Prime Property

This Final Project Paper is concerned with my art project Prime Property. The final exhibition of the project opened on August 24, 2007 and ran through September 14, 2007 in the Alvin Gittins Gallery of the University of Utah. In this paper, I'm attempting to shed light on my rational and intentions for creating the body of work presented here. My art is concerned with the life-governing patterns that create the world in which we live. More specifically, my art is concerned with the patterns of urban sprawl, the wave of ever-new housing developments that is washing over the American landscape. It has become so pervasive a sight that the American landscape, as most people living in America today know it, is to a large degree dominated by the dynamic sprawl of housing developments. Familiarity so often translates into a feeling of rightness or at least a feeling of safety. The phenomenon of suburbia, then, with its concomitant lifestyle has acquired a status of familiarity precluding general questioning because it is part of the post World War II wave of technological and economic progress, which has become the status quo. For the last 60 years, our lives have generally become faster, easier, and more comfortable. The phenomenal gains, however, inherently carry within them losses of corresponding magnitude, which have become just as commonplace and therefore invisible as their positive counterparts. As I see it, we have grown blind to the loss of landscape and the collapse of community based living to the degree that consumer culture has overwhelmed us with an overabundance of material goods and conveniences. This state of affairs makes it difficult to assess the situation critically. The aim, then, of my art lies in provoking a sense of curiosity regarding the familiar that escapes our attention because it is so common. My art-making constitutes my meditation of the common patterns of contemporary life and extends an invitation to my audience to join in this meditation. I surrender to the simple, repetitive, even mundane in my process of image-making, while simultaneously undermining its primary tenet. What at first glance looks like mass-production, reveals itself, under scrutiny, as having grown out of singular attention to every element in my paintings. This shift from the first impression of the apparently machine-made to the realization of individual attention hopefully will awaken the viewer's curiosity not only in the images, but also in the issues connected to those images. In this way, I hope that the viewer will reevaluate her own relationship to the issues of urban sprawl with interest, curiosity and attention.

PRIME PROPERTY by Thomas Liebich A Final Project Paper submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of Art and Art History The University of Utah May 2008 Copyright © Thomas Liebich 2008 All Rights Reserved THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS SUPERVISORY COMMITTEEAPPROVAL of a final project paper submitted by Thomas Liebich This final paper has been read by each member of the following supervisory committee and by majority vote has been found to be satisfactory. THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS FINAL READING APPROVAL I have read the final project paper of ____ T_._.,_._ho"'-m=ace<.s""'L""ie"'"'b""'i"""ch"'----- in its final form and have found that (l) its format, citations, and bibliographic style are consistent and acceptable; (2) its illustrative materials including figures, tables, and charts are in place; and (3) the final manuscript is satisfactory to the Supervisory Committee and is ready for submission to the Graduate School. Approved for the Major Department Approved for the Graduate Council Liebich 1v ABSTRACT This Final Project Paper is concerned with my art project Prime Property. The final exhibition of the project opened on August 24, 2007 and ran through September 14, 2007 in the Alvin Gittins Gallery of the University of Utah. In this paper, I'm attempting to shed light on my rational and intentions for creating the body of work presented here. My art is concerned with the life-governing patterns that create the world in which we live. More specifically, my art is concerned with the patterns of urban sprawl, the wave of ever-new housing developments that is washing over the American landscape. It has become so pervasive a sight that the American landscape, as most people living in America today know it, is to a large degree dominated by the dynamic sprawl of housing developments. Familiarity so often translates into a feeling of rightness or at least a feeling of safety. The phenomenon of suburbia, then, with its concomitant lifestyle has acquired a status of familiarity precluding general questioning because it is part of the post World War II wave of technological and economic progress, which has become the status quo. For the last 60 years, our lives have generally become faster, easier, and more comfortable. The phenomenal gains, however, inherently carry within them losses of corresponding magnitude, which have become just as commonplace and therefore invisible as their positive counterparts. As I see it, we have grown blind to the loss of landscape and the collapse of community based living to the Liebich degree that consumer culture has overwhelmed us with an overabundance of material goods and conveniences. This state of affairs makes