Tension Between Site
and View
Stanley I Grand
Reviewing Cindy TowerÕs
solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994, Roberta Smith
observed in The New York Times
that ÒThemes of destruction and preservation, waste and recycling put in
regular appearances, without pressing the point or becoming preachy.Ó1
At the time Tower was creating installations that included a mix of her own
paintings, found objects, and on occasion great quantities of panty hose. With
titles like ÒWhat To Do With Old BoyfriendsÓ and ÒPirate Cindy,Ó her
installations were characterized by energy, outrageousness, and humor, but
fundamentally expressed an underlying concern with transience, decay, and the
passage of time.
Around 2000, Tower turned
from self-constructed to ready-made installations, which she painted. Her
brightly colored ÒClutter SeriesÓ depict quotidian, messy environments such as
classroom interiors full of stuff or marine engine repair shops brimming with
scattered parts. In an article published in 2005, Tower explained her
motivation: ÒBasically, I decided to paint paintings honoring vanishing
American industries because everything I love is disappearing.Ó2
Her paintings are more than
documentaries of superannuated industries. Raised a Catholic, Tower views the human condition as
somehow trapped in a kind of Purgatory and Òthat is
up to the viewer to decide whether or not to be trapped in.Ó3 The
prospect of escape, of the transmutation of material into sprit, is frequently
suggested by snippets of sky glimpsed through clerestory windows, ruptured
roofs, or other openings that beckon the eye upward. On the other hand, Tower
notes, ÒIf the viewer wants to slide into hell, I
always provide a portal somewhere around the bottom for them to flush
themselves into.Ó4
Long concerned with
detritus and disintegration, TowerÕs vision darkened after 9-11. Since then her
ÒWorkplace SeriesÓ has focused increasingly on the industrial ruin. Once the
apogee of optimistic, entrepreneurial capitalism, these crumbling structures,
like the values they symbolized, are stark reminders of battles waged and lost.
The collapse of the Twin Towers also marked a personal transition for her. Like
Thomas ColeÕs (1801-1848) series The Voyage of Life (1842), now in Washington, TowerÕs ÒWorkplace
SeriesÓ is an allegorical investigation of aging with machines representing the
corporeal. But whereas Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (1897-1983), the great Chicago
master of decay and corruption, favored the face and body, Tower grabs the
entrails: pipes, gauges, and valves interlaced in their densely packed spaces.
Painted with raw, loose,
at times even gloppy, applications of pigment, her palette lacks finesse; she
disdains a mere facile handling of hues (ÒI am not a colorist.Ó5).
She is not interested in aestheticizing, but rather she wants her rough,
gestural surfaces to evoke feelings, provoke viewers, and convey in a very
haptic and tactile way the textures of the subjects themselves.
The space in her
carefully constructed compositions, however, contradicts her anti-aesthetic
approach to color and paint handling resulting in a dynamic tension between
formal elements. Her mix of deep and shallow space, surface pattern, multiple
vanishing points and shifting perspectives often seems claustrophobic,
disorienting, and discomforting. Her paintings are Òmore
about dematerializing and rematerializing. They hold together and fall apart
constantly and become abstract and then not, again and again. They pulsate, are
in a state of flux as am I and the world.Ó6 Formal elements,
in other words, echo and amplify content as she transforms the site into a
view.
Stool is set amidst the ruins of the Forman Family
Factory in Brooklyn, New York (Plate 1).
Founded in 1918 by Sol Forman and two of his siblings, the company
manufactured stamped-metal items including trays and pitchers until the 1980s
when foreign competition forced the business to close. Thereafter, the once
thriving workplace fell into disrepair.
No easy access occurs in Stool. A barrier of stacked fluorescent lights, tools, gears and pulleys
blocks the viewerÕs approach to an abandoned lathe. To the right, in the paintingÕs only uncluttered spot, a
solitary stool appears as a metaphor of absence.
Unlike the Forman ruin,
the engine room of the S.S. Diamond State, a crane ship (T-ACS 7) owned by Pacific-Gulf Marine, Inc.
hibernates at the port of Houston while awaiting a call to serve (Plate 2).
