Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

A River Runs Through It, Part ONE
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Things are heating up in the local art scene, which beginning in May will become the epicenter of more art world attention than it's seen since the heyday of the Hudson Valley School of painters in the 19th century. The new Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center at Bard College will have just opened (see this month's Community Notebook); the Dia:Beacon museum will open; the Watershed project featuring work by 10 art world all-stars will kick off; and the US branch of the international art critics association (AICA) will hold its annual meeting in Beacon, to enable its members to take part in all the festivities.

It can be awfully hard not to get carried away by all the glitz and hubbub surrounding these events. Local officials look to these developments to pump much-needed cash into a depressed economy, and others embrace the presumably salutary effects of the introduction of aesthetically advanced institutions to enhance the local cultural cachet. But I'm far from convinced that all this is necessarily a good thing, a sentiment that I'll begin to probe here, and continue to explore next month.

So why here, why now?

An exhibition open at Vassar College's Loeb Art Center beginning April 12 provides a good place to start. "Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation" features rarely exhibited drawings by 19th century artists such as John Frederick Kensett and Aaron Draper Shattuck. The 40-odd drawings in the show were collected by the late 20th-century artist Dan Flavin, whose own work involves sculptural installations of light (most frequently using the glow of fluorescent tubes). He had planned to create a museum in the abandoned mansion called Dick's Castle in Garrison, where he hoped to exhibit his own work alongside these Hudson River School drawings that emphasize the play of light in nature, thereby highlighting the art historical sources of his own practice.

Initiated by the British-born painter Thomas Cole, who first ventured up the river in the mid-1820s, the Hudson River School grew to be the most influential manifestation of landscape painting in the 19th century. ("School" here means group, not a formal place of instruction.) Cole's main innovation was to find in the American wilderness a landscape worthy of the dramatic ambitions of European narrative history painting. He painted large, awe-inspiring vistas of the Catskills and the river, and in his wake came a steady stream of artists such as Frederic Church, whose elaborate home Olana, outside Hudson, stands as the most enduring local monument of the movement.

That Cole arrived in the 1820s was no mere accident. That decade marked the construction of the major canal systems-the Erie Canal, the D&H, and others-that created a vital network of navigable waterways throughout New York, all converging on the Hudson, which then became the superhighway of the day. Coal, lumber, and other raw materials were brought out of the wilderness, and factories sprang up on the banks of the river to process them into manufactured goods. Towns like Beacon, Troy, Hudson, and others owe their existence to this wave of 19th century industrial development. Rosendale's natural cement was discovered by the builders of the D&H canal, creating an industry there that survived into the 1970s.

So Cole's discovery of the Hand of Providence in the "untainted" American wilderness-and the expansion of that vision through a half-century of work by his followers-was, to put it mildly, somewhat ironic. Industry opened up the interior, and the artists created the myth-and not coincidentally, materially contributed to the growth of a brand new industry, tourism. The enormously popular paintings of Cole, Church, Durand, and others served as fantastic billboards, enticing their contemporaries to travel by steamship up the valley to stay at scenic mountaintop resorts like the famous Catskill Mountain House, creating a powerful cultural framework within which the tourist could organize his or her direct experience of the view. It shouldn't be too surprising to learn that much of the time the Hudson River School artists resolutely turned their backs on the growing evidence of human activity and industry on the river, editing out or simply looking the other way from the factories and other signs of modernity sprouting up under their noses, the better to serve up a pristine, Edenic vision of America "before the Fall."

And so it is once again-but this time, instead of artists spinning an enticing new tale of the wilderness, it is heavily capitalized artworld institutions that are taking advantage of both the pre-existing myths (the rural, "natural" character of the area) and the realities (easy access via commuter rail line; relatively undervalued real estate in an economically depressed area) to promulgate a new wave of industry. True to our post-industrial age, this development takes place as an offshoot of the entertainment industry (how better to classify art tourism?) and focuses largely on the creation of awe-inspiring, beautiful spaces in which to abstractly contemplate the disinterested aesthetic pleasures of Art, which is as close as we get nowadays to that 19th century's sine qua non, God.