it difficult to assess the situation critically. The aim, then, of my art lies in provoking a sense of curiosity regarding the familiar that escapes our attention because it is so common. My art-making constitutes my meditation of the common patterns of contemporary life and extends an invitation to my audience to join in this meditation. I surrender to the simple, repetitive, even mundane in my process of image-making, while simultaneously undermining its primary tenet. What at first glance looks like mass-production, reveals itself, under scrutiny, as having grown out of singular attention to every element in my paintings. This shift from the frrst impression of the apparently machine-made to the realization of individual attention hopefully will awaken the viewer's curiosity not only in the images, but also in the issues connected to those images. In this way, I hope that the viewer will reevaluate her own relationship to the issues of urban sprawl with interest, curiosity and attention. v Liebich vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................. vii CHAPTER 1: PROLOGUE, 1957 ................................................................. l CHAPTER 2: LOOKING AT A MATERIAL WORLD ....................................... 3 CHAPTER 3: BEGINNINGS ...................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 4: EVERY GREEN RECTANGLE AND EVERY LITTLE HOUSE ........ 12 CHAPTER 5: LINES CUT DEEPLY ............................................................ 28 WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 41 Liebich vii LIST OF FIGURES 1. Figure 1: Untitled ............................................................... 10 2. Figure 2: The Hills Are Alive I. .............................................. 10 3. Figure 3: The Hills Are Alive TI............................................... 11 4. Figure 4: Prime Property I .................................................... 16 5. Figure 5: Prime Property II .................................................... 16 6. Figure 6: Prime Property III.. ................................................. 19 7. Figure 7: Prime Property N .. ................................................ 23 8. Figure 8: Detail, Prime Property N 24 9. Figure 9: Prime Property VI.. ................................................. 27 10. Figure 10: Prime Property VII, Stage 1. ..................................... 29 1 1. Figure 11: Prime Property VII, Stage 2 ...................................... 29 12. Figure 12: Prime Property VII, Stage 3 ..................................... .30 13. Figure 13: Prime Property VII, Stage 4 ..................................... .30 14. Figure 14: Prime Property VII, Stage 5 ...................................... 31 15. Figure 15: Prime Property VII, Stage 6 ...................................... 31 16. Figure 16: Prime Property VII, Stage 7 ...................................... 32 17. Figure 17: Prime Property VII, Stage 8 ...................................... 32 18. Figure 18: Prime Property VII, Stage 9 ...................................... 33 ....................................... Liebich viii 19. Figure 19: Prime Property VII, Stage 10.................................... 33 20. Figure 20: Prime Property VII, Stage 11. ................................... 34 21. Figure 21: Prime Property VII, Stage 12 .................................... 34 22. Figure 22: Prime Property VII, Stage 13.................................... 35 23. Figure 23: Prime Property VII, Stage 14 .................................... 35 24. Figure 24: Prime Property VII, Stage 15.................................... 36 25. Figure 25: Prime Property VII, Stage 16 .................................... 36 26. Figure 26: Prime Property VII, Stage 17.................................... 37 27. Figure 27: Prime Property VII, Stage 18.................................... 37 28. Figure 28: Prime Property VII, Stage 19..................................... 38 29. Figure 29: Prime Prope1ty VII, Stage 20 .................................... 38 30. Figure 30: P1ime Property VII, Stage 21. ................................... 39 31. Figure 31: Prime Property VII, Stage 22 .................................... 39 32. Figure 32: Prime Property VII ............................................... .40 Liebich CHAPTER 1 PROLOGUE In her short story A View of the Woods Flannery O,Connor brilliantly describes the human yearning for comfo1t and power, both wrapped up in progress. He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood and they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture. It happened to be the only cow pasture that Pitts had succeeded in getting the bitte1Weedoff and when the old man had sold it, Pitts had nearly had a stroke; and as far as Mr. Fortune was concerned, he could have gone on and bad it. "Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books," he had said to Mary Fortune several times from his seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for anything but the machine. She sat on the hood looking down into the red pit. Watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up [ ... ] l Liebich The Fortune place was in the country on a clay road that left the paved road 15 miles away and he would never have been able to sell off any lots if it had not been for progress, which had always been his ally. He was not one of these old people who fight improvement, who