Part of the Ready Reserve Force (RRF) administered by the U.S. Department of
TransportationÕs Maritime Administration (MARAD), the ship can be called into
action on short notice to sealift military matŽriel and supplies around the
globe.7 Cluttered, but shipshape, the painting expresses well many
of TowerÕs formal concerns: the contrast of elements advancing (the diesel
engine to the right) and receding (the staircase to the left), a tranquil,
empty space at the lower left, linear patterns (pipes) at the top of and
parallel to the picture plane, repetitive forms (wheels, dials, cylinders), an
abrupt terminus at the back, and an escape route (staircase).
Back in Georgetown,
Connecticut in 2005, Tower began to paint the abandoned machinery and decrepit
buildings of the Gilbert and Bennett Manufacturing Company (established 1874),
the predecessor of which Benjamin Gilbert (1788-1847) had founded in 1828 with
his partner and future son-in-law Sturges Bennett to produce horsehair sieves.
In 1837 the company successfully created a metal woven cloth using fine wire on
a borrowed carpet loom. Largely through the efforts of Edwin Gilbert
(1822-1906), BenjaminÕs son, in 1863 the firm became the first in America to
produce wire cloth and market wire screens for windows. The company prospered
and grew for decades, but changing economic conditions, environmental concerns,
absentee ownership, antiquated equipment, loss of foreign markets, and low
profit margins, among other factors, caused its eventual demise. All
manufacturing in Georgetown ceased in 1989, followed by bankruptcy in 1998. The
site in Georgetown is now undergoing rehabilitation and the scenes that Tower
painted such as Wire Cloth Factory
no longer exist (Plate 3).
The peripatetic Tower
also painted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2005. Like Gilbert and Bennett, the
Navy Yard is no newcomer to the American industrial scene. Established in 1801,
the facility built ships that helped transform the United States from a
provincial outpost to a superpower. The Civil War ironclad Monitor was outfitted and commissioned at the yard. The Maine, whose 1898 sinking in Havana launched the
Spanish-American War, was built there, as was the Connecticut, the flagship of Theodore RooseveltÕs Great White
Fleet, with which this nation muscled its way onto the international scene. At
its height during World War II, over 70,000 employees worked round the clock
building, converting, and rehabilitating aircraft carriers, cruisers, and
battleships including the Missouri
on whose deck the Japanese formally surrendered in 1945. In 1966 the Department
of Defense closed the yard and sold the bulk of the property to the City of New
York in 1967. Today, it is an industrial park managed by the not-for-profit
Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) for the City of New
York.
Building 128 was built in 1899 and used initially to assemble
boiler engines and sections of naval vessels (Plate 4). Converted in the 1940s
into a machine shop where impellers and shafts were fabricated, the great steel
shed was filled with silent, rusting machines when Tower painted its interior. Spatial
depth is accentuated by the orange-red orthogonals that race back into space.
The rafters, joists, roof trusses add a brittle, fractured energy to the
painting as if one were looking at the scene through a large pane of broken
glass. The sharp, edgy angles in the top half of painting contrast with the
green, organ-like machines in the lower portion that appear like statues lining
an ancient sacra via.
Since moving to St. Louis
where she teaches painting at Washington University, Tower has painted the
looming skeleton of the Armour meat packing plant, now long abandoned and
fallen into ruin (Plate 5). Roman in scale, littered with glass shards, rotting
boards, syringes, and condoms, stripped by pickers and scavengers, the plant
exudes an aura of violence and decay, malevolence and danger. Once proud
machines with embossed nameplates reading ÒFrick 1902Ó stand watch over rotting
domains as their innards are slowly eviscerated: first the copper, then the
brass, and finally the steel itself. The machines recall those of the painter
Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967), but stripped of cobwebs, haze, and nostalgia.
