard schoolhouse respectively.

“2 Fer 1 02”

The new characters of the second part of “2 Fer 1” are Mr. Bean, positioned near the center of the collage, and then former PGA golfer Tom Kite in the right foreground, wielding yet another golf iron of the Boos series. In fact, Mr. Kite is famous for his iron game, which I only learned about after creating the collage.

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

In his prime Kite had few peers with the short irons. In 1993, Johnny Miller referred to Kite as “the greatest short-iron player the game has seen.

(to be continued)

Let’s temporarily skip further discussion of “Comparative Heights” to move to the 25th Boos collage, called “Bitter Rivals”. To me this seems to be an even simpler work, not far in spirit from the miniature but larger in overall scale. The scene is clear. We have an old Tungaske baseball team returning to the right, although I’m not sure we have the same people represented. To the left we have the same picture of the team blotted out by red-violet flowers that appear to be pansies. These are the “bitter rivals” of the title, fronting a beautiful Tungaske sunset seen from approximately the same location as that of collage 14 (“The Unloading of Bigfoot”), or on the western edge of the town very near the artist’s house depicted in collage 11 as well. I believe those are even some of the same trees represented.

We’ve already associated this artist with Lisa Simpson or “Lisa the Vegetarian” through evidence gleaned in collages 19 through 23. Appropriately, we have the return of Lisa Simpson for the present collage, appearing in outline form between the two “rivals”. But, importantly, the outlined is doubled through inversion. Lisa cannot side with either team but, like the setting sun behind her, has to remain neutral. As Lisa has also been directly associated with a setting (or rising) sun in collage 22, we must assume the same here. What are the rivals? Since the flowers are culled from an advertisement for the Tungaske cemetery, they represent the dead of the town. And since all the players to the right are in all likelihood deceased now, the collage weaves a tale of past (living) colliding with present (dead). Tungaske is a dying town in that the population slowly seems to be trickling away. Again, the dead threaten to rule, vanquishing or “blotting out” a modern rival, perhaps perceived as johnnies-come-lately. The fight is between past and present, with Lisa standing between the two.

The heroine of our story does not appear in “Comparative Heights”, but her image is the last I edited out of a final draft for that collage. I decided to include an excerpt from this penultimate version as collage 25.5 of the Boos series which I call “Q Girl”, bringing Lisa to the forefront at last and not hidden. Her signature lemon tags along.

Per the title, she stands in the “Q” of the delineated “Q Street” from Google Maps’ Streetview. Given that Dorothy’s upraised arm in the overall collage points directly at mystery writing in the sky that seems to spell out a more derogatory word for “queer”, we can also assume that “Q” stands for the same. This may be a kind of coming out moment for the girl, or a realization at least of her gay or, more likely, bisexual nature. This has antecedents in “The Simpsons” show, where several times it is hinted that Lisa is a lesbian.

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/LGBT_characters

In the episode “Holidays of Future Passed”, a montage of photos were featured to show a glimpse of whats to come for the Simpsons family. Lisa is shown intimately holding hands with two women in one photo, then with a different woman in another photo.

I’m also reminded that the flowers in “Bitter Rivals” are pansies, which is another slang word for “gays”.

Drawing further back, Lisa Simpson represents the androgyny or two headed rebis:

In alchemy, androgyny is a symbol of immortality, transcendence and totality. It is the triumph over the deceptive duality resulting from the creation of the universe. It also stands for the merging of the selves, the triumph over mind and ego, and the accord between sameness and diversity, particularly duality.

“Q Girl” provides a summary point for the floor 3 collages of the virtual Boos gallery in Collagesity now, a period to their sentence. But we still have one more, smaller floor to examine. Lisa leads us upwards.

Nautilus City

Collagesity

(to be continued)

(continued from)

What’s outside the rectangles with the green entities, then? First, let me emphasis or reiterate that the reasons behind The Flintstone’s Great Gazoo being brought into the present collage are not just because he’s green like Ray Walston’s similarly green clad Martian character or actually green like the Incredible Hulk, although that’s obviously the main surface tie-in between the 3 framed images. No, this is more Tungaske magic in action here, explained in a post from about a month ago called “Town Oddities”. I won’t repeat the information except to state that the Tungaske woman in the photo is also green clad, has the implications of worm *helmet* — accidental in the photo, it seems — and that she shares other characteristics with the live action Gazoo character. It was very natural, given this background, for me as a collagist to transpose the large silver fish from “gloved green helmeted short plump smiling fisher-woman” to “gloved green helmeted short plump smiling Gazoo” and go from there.

Looking at stuff outside the inserted rectangles now, we have the return of 12 Oz Mouse’s Fitz in the center of “Goodwater Goodland 03”, drinking his beer once more. He’s always got at least one or two stashed away somewhere on or around his body in the series, it seems, and can whip it out at any time. Witness this:

Fitz obviously is associated with the other green beings in the collage, starting with the Great Gazoo as explained before in “Boos Interpretation 17” and working out from there. Gazoo’s silver fish can also be seen as booze — two imbibers, then. As far as the Martian and Ray Walston go, we must keep in mind that Tungaske inexplicably has a large Martian crater named after it. And for (Bill) Bixby and The Hulk we must remember that Iron County Missouri, which contains both a Bixby and a Banner (about 15 miles apart), also has an even closer Goodwater and Goodland between them. Bill *Bixby* starred as David “Bruce” *Banner* in The Incredible Hulk show to follow up on his co-starring role in the earlier “My Favorite Martian”. The proximity of Goodwater to Goodland here (also framed by the north and south county lines of Iron) led me directly to Tungaske and this landmark, 611 page history book on the community…

We have a complex interweave of collaged associations building upon clues from maps, TV and film sources, books, photos, Second Life, and more — leading up to “Goodwater Goodland 03”. And we have these actual names culled from an Iron County map in the present collage (bordering the “My Favorite Martian” insert), just like in the former two collages of the set.

