The emergence of landscape painting as an independent art form coincided with the deterioration of urban life brought on by the industrial revolution. Viewers in crowded, noisy, and polluted cities were only too eager to embrace visions of pristine wilderness, free from the inroads of man and thus spiritually and aesthetically pure.
Of the three shows I visited downtown this month, two belong very much to this earlier tradition. Both Mitch Albala’s misty, romantic views of waterfalls at Lisa Harris, and Ian Boyden’s equally romantic, Asian-art inspired landscape abstractions at Davidson, look to nature as the ultimate source of transformative energy and power. Both artists favor dramatic compositions rendered in near-monochrome, with a minimalist sensibility favoring one dominant element to the exclusion of nearly everything else: the feathery plunge of water plumes in the oil paintings of Albala; the separation of earth and sky in the ink on paper compositions of Boyden.
Both shows represented the work of artists with distinctive sensibilities and an impressive command of their chosen form, but both shows made me feel a bit left out, as though observing a party to which I wasn’t invited. I'm of the mind that landscape art should somehow acknowledge, even indirectly, the inescapable impact of man on the environment, changes that currently affect even the most remote corners of the planet. As a result, the landscape show I most connected with were the downbeat photographs of Adam Satushek, bad news delivered with wit and style.
Satushek, a young artist whose large-format panoramas are captured on film rather than a memory chip, has an exceptionally adept eye for those incongruous juxtapositions of the natural and built realms that puncture rather than celebrate our romantic illusions. His pictures are also LOL funny, which provides just the right counterpoint to his rather grim message.
Take his deadpan street scene Frond. A dried up, parchment-brown palm frond stretches out on a sidewalk, its far end attached for some reason to the nozzle of a yellow fire hydrant (all scenes are presented as found). The plant shape resembles water pouring onto the cement, its outstretched leaves like waves washing up on the base of an LA Times newspaper rack. I’m reminded of the crime scene photographs of Weegee, but an updated, West Coast version, with a palm frond as the dead body, LA as New York, and color replacing black and white. The real victim of the crime, of course, is our image of the West as the golden land of stately palms and endless promise, its uprooted limbs laid out to die on a gritty Los Angeles sidewalk.
As an ironist, Satushek seeks out those vignettes that most reveal the oddity of our one-sided relationship with the natural world, something we experience but do not actually notice every time we step out the door. One of his favorite techniques for highlighting the peculiar is symmetry: Nature centered like a pinned Lepidoptera in a perfectly balanced, man-created frame.
Appendage, for example, is a close-up of two mirror image green bushes, each sitting upon an identical (and inexplicable) light circle of dirt. The punch line here is a large stick leaning against one of the bushes at a rakish angle. Since neither bush is visibly connected to the ground, the effect is to make the prop appear to be the stem, holding up a popsicle stick bush in the process of falling over. This struck me as both funny and ridiculous, but it’s also a satisfying image on a strictly formal level, like most of Satushek's pictures.
Pole features what is a sort of tree made up of leafless branches, but like Appendage, this tree has no visible connection to the ground; instead it both starts and ends partway up a telephone pole, which is of course a former tree itself. The living organism in Pole is symmetrical both top to bottom and side to side, which makes it doubly weird; weird as well is the ghostly grey bush in Bush, surviving somehow in the gap at the corner where two sides meet of an identically grey wooden fence. It’s as though we’ve attempted to produce a race of plants that conforms to strict manufacturing standards, but it’s not quite working – we're surrounded with factory rejects.
I’m equally amused by the droll Lap, where a couple shares a crane operator’s seat on the top of a dump truck cab, he at the controls of a steel jaw which is in the process of disposing of a tortured-looking tree trunk; she perched passively on his lap. Talk about anti-romantic; this young couple is the evil twin of strollers on the beach or flower-pickers in the meadow; the token of their affection is about to disappear into a literal black hole, the bed of the truck. Is this a sort of 21st Century foreplay?
Satushek even manages to take a poke at his counterparts in landscape art, those illusion-cherishing painters (see above). Weed immortalizes a pathetic little bush growing directly out of the edge where a cement-block wall meets a barren gravel walk, but the joke is that the whitewashed wall features a crude painted version of earth and greenery. The titular plant is the exact scale of its background painting, the image come to life but for what? Pygmalion sculpted a woman so beautiful that he brought it to life with his love, but in the world of Weed both the image and its embodiment can only break our hearts. At least, freed from defunct pastoral fantasies, we can laugh through our tears.