The Armour meat packing
business began when Philip Danforth Armour (1832-1901) headed west to the
California goldfields in 1852. When he returned East in 1856 with $4,000, he
saw an opportunity as he recounted to Theodore Drieser in 1898: ÒI
had been studying the
methods then used for moving the vast and
growing food products of the West, such as grain and cattle, and I believed
that I could improve them and make money.Ó8
Thus began an enterprise that would become one of the greatest—and most
notorious after the publication of Upton SinclairÕs 1906 muckraking novel The
Jungle—names in industry.
The Armour Packing Plant in National City pioneered the assembly line, or more
fittingly the de-assembly line. In its time, the plant was a marvel: a
world-class production facility where pigs were slaughtered by the thousands,
cut, cured, and methodically processed into meat, glue, pharmaceuticals, and
fertilizer. Everything, but the proverbial squeal was captured and utilized.
Today the site is an
isolated wasteland where members of the underclass gather old bricks and sell
them to developers who seek a simulacrum of age in their mic-mansions. In the
weeds, in abandoned cars, others traffic in human flesh, drugs, and
violence. The ancient, ghostly
rivers of animal blood now nurture a new generation of entrepreneurs.
This is where Tower
paints. She does not photograph the view and retreat to a studio. (ÒSomehow
just taking a picture of these places isn't enough. I want to feel these places
and record them slowly so that a viewer might also gain a sense of the place in
a soulful way.Ó9) Rather, she works in the midst of the chaos itself
accompanied by a small dog and bodyguards (one of whom is real; the other a
stuffed dummy). At night she hides her canvases among the ruins. Frequently,
the paintings suffer cuts and tears. Daughter of a test pilot, she appears to
relish adventure, risk taking, and pushing the limits.
TowerÕs painting process
has an absurd, theatrical aspect: Her entourage seems to have stepped out of a
Fellini parade. An acolyte of Allen Kaprow, Tower believes in transformation
through humor and self-deprecation, and for this reason creates videos
documenting her adventures among the ruins. The erstwhile performance artist
comes through here, but thereÕs nothing funny about the paintings themselves.
In Grates a staircase leads ominously into a subterranean
realm (Plate 6). ThereÕs no way of knowing that the monumental staircase in the
painting is but a small incident in a vast space. One can imagine Tower and her
entourage approaching this modern mouth of hell and wondering who or what might
scamper up the rusting stairs to confront, challenge, threaten, or worse.
The Carondelet Coke
Plant, another Saint Louis area industrial site, provides the backdrop for My
Brothers and Myself. In this
painting Tower employs cylindrical forms to represent herself and her two
brothers (Plate 7). Clearly, the smallest of the three, the oil drum from which
shoots an intense flame, represents the artist herself.
The buildings of
the Carondelet Coke Plant (formerly the Great Lakes Carbon Coke Plant, and
before 1950, the Laclede Gas and Light Coal Gassification Plant) date to the
first decades of the 20th century. Previously, commencing in the
late 1850s, the Vulcan Iron Works had converted ore from southeast Missouri
into iron at the Mississippi River site. During the Civil War, James Buchanan
Eads built his ironclad gunboats here. As iron production shifted northward to
the Great Lakes, smelting ceased at Caronde let. In 1902 Laclede Gas and Light
built a Coal Gassification Plant to provide St. Louis with lighting and heating
gas. Coke, a byproduct of the coal gasification process, is an essential
ingredient in the manufacturing of steel. In 1915, Laclede upgraded their
equipment and facilities to be competitive with other coke producers. Great
Lakes Carbon Company purchased the plant in 1950 and continued operations there
until 1980. The new owners, Carondelet Coke Corporation, closed the plant in
1987. Two years later, back taxes led to the St. Louis Land Reutilization
Authority acquisition of the property. Reflecting changing times, a casino will
soon occupy the site.10
Most recently Tower has
been painting at the Federal Mill #3, Leadington, Missouri, which the Federal
Lead Co. built in 1906-07 to process the rich deposits from the areaÕs lead
belt. In 1923 ownership of the mill passed to the St. Joseph Lead Co., which
greatly expanded production. At its height it had Òtwenty-six buildings and
much large equipment spread over twenty-five acres. It was the largest plant of
its type in the world, the hub of an enterprise with 1,000 miles of mine
tunnels and 250 miles of underground railroad track beneath all the nearby
communities.Ó11 With the development of mines in the Viburnum area,
southwest of Leadington, operations at Mill #3 slowed and then ceased
altogether in 1972. Thus ended an exploitation of natural resources that had
begun with the French in the early 18th century, been expanded by
the Guggenheims among others in the 19th century, and overall
produced more wealth than almost any other mining enterprise. Today the site is
a Missouri State Park.
