The East Pit, or Why a Westerner Bothers

by Frank Lewis

The western’s trail has grown cold, or would have, were it not for its persistent sense of bother. My visits to my hometown remain frequent. The beauty of the East Pit’s two-mile diameter and two-fifths-mile-deep strip-mine hole looms over the former community. Its undulating terraces spin down toward the earth’s core, and up, like Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, toward the heavens. – Jeff Lipschutz

Lipschutz retains the romantic’s urge to wed form and meaning. The desire in his style and longing in his subject matter allow for neither cool irony nor detached calculation. He is seeking a sense of identity and place informed by memory and recorded by an ardent touch. His paintings insist on the physical with bursts of energetic slathers and the missteps of erasure and scumbling. It is as if he has picked up each object and turned it in his hand, exposing a caked-on patina, punching it back into a shape that is found as much in recollection as in its present physicality. Undoubtedly there is pleasure in the process alone. The resultant spectacle: bravura painting, a near manic rendering, and an often cinematic space would probably be enough; but beyond the surface is an equally complex elegy dedicated to recovery, recuperation, and genuine affection.

The artist reclaims the Mohave desert of both his childhood and of the return trips he has made in middle age. The now abandoned and fenced off mining town of Eagle Mountain is a recalled image of a once verdant swimming pool and the present void of its remains, cracked and baking in the sun. They are not contradictory but rather, logical, complementary markers of time and entropy, diachronic fullness and emptiness. The town of Lipschutz’s boyhood is now devoid of inhabitants but the artist still sees it occupied by the desire to establish a place and put down roots, as part of a continuing and optimistic manifest destiny; yet he simultaneously recognizes the hubris of such confident conquest and control. The reality of parched wooden dwellings, burned out and empty garages and shops, and failing fences, only represents another sequence of renewal and dishabille. The desert will find its equilibrium; the opportunist and the jobless may have left but families and individuals will hold on to memories. Present day visitors find the shells of homes and dwellings, coexisting with the snakes and sage. Returning inhabitants, such as Lipschutz, may find themselves and further they may also find something of who we are as Americans.

Time cannot be painted but one can depict broken walls and the shells of campers, remnants of time’s march. The act of perceiving, equally, does not lend itself to picturing; but the energetic build-up of layers of paint and the insistent contour of an emphatically drawn line can suggest the process of seeing, focusing and fixing a phenomenon. Seeing and remembering overlap, but does their combination corrupt reality or produce it? Influences play in and out. Chaim Soutine, as much an ethnic homage as model, is found in league with the later Philip Guston and the bright impasto of early Diebenkorn and Olivera. Southwestern light and the darkness of Eastern European shtetls vie for prominence. The ramshackle buildings of Eagle Mountain and the heaps of schist and slag remind one of Robert Smithson and his Non Sites, and the now lost “Partially Buried Shed,” from 1970. Graffiti and sensitive passages of paint collide and then merge. In the later work bravura charcoal drawing and thick congealed swipes of oil paint share the canvas, competing and complementing, offering a take on the subject matter that allows for both the contingent and the absolute.

A large panorama, “4 U Only,” is fragmented by time and the literal fissures of canvases pieced together. Unlike the cycloramas of the 19th century, which it initially brings to mind, “4 U Only” memorializes the quotidian, an empty arena or parking lot echoing the vast expanse of the west, mocking an attempt to rein it in. An abandoned camper, a pick-up truck, and half of a trailer truncated by the segmented canvas, the other half unrepresented in the adjoining panel, become isolated moments in time as if the sections were painted on different trips to the site. Each object has a distinct and solid presence, though all are surrounded by a boundary which next week, or next year may give way to the incessant sand and the relentless abrasion of time and the failure of sheet metal and aluminum. And borders and fences are made permeable not only by time and disrepair but by the failure of a business or a social policy and a depletion of natural resources, energies, and dreams. Graffiti, “U.S. out of El Salvador,” “Bob and Lucille,” and Hebrew characters echo the disjuncture of sentiment, location, and moment that haunts the scene. Though a composite of different times and places the site somehow still rings true. The handling is sure. Like the graffiti painted on the fence, Lipschutz’s stroke affirms a human presence. He fixes himself and his perceptions as much as he records the rocks and mesas in the distance.

Those unfamiliar with the dessert might expect a near monochromatic palette of ochre and oxides and certainly those close hues would be accepted in an image recording waste and desolation, yet Lipschutz’s colors are rich, complicated mixes of the entire spectrum. These chromatic contrasts lend a shimmer and brilliance, yet one that avoids the happy sparkle of impressionism.

