Quodlibetica

“You’re dying now. Get used to it!”

- Jim Crace, Being Dead

Death is an odd subject. It is everywhere, happens all the time, and yet we go to elaborate lengths to pretend it doesn’t affect us. Perhaps it takes a fictitious doctor of zoology, courtesy of Jim Crace, to state the obvious. Perhaps it is science alone that can grant us that infamous distance to observe and understand the eventual transformation of all zoological life into the botanical. Or, as Crace’s imaginary doctor might put it: “This is Natural Science. Prepare for death and violence.”

Scientifically speaking, we are dying now. The tools we have developed to forget that simple fact are quite amazing: a lucrative cult of youth reliably churns out cremes, colors, exercise rituals, and plastic surgery, all designed to dissimulate senescence, the natural aging process that inevitably leads to death. Fairy tales promise an elixir of life, New Age gurus a la Carlos Castaneda wisely remind us that “death is our eternal companion,” and, for the religiously inclined, afterlives abounProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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2C with or without angels, virgins, and unicorns. Novelist and master of the paranoid Don De Lillo has given us “dylar,” the wonder pill that eases the unbearable fear of death. Outside the realm of fiction, Todd May recently wrote in the NY Times that “here in the United States, we have the technology to defer death, so we often pretend it will never really happen to us.” Rather than “get used” to death, both the little daily death, one cell at a time, and the looming “tunnel at the end of the light” (Todd May), we are more comfortable turning it into elaborate spectacles—think Bodies and Bodyworlds—which allow us, in side-show manner, to marvel at the life-like-ness of the displays rather than acknowledge the fact of death.

Rob Fischer’s recent solo exhibition at Franklin Artworks, “no landmarks and few boundaries,” may appear to be an unlikely body of work to discuss in the context of death. And yet, the celebration of purposeless driving, car culture’s favorite pastime, juxtaposed with the ecological consequences of said culture bring to mind the elaborate ruses we rely on to foster forgetting. Driving features prominently among them, as Jean Baudrillard, the notoriously arrogant French philosopher traveling the American West, observed: “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.“ The onslaught of the new conveniently erases all that has come before, including the awareness of our mortality.

Framed by the dimensions of the windshield, indulging in this particular kind of amnesia takes on a definite cinematic quality. The road exerts a curious magnetism, a quasi-hypnosis that inspires a timeless, non-committal drifting. The mystique of that experience, whether in literary form—how can I not mention Kerouac’s On the Road?—or in countless road movies, has become part of contemporary American folklore. John Updike, quoted on the postcard for Fischer’s show, famously wrote that “most American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.” A nation on the move, convinced that mobility is a good thing, but hard pressed to articulate why that is, exactly.

Rather than race into the setting sun, as Paul Ramirez Jones in Longer Day, recently on view at the Walker Art Center’s “The Quick and the Dead,” Fischer’s road trips and movies proceed at a more leisurely pace. Ramirez Jones chases after an infinitely extended day—immortality as the definitive way of dodging death—whereas Fischer’s four videos chronicle his drives through northern Minnesota. There are no glamorous landmarks along these small-ish highways. The signage along the roads is quaint but does not fall under the Northwoods kitsch rubric. The colors are drab, the trees mostly bare, and dirty looking patches of snow give way to brown fields. This is no grandiose journey of discovery, propelled by a sense of romantic adventure or pompous complacency, no coming-of-age initiation on the road, no nostalgic recreation of family vacations long past. But rather than slide into the boringly dismal, there is pleasure in the purposelessness of driving: not every journey needs to have a goal and has to result in meaning; sometimes drifting is all there is.

This kind of pleasurable purposelessness sets Fischer’s road movies apart from their commercial cousins: while death figures prominently in the genre—characters are either running away from it or driving toward it, with coffins strapped to the roof (Leningrad Cowboys), bodies stowed in trunks (Little Miss Sunshine), or, in a new spin on the motif, all protagonists are already dead (Wristcutters)—there usually is purpose involved. We like our narratives to have direction and closure. Laughing at death can be hilarious, and it bears remembering that humor is one more way of pretending that death can be kept at bay.