A Tommy Knocker, according to legend, is a minerÕs ghost who
warns the men of an incipient cave-in (Plate 8).12 Recalling TowerÕs
propensity for recycling—whether her Dot paintings from 1993, which were
painted on salvaged western shirts, or her installations adorned with plastic
containers—Tommy Knocker and
other paintings from Leadington use silk or upholstery instead of canvas as the
support. Purchased locally, the
woven materials remind viewers that mills and mines were often found together
with the former providing employment for the minersÕ wives and daughters.
TowerÕs paintings embrace
simultaneously a Romantic and a Pop sensibility. Ruins, of course, have a
special place in the Western imagination and evoke hubris chastised, like
ShelleyÕs Ozymandias. But TowerÕs is an eye that embraces destruction
dispassionately like a Warhol car wreck or portrait of ÒOld Sparky.Ó Her
content, however, is neither cool nor detached. Rather her paintings are, in
one sense, elegiac meditations on impermanence.
Like the Indian-painter
George Catlin (1796-1872), whom she admires, she is recording an endangered way
of life. Tower compares herself to the canary in the mine that signals imminent
disaster, and taken together her ÒWorkplace SeriesÓ is a clarion call Òto preserve a way of life I see reflected in older
technologies in which human touch, toil and sweat was evident in the
making/manufacturing process itself.Ó13
She longs for
an idealized time when ÒAmerican Industries had different values, offered
pensions and insurance to employees and built things to lastÓ and rejects the
present Òculture of impermanence, planned obsolescence, instant satisfaction,
exploitation, sloth, ease, and greed.Ó14
By capturing the raw
beauty and tragedy of industrial ruins, she hopes to help reduce wastefulness,
replace disposition with preservation, and encourage a more equitable sharing
of ever-diminishing natural resources. Devoid of irony, glibness, and cynicism,
her paintings and outlook are fundamentally affirmative.
NOTES:
1. Roberta Smith. ÒArt in
Review: Cindy Tower 'Westward Expansion Inward' New Museum of Contemporary
Art,Ó The New York Times (July
22, 1994).
2. Cindy Tower, ÒCapturing
AmericaÕs Vanishing Industries: The Workplace Series of Artist Cindy Tower,Ó MARAD
Update: Official Journal of the Maritime Administration, vol. 4, no. 4 (April 2005), p. 3.
3. Correspondence to
author (February 1, 2008).
4. Ibid.
5. Interview with the
author (December 7, 2007).
6. February 1, 2008, correspondence.
7. On August 8,1961,
Todd Shipbuilding, Los Angeles, launched the container ship SS Japan Mail, which was subsequently renamed SS President Truman. Later converted to a crane ship and
re-christened Diamond State
(T-ACS-7), the ship entered the Ready Reserve Force February 22, 1989. Due to
its ability to process seawater, Diamond State was dispatched to New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.
8. Yoshinobu Hakutani,
ed. Selected
Magazine Articles
of
Theodore
Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1985), pp. 123-24.
9. Tower, ÒCapturing
AmericaÕs Vanishing Industries,Ó p. 3.
10. http://www.eco-absence.org/stl/car/
11. Susan Flader, ed.
Exploring Missouri's Legacy: State Parks and Historic Sites (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992),
p. 139.
12. The term also
refers to trapped miners knocking on the walls to communicate with potential
rescuers. In Stephen KingÕs novel Tommyknockers (1987), the knockers are aliens, not ghosts.
13. February 1, 2008, correspondence.
14. Ibid.