The museum that Dan Flavin originally proposed for Dick's Castle in the early 1980s was a prescient foreshadowing of all that has now come to pass. Those plans fell through, and Flavin instead found a former firehouse in Bridgehampton, Long Island, to house his art, which is now owned and maintained by the Dia Foundation. (Flavin passed away in 1996.) But his vision of presenting a continuous art historical narrative, from the 19th century to the present day, grounded in an experience of the Hudson Valley, brings this story quite neatly full circle. The exhibition of drawings from his collection (now owned by Dia as well) complements the concurrent exhibition of Church's grand (and grandiose) painting Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, also at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. On April 26, Vassar will host a symposium on Church, which should provide an enlightening window onto both his art and his historical context, for those who would like a firmer grasp of what I've briefly summarized here.

The overt ambition evident in Church's work provides an appropriate analogue for the scale of the new artistic developments about to wash over us. By contrast, there's a vibrant local art scene-which should come as no surprise to regular readers of this column-that is in danger of being marginalized in the glare cast by the artworld luminaries now descending upon us. If Dia:Beacon marks the shift from Big Industry to Big Culture, the local scene is more like the aesthetic continuation of home-based, cottage industry. Created by artists who have made this place their home (and I don't mean the all-stars who first made their bundle in the city, coming here to live in a "country house"), few of them make their primary living from their art, often cobbling together various part-time jobs teaching or waiting tables that free up enough time to do their work.

Despite their position off the main axis of artworld influence, many artists here are quite conversant with advanced aesthetic ideas, and incorporate them into their work on a regular basis. (There are, after all, a number of major studio art programs in the area, and a number of their graduates have elected to stay in the area, for one thing.) So it's not as though the "locals" are just a bunch of hicks-far from it. We are close enough to New York City to experience firsthand its wide range of cultural amenities, and to reflect upon it all back here at home. And for those of us who are not members of the jet set, the word home really means something profound.

The art of Carol Field, on exhibit at the Wright Gallery in Kingston this month, provides an excellent antidote to the artworld hubris I've been critiquing here. Modest in scale, intimate in focus, her studies of fragments of nature come quite literally from views of a stream and woods in her backyard. But they are anything but provincial-she is deeply aware of the incongruity of her enterprise, attempting to capture "unedited" bits of nature, but relying upon the abstracting conventions implicit in her gestural watercolor sketches. Somehow, the fluidity of her medium creates a fitting formal echo of the subject matter, lending the title of the show ("Fluvial Notations") a rich double-entendre.

Instead of seeking to project a grandiose vision onto the raw material of the landscape, she asks rather more searching questions: "What are we doing in the process of seeking out purity in nature? What effect does it have on the landscape to make these images, to create art about it?" This is a much more responsive, intuitive dialogue with the environment, one that does not systematically privilege the insular monologue of purely aesthetic construction.

Native Americans called the Hudson, a tidal estuary, "the river that flows both ways." It seems much more interesting to think about the relationships between art and life-and between people-that way as well. The distribution of power and influence in the art world has little in common with that worldview. Perhaps the new developments afoot will provide us with opportunities to enlighten these latest cultural colonizers with a fundamentally different way of thinking, if they're willing to talk.

"Fluvial Notations," paintings by Carol Field, on view April 5 through 30 at the Wright Gallery, 50 North Front Street, Kingston. 331-8217. Opening reception April 5, 5-pm.

"Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation," on view April 12 through June 15 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie. 437-5632 or visit www.fllac.vassar.edu. Opening reception April 25, 5:30pm.

"Frederic Edwin Church: Exotic Impressions of the Caribbean and South America," symposium to be held at 10am, April 26 at the Loeb Art Center, Vassar. Tickets are $10, reservations strongly recommended. For more information, call 437-5391 or e-mail jocuttler@vassar.edu.