PANIC ARCADE (On Location)
April, 1987
Robbin Murphy
A friend of mine, a writer I've known since college, has come to the conclusion that myth has ground to a halt in America and we are all just living on reruns. She told me this while looking at my paintings but assured me that it was not meant as a criticism of them alone. She had that blank, detached manner to her voice that I associate with someone trying too hard not to look at television or popular magazines or listen to top-40 radio.
Like me she came out of a small, rough, out-of-the-way corner in the Northwest, where a "neighborhood" can easily take in hundreds of miles and families still think in terms of clans. But even in college we did not seem to see the same landscape. She had her mind set on Europe as her escape from what she thought of as a cultural wasteland with New York as the one place in this country where she would be able to do what she really wanted to do. I was lazy, even then, and took those things that were easiest as material to work with -- my gaze never reached much farther than out my studio window.
We both landed in New York ten years ago, though not together. She came by design, I gave in to intertia. She's toughed her way into the life and grain of the city and now takes yearly sojourns to Europe and, lately, Central America. I still stand patiently on street corners waiting for the light to change to green before I cross.
We met recently at a political fundraiser. She had just returned from two weeks in Managua, Nicaragua and was ebullient with her perceptions of that country, the people she talked with and their struggle against what she termed "another Vietnam War."
What most impressed her was their attempt to bring a poetics to their politics, something she had always wanted to do in her own work. She admired their commitment to the land and, as an afterthought, suggested that I might think about going down there to paint landscapes.
Everything shares a relative location and I've tried to pinpoint just where my thinking about art is located relative to my friend. Where she sees an image I see the image. To her there's a landscape anywhere and to me there is the landscape, the landscape I remember. In my memory that landscape is located next to something else, or on top of, or around it and there is a connecting structure that I deal with in my paintings. Perhaps it's just two ways of mapping the terrain.
Weeks passed and I ran into my friend again at a gallery opening of a mutual friend who was having his first one-man show. Since we'd known each other too long to ask what we thought of the work I asked her what she'd been working on. She was writing a political piece but was having difficulty making it as poetic as she wanted yet still effective as politics. She was also thinking of editing her grandmother's diaries, written when her family settled in Montana in the late 1900s. Her mother had finally sold the farm and sent them to her because she was "the writer in the family" and might find some use for them. She said the continuity wasn't very good but Granny had a way of describing the building of the house, hiding in the root cellar from the Indians and harvesting the first crops that was vivid, as if she'd used a camera. But my friend felt guilty about starting another project until she had more pressing work done. She thought she might be able to do it in the summer when she had some free time.
I asked her if she'd ever built a Memory Palace. It was a system taught in the 16th century to help scholars remember secular and religious material. They would build a mental structure in their minds consisting of rooms or locations to store images for easy recall. The structure could be taken from reality, buildings or places that actually existed, or they could be made up or they could be a combination of the two. An idea -- Christ's suffering for our sins -- was given an image, the cross, and placed in a room. Another idea would be given an image and placed in another room linked to the first by a hallway or a door. To recall any of these ideas you mentally took a walk through the Memory Palace and found the location of the image.
She said it sounded like a film she'd seen but couldn't recall the name of it. She asked how my landscapes were going and if I had a gallery yet then moved over to the group surrounding our friend who was having the exhibit.
She may be right about myth grinding to a halt. So many ideas seem trapped in texts that it's difficult to locate them. Our history has become a form of entertainment and it's as if we're stuck somewhere between Arcadia and Utopia forever. The psychologist and philosopher William James said much the same thing at the turn of the last century. He termed it a search for restitutio ad integrum, a return to a primal wholeness. He was stuck between the promise of Jefferson's "arcadian democracy" and the new urban industrialization, between his Puritan roots and a modernist future.
European writers at that time expressed doubt that such a varied social environment could ever achieve any cultural consensus that could be called American. Modernism was taking root but the American plant that grew produced a variety of fruits; Arcadia had become a shopping arcade to pick and choose from.
I recently read my friend's piece on Nicaragua in a magazine. She never did make it poetic. It was hard, didactic but well thought-out and I couldn't help but agree with her stand. She attracted quite a bit of attention with it and her name is now known to people she's never met. The last I heard she was spending the summer in Paris, soaking up the culture.
ROBBIN MURPHY April 1987