object to everything new and cringe at every change. He wanted to see a paved highway in front of his house with plenty of new-model cars on it, he wanted to see a supermarket store across the road from him, he wanted to see a gas station, a motel, a drive-in picture-show within easy distance. Progress had suddenly set all of this in motion. The electric power company had built a dam on the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country and the lake that resulted touched his land along a half-mile stretch. Every Tom, Dick and Han-y, every dog and his brother, wanted a lot on the lake. There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place. There was talk of an eventual town. He thought this should be called Fortune, Georgia. He was a man of advanced vision, even ifhe was 79 years old. (335 - 338) 2 Liebich 3 CHAPTER 2 LOOKING AT A MATERIAL WORLD What a vision Mr. Fortune in Flannery O'Connor's Story had. Looking at today's American landscape, his prophetic vision has expanded into what strikes many as a nightmare: an ecological catastrophe and explosion of ugliness everywhere you look. Others see it in terms of economic opp01tunity, a way to make lots of money on the one hand and an affordable way to escape the cities and own a piece of the American Dream on the other hand. No matter how you look at urban sprawl, the phenomenon is happening and impacting the American landscape and the American way of life - and so much so that it's no longer recognized as a particular phenomenon. John Mitchell describes it this way in his 2001 National Geographic article: An old saying has it that you can't have your cake and eat it too. So it would seem in the land of the manicured lawn and the picture window, the treeless cul-de-sac, the sterile shopping center, the blockbuster mall, the corporate campus, the amorphous parking lot, the clogged highway that inevitably fails to serve its desired function as soon as it is built. Yet most Americans who live among these icons of suburban growth aren't terribly troubled by them. It's the way things are, a tolerable nuisance even if the Liebich 4 process does gobble up the land, skewer the fabric of community life, and erode the economic base of older towns and central cities. And perhaps it is tolerable to so many because it has become so familiar. After all, outward growth of this kind has been occurring in most regions of the country since the end of World War II. (49) Familiarity so often translates into a feeling of rightness. A situation may feel right, not because it is, but because it feels familiar. There is security and comfort in familiarity. Things are as they should be because they are the way they have been. So, in light of the immense and steady progress America has experienced since the end of World War II, the premise that life in general is continuously improving as technology is progressively making our lives faster, easier and more comfortable carries with it a notion of rightness, while it fails to acknowledge that all these gains cany within them losses of equal weight. The drawn-out boom of suburbia and its extension into trophy home developments, as I see it, is neither taking into account the loss of landscape nor the collapse of community based living. Equally, consumer culture overwhelms with glitzy images and an overabundance of things, and leaves little of our attention open to the reality of the lives we are actually living, not to speak of contemplation and evaluation of such lives. The aim, then, of my art lies in provoking a sense of curiosity regarding the familiar that escapes our attention because it is so common. This aim targets not only my audience, but myself, as the very act of my art-making constitutes a meditation of the commonplace (and in my experience often shocking) components of contemporary life. As an artist I embrace the simple, repetitive and mundane in my process of image-making Liebich 5 in such a way that the viewer will at first only see the familiar, seemingly repetitive imagery of mass-production that a closer viewing will expose as an illusion, revealing the organic process of my image-making. While superficially imitating mass-production, I pay close attention and singularly create every individual element in my paintings. My hope is that the shift from the first impression of the apparently machine-made to the realization of singular attention will awaken the viewers curiosity not only in the images, but also in the issues connected to those images. And further, I hope that the viewer will find herself, no matter what the individual standing, to be implicated and part of the issues of urban sprawl, thus with grounds for interest, curiosity and attention. Liebich 6 CHAPTER3 BEGINNINGS During the summer of 1974, I was three years old, my father started to herd sheep on a large army training ground near a village in northern Germany called Wohltorf. A year later, he decided to move the family - then living in an apartment in the city - to a newly deserted house on the edge of the territory. I darkly remembered the house from a visit earlier that year, when my father and I had dropped in on the old Russian lady who lived there with her chickens, without electricity or running water. There was a craterlike pond in the middle of the pasture, the embankment of which looked much like a landfill where scrap metal and wood mingled with tom-up