The late Studs Terkel, an American author, had the amazing ability to extract histories from people. He acted as a conduit for rich history to flow through, unabated by conventional media filters. Through Terkel we saw a different America, one overflowing with humility, honesty, misery and unbridled joy. It was an America that we all could identify with. The newest exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, ""Apple Pie: Symbols of Americana,"" engages this same America largely via the Midwest.
This mixed-media show is comprised entirely of art from the MMoCA's vast permanent collection. The works combine to give us myriad looks at the Midwestern identity by pivoting around a heterogeneous image of America. Be it robust and innocent or aversively unpleasant, ""Apple Pie"" strives to assemble our history from the byproducts of Chicago's great urban expansion and a heightened sense of isolation.
""Apple Pie"" gives us a disparate, fragmented America. This hide-nothing juxtaposition colors America an interesting shade of quixotic. The pastoral side is buoyed by Grant Wood's iterations on Monet's ""Haystacks"" series and Robert Frank's rather inviting photographs. Larry Clark's photo-portraits of strung-out, shiner-sporting solitaries staring across the gallery at the heroic laymen featured in a set of lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton. The suggestiveness of Benton's drawings is twofold: The pictures' tight, frame-wary arrangements allow for reproduction in magazines and books, while their regionalist content hints at an array of narratives, however mythical.
Indeed, historical memory and its tenuous relation to the cultivation of images is one of the most salient themes of ""Apple Pie."" John Steuart Curry's reimagination of Madison pushes us through this state of fractured identity into a place of unconventional histories. Madison sits completely ethereal and autumnal from Curry's vantage point on top of a hill that doesn't exist outside the painting, calling into question the way we deal with (and often accept) historical revisionism.
What makes Curry's imaginary Madison more seductive than the actual Madison that we see every day? If Curry's images seem especially engaging, it's because they pulse with visual detail despite their fictitiousness and ostensible straightforwardness. After all, it's much easier to find something hidden and true within a material image than within a mental image. However, this tendency is almost immediately challenged by Marsden Hartley's ""Trees and Mountains,"" which is a landscape as seen through the eyes of a sausage grinder.
""Apple Pie"" deals with our own incidental history, leaving foreign conflicts for another exhibit. This focus on daily events lends the show a sense of intimacy. The segregation gag in Elloit Erwitt's ""Cats and Dogs, Alabama, U.S.A."" is as quintessentially American as... well, apple pie. Fred Stonehouse's paintings use popular iconography and sneaky textures to indict the U.S. for a host of familiar sins (readers of the late Howard Zinn will know the score).
""Apple Pie"" is not without its exaggerations of the American identity. The latter half of the exhibit is dedicated to a larger-than-life America. It advances a caricature that we can't quite reconcile with the rest of the images we've seen up until this point. Mark Mulhern's colored graphite drawings are hilarious, symbolically loaded and irresistibly crude; his ""untitled (punch)"" goes after capitalist society without resorting to naturalist pity-partying.
Roger Brown's ""Mountain Sites"" is both a playful jab at white-collar America and a deceptively hallucinogenic riff on American landscape painting, yielding a composition with any number of possible centers.
William Weege's screenprints flaunt an acute interest in the strange intersection of genitalia and nationalism, similar to the style of Robert Rauschenberg. Several works explicitly link the honky-tonk sensibility to a masculine strain of sexuality. Rejections of frontier romanticism are present throughout, though even the richest works in this vein—like T.L. Solien's ""Man on Island,"" whose interplay of figure and symbol recalls Joan Miró—don't kick much dust in the spectator's eyes.
""Apple Pie"" proves that critiquing and celebrating American history is the task of the artist as well as the historian. As the opportunity to see such an eclectic mix of American artists engaging with the soil beneath their boots is invaluable.
