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Our contemporary conception of the suburbs was conceived by developer William J. Levitt, and realized in 1958 with the completion of Levittown, Pa. At the time, Levittown, with its 17,311 homes and 70,000-plus residents, was the largest planned community constructed by a single builder in the U.S. Its mass-produced homes, which sold for under $8,000 each, epitomized the American dream and established home ownership as the signifier of middle-class status. But it also transformed American culture, entrenching the automobile into daily life, and creating a consumer culture based on home improvement, barbecues and lawn care.
Present-day suburban
life is reminiscent of Levittown, as a drive to any of Cleveland's outer-ring
suburbs — with their developments of larger, upscale versions
of Levitt's prefab homes — will reveal. Yet today “sub-urbanity”
is further complicated by middle-class America's penchant for indoor
pursuits (cable TV, online shopping, video games) and, in many cases,
for sustaining a principally white homogeneity devoid of tolerance and
even the slightest degree of social deviance.
There is
little room in this context for avant-garde contemporary art, and this
is the premise of subURBAN, the current exhibition at 1300
Gallery . Artists from the United States, as well as from far-reaching
urban areas in Australia, Brazil and Brussels, were asked to take a
piece of preexisting suburban “art” — mass-produced
landscape or black velvet paintings, animal sculpture or fake fruit
—and transform it by painting over it or altering it.
There are some compelling works in the exhibition, but the overall concept is shaky, and most of the artists fail to examine the dichotomy between urban and suburban life. They also fail to address the social complexities and problems inherent in suburbia. Furthermore, many of the artists' styles and subject matter seem to originate from the trappings and habits of suburban life; in many cases, animé-inspired characters reminiscent of those that float freely across video-game screens and Cartoon Network programs supersede or infiltrate tacky landscape paintings, exchanging one form of suburban iconography for another. There is little critical engagement on the issue of what urbanites or suburbanites define as art; would a suburban grandmother define her maple carved fruit as art? Do most city dwellers share an appreciation for “high,” or at least gallery-worthy, art?
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Deth P. Sun makes clever use of a landscape painting depicting a river that winds between tall, willowy trees. The artist inserted a stylized large blue cat with a bandaged paw on the riverbank. The creature engages a smaller white feline across the river, and three ominous black cats appear down stream. The
original artist's signature — “Robert Wood '56” — remains on the bottom right corner of the painting, and is balanced by the addition of the word “sweetness,” which was added by Sun. The words “telecommunications” and “big fun” are written in the same block print on the frame of the painting, and a thrift-shop price tag — “$20.00 framed print” — remains on the top edge of the painting. Even with these witty, ironic touches, there is little that defines the altered painting as especially urban. As many white, suburban members of Generation X (and, for that matter, Y) can attest, irony and cynicism were born in the suburbs.
Furthermore, the animé-inspired imagery in Sun's work is more at home in neighborhood comic book shops or cable TV than on the graffiti-altered urban trains, bridges and walls that dot the urban landscapes. In this context, the comfortable, privileged suburban life influences the urban realm, not the reverse.
California artist Lesley Reppeteaux's series of altered china bowls feature portraits of waiflike young women with exaggerated features, evoking the big-eyed “Keane Kid” prints of the 1960s and '70s, but with an alterna-chick twist. They are visually interesting, and the added imagery is complemented by the red rose motifs already found on the edges of the bowls. However, the bowls are not solely decorative objects, and they are by no means “art,” even in the kitschiest sense of the word; ultimately, they are utilitarian. And they would be as much at home in an urban kitchen as in a suburban one.
Souther Salazar painted a fanciful scene over what once was a print of a stalk of broccoli. The original piece was no doubt of the floral kitchen-print genre, and Salazar transforms the broccoli into a tree within a newly created landscape painting. The artist makes adroit use of the space around the broccoli tree, which contains a giraffe, birds and other whimsical plants. The imagery and predominant orange tones of the work bring to mind the 1970s animal prints and posters that were commonly displayed in children's bedrooms.
As is often the case at 1300 Gallery, the exhibit includes several first-rate works by regional and international artists . But this show is not conceptually cohesive. There are clear traces of suburban life in many of these pieces, not only in the original objects, but also in the imagery and motifs imparted by the allegedly urbane artists. The works lack a critical edge, and in fact echoes many of the most culturally debilitating aspects of suburbia. The iconography of generations of people raised on MTV, TV Land reruns, B movies and shopping malls is steeped in nostalgia that is just as tacky as the dusty bowl of faux fruit that our grandmothers cannot bear to part with. What is truly fascinating about the contrast between urban and suburban life is beyond trinkets, or art, of either the “high” or “low” variety.
What is more interesting is the way we connect with our neighbors and our community. We live in the era of “nesting,” content to experience the world from the confines of our homes and to live vicariously through television or the Internet. This phenomenon is endemic in the suburbs as well as in the city. It is disappointing that none of the artists in subURBAN chose to criticize or deconstruct the socially constructed notions of “urban” and “suburban.”