Thoughts on Landscape by Frank Gohlke

Author:Frank Gohlke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936102-08-2
Publisher: Hol Art Books
Published: 2009-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

[1992]

The exhibition and catalog before you grew out of a crisis in one artist’s understanding of what constitutes her responsibilities to her subject. Rose Marasco’s curiosity was aroused by the ubiquitous Grange Halls of Maine, and she thought that to portray their four-square sobriety against the changing fabric of rural Maine might suggest a story about where we’ve come from and where we’re heading. As she worked, a realization dawned: the story was much larger—more interesting, more instructive, more moving—than she had imagined; and the story in all of its growing richness could not be extracted from the exteriors of the buildings alone. A single kind of picture could not possibly do justice to the world in which she was becoming immersed.

Rose has resolved her crisis by dispensing with style (in its sense of an unmistakable visual signature) in favor of an aesthetic of maximum flexibility; her approach as it has evolved makes use of accumulation, accretion, combination and recombination, text, collage, sequencing, and superimposition. Rose surrounds the viewer and the subject with such a variety of visual forms that we are kept slightly off-balance as we move from one to the next; our stance toward the material is thus active as well as contemplative; we are engaged by the imaginative effort involved in continually shifting and enlarging our frame of reference to include new aspects of the subject and of Rose’s involvement with it.

What is the Grange? On first encounter it is a frame building one to three stories tall with little or no adornment, well-kept or deteriorating, sitting at a crossroads or in the middle of a commercial block in a small town or on a village green or in a field. The grid in which Rose has arranged these building portraits suggests that there is an unending supply of them. The grid allows us to see both the common plan of the buildings and their individuality; each contains a story unlike any of the others. The grid reminds us how specific the things of the world are; and, although this was not her intention, it is a testament to Rose’s inventiveness—all of those photographs and no redundancy.

What is true of the exteriors is true of the interiors, but here the invention is seen to reside in the way the members of each Grange have taken a minutely prescribed arrangement of space and furniture and made it their own. The shift to color in these photographs is important, because color is central to the way these ritual spaces are individualized. Rose keeps a consistent, respectful distance from the elaborate tableaux that dominate the rooms, thus neutralizing issues that might arise from differences in taste between the makers, viewers, and herself. This is characteristic of her attitude, which is exemplary in its refusal to claim either privileged viewpoint or unwarranted identification. She is insistent on her position as observer; when we are “inside” an experience—as in the irregularly shaped composite which reads like memory flashes of the potato

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