The Mystique of the Mississippi
Alec Soth at the Minnespolis Institute of Arts
Listen to Paul Robeson’s 1936 recording of Old Man River: unconcerned with petty human worries—growing food, avoiding pain and dodging prison, dealing with daily toil and racial inequalities—the river just keeps rolling along. While the singer dreams of leaving the river and all it stands for, including his “white man boss,” in favor of the river Jordan, the mighty Mississippi flows untroubled, dreamless, with an inevitable force greater than all human aspirations. The themes of the song still resonate, as the river continues to serve as a powerful trope in the cultural imagination of this country, and one by one, they make their appearance in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi.
First shown in 2004 and comprised of 46 prints, Sleeping by the Mississippi skillfully taps into these cultural and metaphorical legacies. Until recently, 26 of the prints were on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which acquired a complete set in December of 2007. Not bound by the linearity of the book format, this visual narrative is free to unfold in unprecedented ways in the gallery.
In a digital era, an age of seemingly limitless reproducibility, Soth’s purposefully slow and labor-intensive process may seem like an anachronism. Yet he creates images that resist short attention spans, images that linger—and images that, clearly, have garnered their maker critical renown. Looking at this body of work now, in 2008, I cannot help but wonder what it means to return to Sleeping by the Mississippi knowing these photographs have catapulted Soth to what has, on more than one occasion, been described as “stratospheric success.”
The work thrives on the contrasts foreshadowed in Old Man River, where human yearnings clash with the river’s impassivity: the frozen, white stillness of a Minnesota lake with a houseboat is offset by bright red laundry hung out to dry. Evocative, even suggestive colors—yet from a practical point of view: who hangs laundry out to dry in freezing temperatures? It doesn’t dry; it freezes.
The landscapes—riverbanks, big skies, prison farms—dwarf the people in them and collide with the unguarded intimacy of the portraits hung next to them. In Lenny, Minneapolis, Minnesota, the bulky physiques of the subject and his Rottweiler are juxtaposed with kitschy decorative plates mounted on the wall behind them. The brightly lit gas station in the foreground renders the dark cemetery behind it almost invisible. The orange overalls of a prison work crew brighten the pale patriotism of Jefferson’s Memorial Cross, complete with flag, grey sky, and nearly imperceptible river.
Soth directs our gaze with unwavering focus and intensity. Details matter, as they do in dreams, which Soth asked his subjects to record for this project. The compositions have a certain inexplicable symmetry, which becomes more apparent in Niagara, Soth’s second distinctive body of work. Still and uncluttered, they resemble a dream’s uncanny, hyper-real imagery, familiar but never before perceived this clearly.
Conceptually, the suggestions of mobility—the waterway, the railroad, the transformations of the ordinary into the quasi-iconic worked by dreams and the creative process, Soth’s own travels up and down the mighty river—collide with evocations of immobility and stuck-ness: in prison, in prostitution, even in the Black character fixed in wax.
The river, though metaphorically big enough to contain all of these contrasts, appears only on the periphery, if at all. From its snowy beginnings, it meanders through the photographs into the muggy expanse of its delta in the deep South. The water’s grey fades imperceptibly into the sky, suggesting vastness that visually echoes the profound indifference of Old Man River.
The subjects of Soth’s photographs seem to have absorbed some of that indifference. They pose with a fatalist air, which at some times suggests melancholic acceptance and at others a weary defiance of judgmental eyes. Most of all, these mid-American dreamers appear resigned to their fate. What could be more at odds with the mystique of the American Dream—which is, after all, a dream of mobility, whether social or geographical—than this melancholic fatalism?
Soth’s oft-cited predecessors, such as Walker Evans, have chronicled similar moments of disenchantment duing the harrowing years of the great Depression. “Old Man River” harkens back to that period of economic downturn. It was written in 1927, two years before Black Tuesday hit. In 2008, as the United States face another economic crisis of historic proportions, Sleeping by the Mississippi seems to precociously anticipate a new cycle of fading American Dreams. But while the photographs bear witness to the forgotten dreams of loners and criminals and supposedly fallen women, it is worth remembering that this body of work sparked Soth’s successful career, which reads like a dream come true. Nonetheless, this sudden rise to fame invites a degree of fatalist acceptance too: careers tend to develop lives of their own, sweeping the artist up in their wake, indifferent, just rolling along.
This review was previously published in ARP (Art Review and Preview) in summer 2008.
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