“Curtains” depicts an abandoned theater, where Friday night fantasies were played out for hardworking families on the west’s final frontier, these peripheral and liminal spaces already marginalized even as they were filled with tract houses and swimming pools. What dreams and myths were acted out here by school children eager to believe or Hollywood actors already dissipated by the emptiness of the charade? The squalid curtains reveal the now empty stage and a dilapidated AV cart. The illusion is exposed and the once active house of fantasy echoes with the dry scraping of sagebrush across the littered floor.

Lipschutz flirts heavily with the idea of a drama, acted out on a stage. Even in his on-site studies of the natural phenomena of the desert, we see the author, arranging line and color, translating perception and affection into an object – a painting. When these small studies are redone on a larger scale, they are clearly reenactments and reinterpretations. And the lessons learned in painting a cactus-bordered trail are applied to a simple still-life of an apple, which later becomes a metaphor for New York haunted by an angel of the Apocalypse. A sign with a caricature of a Mexican bracero seen at a border town mini-mart becomes as iconically charged as the lilies in 15th century Netherlandish altarpieces. The oftentimes careful and affectionate picturing of mining shacks, the tired residue of an industry long absent, echoes the present day squalor of border towns and the innumerable third world settlements which many of us overlook. For instance, “Garden of Eden” at first seems an ironic take on the notion of paradise. Yet this little ranchito bordered by train tracks and drainage culverts is rendered with empathy and even longing. The artist suggests that we all find “our little plot” of peace in a world rife with pollutions and disarray. All of our dreams and desires are enacted from a script of behaviors that has been handed to us and that we have amended.

“Ghost Town” presents a landscape framed by a window. The frame, a darkened interior of another abandoned building, or possibly a chalkboard, is covered in graffiti, the residue of past occupants and teenage vandals. But we see a chalk-like drawing of the artist among the tags and political slogans as if all mark making is a way to insert ourselves into time and space. Levels and categories of representation, high and low art share this space of imagination and speaking. In “El Grito” a worn and peeling billboard combines advertising caricature and an image of Munch’s “Scream,” borrowed, according to the artist, from a book seen in a Milwaukee Mexican bodega. The billboard seems to have weathered and cracked into a map of Wisconsin, though marked with a variety of locations, including Guadalajara, Tucson, Los Angeles, and Oshkosh. In another painting, “Cerdo y Oso (Pig and Bear),” the same sign seen from the rear shows Pooh and Piglet walking away from the viewer. Fragments of Spanish text issue from an unseen Tigger sending off his amigos: “Goodbye for now, and do not forget your world.” Fantasy children’s characters become immigrants crossing the border, reminding one another to not forget their past, but they become our childhood voices as well, admonishing us to not forget our past and our place. We are all migrants, simplified and not always flattering caricatures of far more complex genealogies, histories, longings, dreams, and desires than we can express.

The works are about memory and thought, the way that an idea or a point in a conversation is able to generate another related though distant connection. The plight of Mexicans crossing the border recalls memories and stories of his own Eastern European family arriving in the U.S. The desert of California and our failure to possess and contain it remind the artist of more recent acts of imperialism and failure in deserts far from Eagle Mountain. The shell of an abandoned trailer sits next to a tank. Legal and illegal immigrants do not stay in border towns but rather migrate to Los Angeles, Eagle Mountain, and Oshkosh, their Diaspora another wave of the “American Dream.”

Yet these ruminations on the apparently cyclical nature of dreams and failure are not heavy handed screeds. The energy of the mark making and nods to a kind of comic caricature and informality is a wry observation, poignant and slightly bewildered. What new bogeyman will replace the Jew, the Mexican, the Arab? What will the little man behind Oz’s curtain, speaking of progress, freedom, the marketplace, and democracy, choose next to distract us from his pillage and spoil?

Lipschutz is a wanderer, a traveler through space and time. In his paintings we feel the bounce and rattle of pick-up trucks with rounded fenders, and fabric upholstery that smells of dust, cigarettes, and maybe dog, and our vision out the window is like a hand-held camera shifting, jerky, unfixed in both the horizontal and vertical plane. He takes us to places far from the interstates protected by walls of fast food restaurants and Super Eight Motels, places a bit farther down the road to nowhere than destination-specific travelers ever go. Yet these are sites we might remember, through experience or images glimpsed in a newspaper, that small bit of the third world at the edge of almost every decaying American city, a slice of desert from an old western movie, or last night’s newscast.

We all have our Eagle Mountain, our own panoramas cut apart by time, pieced together by memory and the seasonal return to places always in flux. They may be blasted, incomplete, and abandoned or renovated and reclaimed. They haunt us as they sustain us, and like a photograph from the family album, with each viewing they seem to shift into other places fresh in memory, yet unfixed in space and time. Jeff Lipschutz paints from his own journeys but they are trips we have all made.

Frank C. Lewis is the Director of Exhibitions and Curator of the Collections at the Wriston Art Galleries, Lawrence University.