Back to Fitz and the center of the collage: Behind the green mouse is the composite Tungaske and Tungaske Cemetery signs we’ve seen in “I Must Be Going. Hello!”, which stand for a town in danger of dying out, leaving only the dead to rule. Behind it is what appears to be a sunset or sunrise, but is actually the top of Lisa Simpson’s cartoon sun-like head. If it is sunset, this could be despair. If it is sunrise: hope. We are going to assume this is a hopeful situation for Tungaske, and that the town and its cemetery will not become “as one” here, since Lisa Simpson keeps appearing in Boos collages to come. She is the ordained savior artist.

(to be continued)

(continued from)

The central figure of “Booses” is the Great Gazoo from the popular 1960s animation show, The Flintstones. But here he’s seen in his live-action version from the 2000 movie “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.” More on the Great Gazoo here:

The Great Gazoo is a tiny, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet Zetox as punishment for having invented a doomsday machine, a weapon of immense destructive power. His invention was a button which if pressed would destroy the universe in an explosive “ZAM,” though he insists he made it on a whim (“I wanted to be the first on my block to have one!”) with no intent of using it. Gazoo was discovered by Fred and Barney when his flying saucer crashed; Gazoo recognizes Fred’s and Barney’s world as prehistoric Earth, implying Zetox banished him through time as well as space.

Gazoo refers to Fred and Barney as “dum-dums” and constantly causes problems for them. He can materialize and dematerialize objects, teleport, freeze time, travel through time, and perform other remarkable feats, but when he attempts to help out Fred and Barney, he usually ends up causing even more trouble. Although his powers are frequently described as “magic,” they are more likely based on incredibly advanced science, in accordance with the third of Clarke’s three laws. The only people who are able to see Gazoo are Fred, Barney, and the children, because they believe in him; animals also can see him. A running gag is that Fred argues with Gazoo while Wilma believes that he is talking to himself. When their daughter, Pebbles, says “Gazoo,” Wilma thinks Pebbles is sneezing.

And a funny addition here:

The Great Gazoo is also referenced in The Simpsons episode “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”, a metafictional episode looking at alleged future developments in the series that would never come to pass, which include Ozmodiar, a floating green alien that only Homer could see. Ozmodiar eventually appeared (twice) in The Simpsons episode “HOMR”.

Metafiction rocks! Back to “Booses”: The Great Gazoo holds a silver fish in his hands, and seems to be eating it. A small white cartoon ghost hovers to his left, holding a mug of booze or beer. Ironic juxtaposition. The fish also has the word “BOOS” across it, acting as a kind of forward projected buckle for the Gazoo’s belt. This seems to imply that the fish also represents booze, and that the Gazoo is imbibing too, just like the little ghost.

Notice the very similar color of the animated Gazoo and 12 Oz Mouse’s Fitz in these images; I just happened to save them in the same folder on my computer:

Fitz is also an imbiber of alcohol. In fact, he’s always at least a little drunk in the show. So I think it’s safe to say that Gazoo and Fitz the Mouse are supposed to be overlapped in this collage, given that a duplicate of Gazoo’s right arm holds Fitz’s letter to the left. The green-blue hummingbird is a dart. Gazoo’s helmet even has the shape of a inverted hummingbird feeder of sorts. But what of the fish? I guess this is as good a place as any to remark that in collage 3, another green being (Hulk) — seen through the doorway of the Boss, MO rock house also appearing in collages 1 and 2 — has the head of not a fish but a bird between its teeth…

… and I was conscious of the association at the time, since collage 3 was actually finalized after collage 22 here. Bird and fish are suppose to be tied together, leading in from the “Can You Be More Pacific?” miniature, or collage 21b as it were.

Collage 23, “Goodwater Goodland 03”, contains the same image of the Gazoo, so we can just continue our analysis by examining that work. The collage is unusual in several aspects. One is that it shares the same name with two earlier, proximate collages of the Boos series, or “Goodwater Goodland 01” (collage 09) and “Goodwater Goodland 02” (collage 10). The unusual part here is it comes a full 13 collages after the latter of that set. Why the reappearance of an already dispensed name? It’s because we have much of the same pictorial framework in place for the present one: we have the return of the mural picture from collage 10 in particular, with rectangles removed that depict smaller representations of the same mural seen from different angles found in collage 09. In Boos Interpretation 07, I describe how this flipping of background and foreground stands for a tajitu situation, where yang and yin energies have interchanged.

“Goodwater Goodland 02”

Instead of the rust colored funerary book appearing “behind” the rectangle areas removed from the Tungaske mural, we now have 3 separate pictures of *green entities*.

Of course there’s Gazoo again at the top (sans fish this time), then part of a DVD cover for the show “My Favorite Martian” to the left, another 60s TV staple like The Flintstones, and then the return of Bixby and his Incredible Hulk character in the last rectangle to the right. Bixby just happened to be the co-star of the earlier “My Favorite Martian”, alongside star Ray Walston (who played the Martian of the title), and I included his full name in the culled image to make the Martian-Hulk association more open. The Great Gazoo, although not technically Martian (although sharing the same general color, shape, and *helmet* as a true Martian from another cartoon classic)*, certainly fits in as another related, green alien. To complete what we see in the rectangles, Gazoo also has “Lisa Simpson eyes”.

(to be continued)

—–

* Interesting (The Great Gazoo vs. Marvin The Martian):

http://dev.xversusy.com/challenges/Marvin_the_Martian_vs_The_Great_Gazoo