bed springs, plastic bags full of rotting garbage and such. When '-Yemoved into the house and began remodeling, my father had the garbage covered with truck loads of dirt. Soon we had sheep and horses grazing around a picturesque pond in the pasture behind the house. We kept bees in a small grove of trees which had once lined the garbage hole. This small ranch became the idyllic setting for my childhood and youth. It was easy to forget all the trash under the steep grassy banks of the pond. As a matter of fact, the whole family still refers to the small farm in Wohltorf as "paradise". Liebich 6 CHAPTER3 BEGINNINGS During the summer of 1974, I was three years old, my father started to herd sheep on a large army training ground near a village in northern Germany called Wohltorf. A year later, he decided to move the family - then living in an apartment in the city- to a newly deserted house on the edge of the territory. I darkly remembered the house from a visit earlier that year, when my father and I had dropped in on the old Russian lady who lived there with her chickens, without electricity or running water. There was a craterlike pond in the middle of the pasture, the embankment of which looked much like a landfill where scrap metal and wood mingled with tom-up bed springs, plastic bags full of rotting garbage and such. Ween w.e moved into the house and began remodeling, my father had the garbage covered with truck loads of dirt. Soon we had sheep and horses grazing around a picturesque pond in the pasture behind the house. We kept bees in a small grove of trees which had once lined the garbage hole. This small ranch became the idyllic setting for my childhood and youth. It was easy to forget all the trash under the steep grassy banks of the pond. As a matter of fact, the whole family still refers to the small farm in Wohltorf as "paradise". Liebich 7 I left paradise for the city and ever since have been driven by a desire to reunite with paradise in some way. After the family moved, the house was tom down and the ranch turned into a gravel lot for road repairs on the army training ground. A decade later the army also left and the remainder of paradise became part of a nature preserve which now encompasses the entire former army territory. This almost sounds like a utopian return to innocence; however, the localized transformative arc of my childhood ranch, which ends (so far) with a return to more or less uncultivated nature, runs counter to global developmental trajectories of a rising world population expanding its grip on the land with an ever-increasing hunger for wealth, status and comfort. When I seriously started to pursue art about four years ago, my work largely consisted of an attempt to follow the arc of my family ranch by trying to strip myself off cultural conditioning in search of pure expression of the natural as I imagined it then. The process of shifting from the dream of "pure expression" to an investigation of the material reality of the world I was inhabiting grew out of an exploration of the physical material of my paintings. Starting with the format ofmy painting surfaces (be it canvas, paper or masonite), I found that no matter what I was expressing within my paintings, the paintings themselves always ended up in the box. My paintings were always framed by the rectangular format of the painting surface material. Everything I was trying to do with my paintings was subverted, and ultimately called into question, by the make-up of their very material. The rectangular format was running counter to my intention for the paintings which I created in an attempt to break out of the rectangular, straight-lined confines which I found to embody the dominant forces of cultural production and conditioning. I found that I bad fallen victim to inattention because the recto-linear ...... Liebich 9 a continuation of the experience of landscape that had found expression throughout the history of Chinese painting. Did I have a landscape that could engulfed me like that? Or was the landscape so obliterated that it was impossible for me to access it? Or could I still access it, just in a different way - just a different landscape? I knew that I didn't have the landscape that Wang had experienced. My world was different. And while there was a longing for Wang's landscape, I felt compelled to acknowledge and accept the factual existence of my contemporary landscape. My acceptance allowed me to begin an investigation of that landscape and its implications. At what point did the working of the land tip over into a pillaging of the land? What were factors that allowed our lifestyle to be this demanding and taxing on the planet? How was I participating in progress, and how did this participation impact the planet? What could I do visually in my art to question the situation without grossly simplifying it? Liebich 10 Figure 1: Untitled Figure 2: The Hills Are Alive I Liebich 11 Figure 3: The Hills are Alive II Liebich 12 CHAPTER4 EVERY GREEN RECTANGLE AND EVERY LITTLE HOUSE Allan Ginsberg realized this dilemma in 1956 in his poem "A Supermarket in California" and opened a conversation with the past, with an imaginary Walt Whitman, only to question the present? What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I Walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache Self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the Liebich 13 pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling bis ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? (1215) Liebich 14 Ginsberg presents the experience of 20 th Century Post World War II prosperity and questions the past which dreamed it. Are we really living the dream fulfilled? In some ways we are, aren't we? Entering into a similar dialogue with the past, I tried to imagine what Wang's mountains would look like were they to be covered with thousands of suburban developments? I returned to my studio with that image in mind. And still use it as a touch stone for my current work. While wanting to investigate a specific situation, namely urban sprawl which is consuming open landscape at an alarming speed, I also want to address the situation through painting, and abstract painting at that. While the phenomenon of urban sprawl has been addressed in several art forms, e.g. photography, film, fiction writing, to name a few, painting has remained silent in this conversation. And this, while radical transformations have been taking place for over half a century. Here are just a few numbers: * Seventy million Americans lived in the nation's urbanized areas in 1950; these regions covered some 13,000 square miles. By 1990 the urbansuburban population had more than doubled, yet the area occupied by that population almost quintupled - to more than 60,000 square miles. * Phoenix, AZ, one of the Sunbelt's fastest growing communities, has been spreading outward at the rate of an acre an hour. Atlanta, Georgia, another overachiever, boasts a metropolitan area that is already larger than the state of Delaware. Liebich 15 * Sprawl is claiming farmland at the rate of 1.2 million acres a year. Tln·ow in forest and other undeveloped land and, for net annual loss of open space, you 're waving good-bye to more than two million acres. * Sprawl keeps a person in the driver's seat. The suburban family, on average, makes ten car trips a day (keep in mind that most families have two vehicles). A commuter living an hour's drive from work annually spends the equivalent of 12 workweeks, or 500 hours, in a car. Traffic delays rack up more than 72 bil1ion dollars in wasted fuel and productivity [ ... ] * By 2025 the United States will be home to nearly 63 million more people than are here today. If current trends prevail, they're going to need more than 30 million new homes. Most of those homes will be singlefamily, detached units built beyond the edge of today's newest suburbs. And most of the families occupying those houses will be in and out of their cars at least ten times a day (Mitchell 50). Initially painting seems to face obvious challenges in dealing with contemporary landscape transformations, if only for the sheer speed and scale at which the transformations takes place. While photography, for example, can fall back on the genre of landscape photography to address suburbia, it would seem silly to attempt an analogous project in painting: 19th century landscape painting of suburbia? Liebich Figure 4: Prime Property I Figure 5: Prime Property II 16 Liebich 17 On second thought, however, I see advantages in painting. Abstraction allows me to get beneath the surface-appearance of the landscape. And while I'm not talking about the modernist project of accessing the sublime through pure form and such, I can speak more directly to the life-governing patterns free from specific references to the surface appearance of actual objects and places. In this way, I am also able to give up the idea of making a faithful photographic r~cord of what I see, while still offering an important perspective on the subject. The very physicality of painting, the methodical building of a painting through layers, allows me to use the materiality of the medium and my particular process to support and strengthen the presence of the surface image within the picture plane. The picture plane being square, I acknowledge the grid. As a cultured human being (and I'm not using this term in the sense of well-educated and mannered), I can only see through culture. This obstruction of vision finds expression in my paintings, largely through the form of the grid which I regard as a major element in our historical and contemporary cultural framework. The homes we live in, the streets we live on, the computer screens and windows we look through, everywhere we encounter the rectangled and straight-lined grid, which is entirely foreign to the organic world. Rectangular painting surfaces establish themselves as part of the grid and to organize a painting within that constraint is an act of surrendering to it, an act of accepting it as a cultural imprint on myself and my way of seeing. I feel thus that my paintings, though created by an organic being, exist as prisons of sorts within their frames of rectangularity. This I use as a means of representation. The rectangular framing of the landscape refers to the way we experience the landscape most often, on TV, framed in photographs, in movies, on the computer, or through Liebich 18 windows (especially car windows). When we see the landscape, we are usually not in it. We are watching, but not participating. Thus the landscape becomes an image with little difference of whether we are looking through a window at a "real" landscape or at a pictorial representation of a landscape. We are equally removed. With the exception of our eyes, all our senses are cut