Looking Forward to Ruin
Circle Drawings
Housing Generations I, II and III
Kyger Creek Middle
Muñecos
Ruin Series
Exhibited in full:
“Looking Forward to Ruin,” Trisolini Gallery, Athens, Ohio
This town is no Mayberry, no Celebration, no latter-day Green Acres. This town has no public square, no small but genteel neo-Classical court house, no dignified statuary, no plaques commemorating Civil War dead. Its history does not include spectacular coal mining disasters or civil rights unrest or now-famous author who plumbed its placid surface to discover primal tensions.
In truth, it is not even what has been come to be thought of as Anytown, USA with its ubiquitous traffic chute streets lined with fast food chains, gas stations and Wal-Marts.
What this town has, besides a well-equipped bait and tackle store and a pizza restaurant willing to expand the menu to include a daily special of pinto beans and ham, is the largest coal fired power plant in North America.
This power plant is no Standard Oil or United Steel Company. In fact, as the area’s largest newspaper likes to report, this power plant hires around 380 people in a region of very high unemployment and pays around seven million dollars in property taxes. It pays standard wages and hosts picnics, and at lunch men pour into the locally franchised Marathon station to buy BLT’s wrapped in plastic.
We sat outside the Marathon station at a picnic table and noted, that day, the sky was very blue. Across and slightly east of us two 830-foot towers belched out two perfectly cottony cumulous clouds, a mix of sulfur trioxide, nitrogen oxide and other fine particles. Leaving town I noticed one detail that sets it apart from other nearby towns – poster board signs declaring in spray paint ‘Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast,’ and ‘Quit Preying on our Kids.’
We come around again, this time with disposable cameras. We photograph houses, attend a few garage sales and sit by the river, watching enormous coal barges, combustible islands, float down the dividing line between West Virginia and Ohio.
We agree, today, we don’t really feel like talking to anyone, both of us a little depressed. The one distinguishable character of this place, it seems, the one element of the sublime, is the unperturbed puffs from the two towers, adding their chemical loads to an already-rich atmosphere.
Later that night we watch a local report on the town that manages to capture, in title, both the grandiosity and vague emptiness of the issue entitled Clouds of Concern. Twin journalist riff on clichéd roles: uncaring corporation and concerned citizens. At what must have been the exact half of the program the journalist bait and switch and the roles become responsible, job-bringing industry versus hysterical hand-wringing citizens.
The economic anthropologist Michael Taussig states that our notion of time, space, even what constitutes our idea of human nature is as much social products as farming tools, monuments and textiles. But because we are active participants in these constructions they begin to appear immutable, natural. We become unconscious of our own culture’s central myths. This transformation of socially created myth into fact robs us of our critical abilities.
Taussig’s well-known analysis of pre-capitalism communities in Columbia, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, also takes him into the research of munecos, little fetish dolls, a response from a society unused to free market conditions such as wage inequalities and unmitigated competition that pits individuals and communities against one another.
This plant supplies enough electricity to power 2.6 million homes. This is a population equivalent to Arkansas or Kansas. This electricity lights up our night sky in a blaze of 100-watt bulbs, fluorescent tubes, and incandescent fixtures. This electricity creates sound-fields made up of canned laughter and bursts of gun-fire from the TV, the reassuring blast of furnaces, the hum of refrigerators, toasters, and hair-dryers. Somewhere, indeed everywhere, a printer spits out another term paper, an electric garage door slides open to admit another car, and a vacuum cleaner takes another swipe over a carpeted living room floor.
These are our articles of faith.
