May 12
The Index
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- Visions of the Susquehanna
"A vast wilderness of great natural abundance explored, settled, farmed, industrialized, and now threatened."
Thus Rob Evans, the curator of the travelling exhibition Visions of the Susquehanna, sums up the history of the Susquehanna river ever since men have known it. This history can be generalized to stand for the evolution of the relationship tying the American people to its own territory in the course of the last four centuries.
After crossing Pennsylvania and Maryland, the exhibition is moving upstream to the river's mouth in the state of New York, at the Roberson Museum and Science Center where it will be on show until the end of summer.
Visions of the Susquehanna does not include the earliest documented pictures of the river - Native American petroglyphs hewn in the rock of its very banks. Neither are shown the drawings from the first settlers, who'd barely made the crossing from Europe and went down along the river in the wake of John Smith, the first explorer to reach its furthest extremity exactly 400 years ago.
Evans chooses instead to focus on painted masterworks inspired by the river. The exhibition opens with Pre-Romantic landscapes from the second half of the XVIIIth century, lush and prodigal, yet so wild that their mysterious air mixes with a sense of indistinct menace. Romantic painters from the Hudson River school follow. In the mid-XIXth century, as the river's population grows, it becomes the symbol of nature as a nourishing force.
The industrial revolution then lays its mark on the landscapes of Eastern America. The ponderous presence of steel and the accumulation of constructions catches the artists' attention. The river even disappears from pictures that take it as their subject. Bridges, houses and new equipments steal the show.
Not before the 70's does the Susquehanna re-emerge. America feels strong ties with its countryside again, and painters exhibit a new-found interest in rural landscapes - an interest they share with photographers, such as those who form the New Topographics movement.
This trend has grown ever stronger in the last couple of decades, and given rise to striking pictures of the Susquehanna that make up a great part of Evans' exhibition.
In his allegory Agnes Susquehanna - Born 1972 (2006), Peter Paone employs a gaudy color scheme and seemingly shoddy workmanship to figure a natural catastrophe: the river overflowing its banks during Hurricane Agnes, in 1972. A smiling fairy is perched on a donkey that's standing in a small row boat, like a mocking Virgin who'd rather flee to Egypt. She's contemplating the floating body of a tramp, a contemporary Ophelia among the curious fish, before a background of trees with submerged trunks and devastated houses huddled together.
In Lift (2006), Randall Exon blurs all of our perspectives. That boat - is it coming up or going down? Has it ever sailed? The lift it's hanging from seems bound to lay it down directly on the rock pier, at best on the ground below. Besides, this immaculate river, this deeply Romantic landscape, do they exist today? Isn't it rather a memory of yesterday's Susquehanna - even a dream of the Susquehanna of old?
Rob Evans, a very good curator and an excellent painter, laudably dares show one of his own works, Migration (1997). We are placed on an asphalt road, crossing at a right angle the road of the birds, and we cannot determine whether they're flying down South or up North. This endless, deserted road seems to cut the river in two down the way of its course, rather than traverse it from bank to bank as a bridge would. There's one more ambiguity: the elevated point of view could lead to think that the scene is perceived from within a car or a truck - but if that is the case, it's driving the wrong way round, on the left side of a continuous centerline. In this half-light of dawn or evening, we don't know whether our gaze is turned to the West or the East - in the sense of the first settlers' great migration, or backwards, toward the mouth of the river, where the immigrants came from.
Paone, Exon and Evans sum up well the mindset hovering on the Susquehanna. They convey the nostalgia of an idyllic symbiosis with the hospitable wilderness. The land is a territory offered to the settlers for them to prosper; or so states Manifest Destiny mythology. But the viewer is also confronted with the dark intimations of environmental upheaval, of climate changes, of floods and hurricanes, and man-made catastrophies, not only insidious pollution but sudden events such as the near-meltdown of the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in 1979. Ecological preoccupations reached a climax in 2005 when the Susquehanna headed the list of the United States' most endangered rivers.
Eloquent paradox: one of the only poems devoted to the river was penned by an assistant engineer during the edification of the Conowingo dam in the early 30's. In it, W. K. Martin deplores the scarcity of verse celebrating the Susquehanna. Conversely, through the wealth of pictures he uncovered, Rob Evans reveals the formidable appeal the river has held for many generations of painters.
Top to bottom:
Debra Bermingham, Sunlight on the Susquehanna, 2006, oil on panel, 25 x 68.5 inches (four panels), courtesy DC Moore Gallery, NYC
Leonard Koscianski, Food Chain, 2003, oil on canvas, 46 x 66 inches, private collection, courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Steve Stremmel, Reno, Nevada
Stephen Etnier, Susquehanna River, 1931, oil on canvas, 28 x 36.1 inches, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Auspitz Collection
Peter Paone, Agnes Susquehanna - Born 1972, 2006, acrylic on MDF board, 40 x 40 inches, courtesy the artist
Randall Exon, Lift, 2006, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches, courtesy Hirschl & Adler Modern Gallery, New York, NYRob Evans, Migration, 1997, mixed media, 20 x 27.75 inches, collection of George and Bambi Long
Mary Veronica Sweeney (b.1957), I Saw the Ball of Life Going Down the Susquehanna, 2006, oil on canvas, 61 x 41 inches, courtesy the artist
Visions of the Susquehanna
May 15 through August 30, 08, Roberson Museum and Science Center, Binghamton, NY