Sequestered Newspaper Racks

Here is an image of out-of-use newspaper racks, in a storage yard in San Francisco, on Friday March 13th, 2009. It's an AP photo by Noah Berger, one in a series of pictures from the current recession, over at the Big Picture; an editor's note specifies that the unused boxes were removed due to city rules, not because of economic pressures.

Still, it's an image that no doubt made the mix because of the precarious state of the newspaper business. This has been a topic of discussion in many places, including one of my favorite blogs, Daughter Number Three, where the topic is called "newspaper diaspora."

Here is an interesting piece by Walter Issacson, from the Thursday, February 5, 2009, issue of Time magazine: Issacson tracks the ups and downs of various web trends, pointing out that "the bulk of the ad dollars [on the web] has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators." He advocates a new, less cumbersome system of micro-payments, directing more income to content providers. It is an interesting suggestion, in an article that may get you searching deeper, clicking over to the 50 best websites of 2008, the 50 best inventions of 2008, Apple's 10 best business moves, and pictures from the recession of 1958. (Just yesterday, by the way, the editor of Time stepped down: magazines are in trouble, too.)

But first, the art: this image drew me in because of both its formal and conceptual properties: the color and configuration of multiple, nearly identical shapes; the topic it suggests (the death of newspaper). Objects often appear more abstract when clustered (like buckets hanging from a tree); it's a color field with its own formal beauty. Who invented the newspaper rack as an object, anyway? (Like a plastic or metal tv screen on every street corner.) What are those city rules pertaining to them? And whatever happened to the newspaper boy?

Museums are important because ideas reside there, on every flat surface, in each installation. What happens to newspaper racks if they are piled in a room in a contemporary museum? I imagine that they would spark thoughts ranging from city rules to the state of print journalism to the economies of art. What would it take for an artist to claim and redistribute these racks? What happens to their value if they become sculpture? Or if an artist like Walter Lab, who sees the potential for beauty in trash, flattens and turns them into a painting?

"Deserted Landscape: The Bag Paintings" by Walter Lab

My cousin Walter Lab will have a series called "Deserted Landscapes: The Bag Paintings" at the Wayne and Miriam Prim Theater Gallery in the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from September 20, 2008 - December 07, 2008. (That's an oil painting, folks, not a photograph.)

Walter Lab often chooses to paint those objects that best suggest the environmental and social demise of our culture: improvised shelters of homeless people in LA, cargo ships filled with perhaps useless commodities (or imported food), beaches in Jamaica covered with trash.

He describes the bags in these paintings as "materialist sculpture in the public trust." Because he sees them as such, they become "claimed sculpture, site specific chance-made and chanced-upon installations" that arouse a contradictory response in the artist: both annoyance and longing.

Lab's own words say it best:

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Ernst Lorenz

In the California desert, winds lift the debris of physical culture, and relocates it in the landscape. The flying membrane and textual graphics of packaging is snagged on bushes, heaving where it is caught. Whipped and filled by desert bellows, shopping bags become ornaments, drapery, jewelry, signage, perversity, beauty.

Annoyance and longing are two strong human responses to the social phenomena of scattered packaging and ubiquitous plastics and to the physical anthropological presence of consumer debris in our surroundings.

Painting plastic bags on bushes, I am painting advertising set out like balloons into the wind, signage, romantic irony, diminished literacy, commerce and recall (human memory), the cheapest use of cheap oil and cheap gas, the demand for green technology. The uncertainty of humanity. I am also painting objects transformed into ornaments, into drapery and jewelry, weighted with opinion, objects believed to be perverse (annoying), or maybe elegant.

You could say that I am an optimist referencing the surety of change, the surety of survival. Yet I don’t offer a solution, I only describe the problem (longing).

You will appreciate these paintings if, like me, you get a queasy feeling in your stomach each time you use an extra plastic bag when you shop. Click on the image at the left to go to the Nevada Museum of Art and information about their upcoming Art and Environment Conference.