out of the experience. It may not be a far stretch to say that our position in relation to the landscape is also that of imprisonment. Our own imprisonment, however, is largely voluntary, and one might ask why we are so willing to remove ourselves from the land. The answers are close at hand. It may have something to do, not only with the technologies that allow us to live in cozy bubbles, but with the transformation of the landscape itself. James Howard Kunstler observes in his book The Geography of Nowhere that the road is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like no place in particular. ( 131) When I started to develop a visual language to talk about urban sprawl, I was primarily concerned with the land. ·What happens to the land when it gets covered up by development? How do I keep the land in the picture when the situation requires that I C (1) 0(') ::r' Figure 6: Prime Property III ...... \0 Liebich 20 obliterate it? What is the language of the land, and what is the language of progress? Eventually, I ended up re-contextualizing two alternate philosophies of the abstract language of modernism: Neo-Plasticism and Expressionism - the former embracing the optimistic modernist enthusiasm for progress and industrialization, while the latter emerges as a victim of such forces and vehemently opposes them. Piet Mondiran's 1919 Manifesto entitled "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" offers a glimpse of what sort of conviction drove early modernists: The life of the cultured person of today gradually turns away from natural things to become more and more an abstract life. With exterior things becoming more and more automatic, we see our vital attention concentrate more and more on interior things. The life of the really modem person is neither purely materialistic nor purely sentimental. Rather, it manifests itself as an autonomous life of a human mind, conscious of itself. [ ... ] The really modem artist feels consciously the abstraction in the experience of beauty, he recognizes that the sense of the beautiful is cosmic, universal. The corollary of this conscious recognition is the abstract plastic, the individual adhering to what is universal. [ ... ] It must find its expression in the abstraction from any form and color, that is, in the straight line and in the clearly defined primary color. While expressionists located their ultimate reality equally in the cosmic and universal, while they also shared the idea of the abiding value of aesthetic beauty, they generally rebuked culture and the positive idea of the cultured person. Clifford Still describes why he had to rid himself of all culture in order to access and express the ultimate real. "I Liebich 21 held it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which would aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and an idea be revealed with clarity" (593). Eventually both modes are based on the belief that the universal sublime is the primary reality and see the modernist enterprise (with all its tools and industry) as a means to dwell within that reality, the former collectively, the latter individually. In my paintings I use the language of abstraction, the language of the universal within the modernist milieu, to connect my subject matter with my painterly means of making meaning. Urban sprawl originated within the context of modernism, may be considered a continuation or exacerbation of modernism or at least the post-modem version of modernism, which logically follows modernism and is therefore implicated in modernism. So, I use the language of modernism. And subvert it. I'm using the signifiers of the transcendental and convert them into signifiers of the material. Thus the elements of abstraction become mere tropes in an allegory of land use/misuse. First of all, the grid is exposed. Everything in the picture either conforms to or acts out against the grid. Underlying the grid stretches the land. Ink-washes on paper, which allude to landscape, if only by alluding to Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings, such as Sesshu's "Splash Ink" paintings. In this regard, the landscape carries the connotation of the sublime manifested in the material as one might encounter in theories of the Tao. This being an older, more comprehensive spirituality than that expressed by Abstract Expressionists like Kline, Gottlieb, De Kooning or Motherwell, who all owe to the ink paintings of the East, it must still be acknowledged in its relation to Abstract Expressionism. The ink washes constitute the only element in the painting Liebich 22 that acts out against the grid. But they are being covered. A framing occurs. Whatever happens in the painting as a whole is enacted within the painting. A developer might leave an interesting landmark alone to drive up the lot prizes, and in so doing changes the landmark significantly by re-contextualizing, by framing it. The green rectangles, while lining up off the grid, merely create an alternate gird as suburbs, which aim to provide an alternative to the harsh grids of American cities, create a community blue print no less boring and ultimately grid-like. They also make reference to agricultural fields and pastures which often serve as perfect lots for cheap and efficient development, which will then turn them into standard lawns for every house. The houses, in cookie-cutter fashion, stand two-dimensionally