Fischer’s work does not invite such comic relief; neither does it satisfy with cathartic closure. If road movies are a metaphor for life (albeit a rather exhausted one) that promises self-transformation and the miraculous discovery of meaning—think family, love, true friendship, revenge—Fischer’s road movies opt out of the whole business of supplying us with cheesy answers to life’s unanswered questions. What a relief. Instead, we are free to wander the galleries, get lost in the visuals and the wistful, melancholic soundtrack of the road—and feel what it’s like to let go, to suspend that ever present quest for purpose and meaning for a while.

But of course, there is no permanent escaping purpose here. Fischer’s footage was shot with the aim of making art out of it. I wander the galleries trying to find an angle for writing about the display. Perhaps we get to indulge, momentarily, in that fleeting sensation of drifting. Perhaps the point is to long for irresponsible, infantile pointlessness, and to experience that putative lack of purpose not as existentialist crisis but subtle liberation.

The nostalgia in “no landmarks and few boundaries” does not stop there. But noticing its intricate presence in Fischer’s work requires turning away from the video projections and paying attention to the sunken pool he installed in Franklin’s new main gallery, an old movie theater. Hovering around the pool are transparent plastic cubes, painted with pond vegetation, lit from within by what I took to be neon tubes. A natural environment is recreated here in a post-industrial aesthetic. Paul Schmelzer, in his review of the show for Artforum, takes this as a parodic comment on the art-world-habitat. But in light of Fischer’s previous experiments with building “strange hybrid vehicles” (Schmelzer) or complicated water collection, filtering, and irrigation systems, it seems that this submerged pool—on opening night, pranksters floated a bunch of beer cans in it—serves as a reminder of where we might be headed if car culture’s carbon footprint continues to expand and deepen.

Fischer’s road movies are a nostalgic homage to car culture—nostalgic because, already, there is no way back to the progress-happy road culture of old, when the nation took to the road as a means of self-discovery, when driving was a national pastime, not an ongoing negotiation of the true price of gas.

Formally, Fischer connects the lines and stripes of the roadways to the marks of gym floor boards that gnarl across the wall in a semblance of linear progress but keep circling back on themselves. The belief in discipline and following directions no longer holds here. The order of the gym has given way to this fantastic arrangement, a re-purposing that casually defeats linear notions of progress.

The death at stake in “no landmarks and few boundaries” may not be ours, not right away. It is a slow but accelerating ecological decline that Fischer’s work evokes, as more and more stories about the precarious health of ponds surface. Recently in the news: runoff from asphalt sealants, which technically qualify as hazardous waste and are widely used to preserve blacktop, gradually accumulate in storm water retention ponds and, from there, slowly infiltrate the ecosystem. One river at a time, one species at a time.

As Fischer’s title reminds us, there are no landmarks to navigate this ecologically compromised future and even less boundaries to effectively curtail such hurtful practices. But his road movies express a longing for a time when driving as drifting was a simple, purposeless pleasure, not riddled with the complexities of ponds and pollution.

In the narrow walkway leading into Franklin Artworks’ decade-old gallery, I find myself next to the backside of a temporary wall, whose front is in use for one of Fischer’s videos.  A sliver of footage escapes from the projection surface and appears on the permanent wall of the walkway. Reduced to abstraction, unrecognizable landscapes shimmer through this sliver of light. It reminds me of a splinter—an obnoxious splinter that we do our best to ignore because it is so deeply embedded into our skin and cells and psyche. Yet we can’t get it out, so we make do and get poked occasionally and usually unexpectedly.

Sources

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London, New York: Verso, 1986.

Cohan, Stephen, and Ina Rae Hark. The Road Movie Book. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Crace, Jim. Being Dead. New York: Picador, 1999.

Dayton, Jonathan, and Valerie Faris. Little Miss Sunshine. Fox Searchlight. 2006.

Dukic, Goran. Wristcutters. A Love Story. No Matter Pictures, 2006.

Kaurismaki, Aki. Leningrad Cowboys Go America. 1989.

May, Todd. “Happy Ending.” New York Times Online.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/happy-ending/?em November 3, 2009.

Nelson, Tim. “New concerns raised over blacktop sealant runoff.” Minnesota Public Radio, http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/29/sealant-runoff. November 2, 2009

Paul Schmelzer. “Rob Fischer: Few Landmarks and No Boundaries.” http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com. November 7, 2009.

Troyer, John. “Critics’ Trialogue.” Lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. October 15, 2009.

Images:  Images of Rob Fischer’s exhibit come from Franklin Artworks photostream on Flickr.