in crowded uniformity. Their color allows associations with nostalgic terracotta bricks, but it's also dangerously close to the color of dried blood: cookie cutters leaving their imprints. The road, reminiscent of Barnett Newman, is a road. Unlike Newman's paintings, this rectangle is not a totality, it's a small part of a larger painting- and it's a stand-in for a road. No sublimity here. Or could the road and all the roads that it embodies be a different kind of sublime, or just a perversion of the sublime? Large blue squares above the horizon line. Pure color. Pure form. The sky appears above the houses almost as so many blue television screens or the cloudless blue backdrops in movies and postcards. Baby blue squares above the horizon. A fake sky. A lame symbol of a sky. My aim is to seduce the viewer with the aesthetic beauty, i.e., with the signifiers of the sublime - the ink washes, the composition of the elements, the colors and forms, the layering, the friction of grid and organics - only to let her discover the allegory of sprawl. I want the viewer to experience the friction between the language and its obvious Figure 7: Prime Property IV C Cl) g: (") ::i- N l;.) Liebich 24 Figure 8: Detail, Prime Property IV Liebich 25 subversion, as well as the friction between the aesthetic presentation and the subject matter. In all of this, I keep my language simple. And in spite of the crowdedness in parts of the picture, [ try to paint only as much as is necessary to communicate certain ideas, or to create a certain presence in the work. Nevertheless, I find it important that my paintings contain multitudes and that there is a sense that these multitudes extend beyond the edges of my painting. The multitudes allow me to use my medium to my advantage. My medium allows me to say something through my process that is otherwise not said in my paintings. It alludes to choice. While my paintings are not an indictment of urban sprawl or progress in general, they do state the fact that urban sprawl is happening and that there are consequences to that. By using the two opposing languages of modernism, NeoPlasticism saying, "This is great. It will make all ofus more spiritual people." And Expressionism saying, "It's terrible. Leave the suburb and break on through to the other side!" I am circumscribing the works ability to function as a critique. In this way, lam also involving the viewer in the construction of meaning. My assertion of choice sinks in when the viewer realizes that, while my paintings have elements that appear, at first, to be printed, I paint every green rectangle and every little house. When the viewer realizes that everything in my paintings is painted, it becomes obvious that it could have been done differently, more easily. And then the question arises, asking why I painted all those little houses when it could have been done much faster and easier, perhaps even better. It's a choice. And urban sprawl is also a choice. I don't know how, if or when people will, on a large scale, make different choices - when Liebich 26 riding a bicycle and living in the city might become choices people will actually make, even though cars are available and houses are cheaper in the suburbs. I realize that I'm not knocking the viewer over the head with the idea of choice, and I don't want to do that. I think my work would be pretentious were it to be more forceful in its assertion. I am a participant of this lifestyle. Although I have seen people live entirely different and less destructive lifestyles, I have not chosen them for myself. I do think, however, that within the parameters of our culture there are choices we can make that would drastically reduce impact. r ;· 0(") ::r Figure 9: Prime Property VI N --J Liebich 28 CHAPTERS LINES CUT DEEPLY Liebich 29 Figure 10: Prime Property VIJ, Stage I Figure 11: Prime Property VU, Stage 2 Liebich 30 Figure 12: Prime Property Vll, Stage 3 Figure 13: Prime Property VII, Stage 4 Liebich 31 Figure 14: Prime Property VTI, Stage 5 Figure 15: Prime Property VII, Stage 6 Liebich 32 Figure 16: Prime Property VTI, Stage 7 Figure 17: Prime Property VII, Stage 8 Liebich 33 Figure 18: Prime Property VII, Stage 9 Figure 19: Prime Property VU, Stage 10 Liebich 34 Figure 20: Prime Property Vll, Stage 11 Figure 21: Prime Property VlI, Stage 12 Liebich 35 Figure 22: Prime Property VII, Stage 13 Figure 23: Prime Property VII, Stage 14 Liebich 36 Figure 24: Prime Property VII, Stage 15 Figure 25: Prime Property VTI, Stage 16 Liebich 37 Figure 26: Prime Property VII, Stage 17 Figure 27: Prime Property VII, Stage 18 Liebich 38 Figure 28: Prime Property VII, Stage 19 Figure 29: Prime Property VII, Stage 20 Liebich 39 Figure 30: Prime Property VII, Stage 21 Figure 31: Prime Property VII, Stage 22 Liebich 40 Liebich 41 WORKS CITED Ginsberg, Allen. "A Supermarket in California." The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. New York: Norton, 1988. 1215. • Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Mitchell, John G. "Urban Sprawl." National Geographic Jul. 2001. Mondrian, Piet. http://www.noteaccess.com/ APROACHES/Mondrianl 7 .htm. 11/20/2006. O'Connor, Flannery. "A View of the Woods." Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. New York: Noonday Press, 1999. Still, Clyfford. "Clyfford Still (1904 - 1980) Letter to Gordon Smith." Art in Theory, 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 592 - 594.