Paint the Legend?
The True Stories of Jeff Lipschutz's Desert and the Myth of the American West

by Teri Tynes

“He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.... He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. “
- Walter Benjamin, 1932 

In spite of many reasonable arguments one could use to dissuade them, dreamers, exploiters, and runaways still pull up stakes and move to the American West. Even the West that is mostly desert, inexplicable from the outset as a welcoming site for human habitation, has continued to lure newcomers, drawn in successive waves to its rich natural resources or its dry heat. Las Vegas, for example, with its dizzying demographic explosion, underscores the ecologically precarious proposition of life in the desert for too many, and Los Angeles, with its distinct ecosystem, has lived with the same odds for much longer. Some survivors of Hurricane Katrina, uncomfortably relocated to desert communities in a national diaspora, awaken every day to the surrealism that is the de facto birthright of living in certain parts of the West. The entire region serves as a palimpsest for the regeneration of our shared national myths, but even its remote areas, or especially there, a blank piece of paper, or canvas, can inspire a particular or peculiar story that serves to illustrate the whole.

One town in the Mojave Desert of southern California, Eagle Mountain, can tell a story of the West, but Jeff Lipschutz, as its visual storyteller, has succeeded in illustrating the moral of the story as well as the lived experience. A site for Henry J. Kaiser’s iron ore mine operations, two miles outside the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park, connected by a private, Kaiser-owned rail link to the nearby Salton Sea, Eagle Mountain was not just a company town but everyone’s hometown who happened to be raised there. Its children, like Lipschutz, grew up with a shared value of conformity, one promulgated to all American children of the Cold War as a life most idealized visually in the televised suburbs. The children of the Mojave, however, experienced a different visual culture than the norm, not just a more beautiful setting of the sun but also graphic scenes of the dynamiting of nearby mountainsides. Still all of us take for granted that we’ll always have the hometown to which we can return, even if the passage of time and its attendant changes make the journey bittersweet. Eagle Mountain, the home of the artist, didn’t keep its promises, closing for business in 1982 when its corporate master Kaiser decided to explore more profitable opportunities elsewhere. Many of its residents, such as Lipschutz, grew up and moved on. But it’s tough to lose the chance to go back to the familiar, to find oneself instead in a Twilight Zone of exile, living with only the memory of a town.

Lipschutz, nevertheless, always circles back to Eagle Mountain, even in its entropy and decay. With its abandoned civic buildings and windswept ruins of industrialization, its visiting dog-coyote offspring and spectral garages, Eagle Mountain has served as the artist’s compulsive personal canvas, his invitation to commemorate and inscribe his presence there, making his mark alongside the left-behind graffiti and once-proud vernacular evidence of life. As an American hometown, Eagle Mountain, with its history of mining and proximity to desert military life (General Patton trained his troops less than twelve miles away for the invasion of North Africa) seems an absurdly uncomfortable paradise, a place that may be least visually resonant with the conventions of that idea. Yet for Lipschutz, Eagle Mountain, in its poetically tragicomic abandonment, continues to encode for him, as a painter, deep-rooted dualities of memory and forgetfulness, natural beauty and the waste of industry, promise and betrayal. Adding a deeper texture to the story, the artist’s own lineage, by way of his parents, reaches back into the great European tragedies of the twentieth century, with his mother’s lost shtetl of Chortkov in the Ukraine and his father’s Vilna, once called “the Jerusalem of Lithuania”. Lipschutz’s paintings quite strikingly illustrate, and in a surprising literal way, Walter Benjamin’s observations about approaching one’s own buried past.

Lipschutz has shown with his paintings an awareness of the myths but also the dualities of the western experience and perhaps the discovery of an original sin. The western genre that shaped the experience, first with the dime novels, then with the movies, and finally with the televised versions that dominated the early days of that medium, told a story of civilization against savagery. Civilization, with its railroads and school marms, always wins. But if the forces of civilization turn out to be the savages after all, profligate in their use of heavy metals, the imperial presence of steel and industry in the desert, then that tells a different western tale. The artist is of a generation inclined toward a revisionist history, and indeed scholarly treatments of the American West within the last thirty years have opted for a more tragic trope. With his canvases, Lipschutz is sending out counter-narrative existential postcards, projections of loss and desire, but they still retain a sense of humor necessary for such explorations.

A cineaste at heart, Lipschutz approaches the canvas with a film director’s eye, and indeed he has also filmed his archaeologist-as-artist homecomings in short films. His repertory of visual images - palm trees, a drainage pipe, family members, and the bubble trailer, among others - is analogous to the stable of actors employed by director John Ford. Framing shots, also Fordian, appear in work such as the painting Ciganka, with the artist’s wife peering out the window, Curtains, and Ghost Town. The large scale Desert Painter reveals the centrality of framing and fixing the gaze. 4 U Only, one of the artist’s most monumental works to date, is cast as a wide angle shot of the town’s empty outskirts against a badland’s backdrop, in exaggerated Cinemascope proportion. Eagle Mountain is Lipschutz’s Monument Valley. Several other works reveal more of an aesthetic kinship to montage practices of the early twentieth century European modernists.

An individual painting, unlike the phantasmagoric ephemeral nature of cinema, allows for a lingering contemplative vision, and Lipschutz’s canvases invite reflection and inquiry. The surrealism that many note in his work derives in part from the juxtaposition of man-made objects with the desert’s flora and fauna, the palms and peacocks, fragments and body parts, the effects again of montage. He renders the scene with an earthy palette of ochre, olive greens, and a variety of Philip Guston-like dirt pinks. These in turn meet a full spectrum of blues, teals, and aquamarine. In revising how one paints the Western landscape, the artist has defied compositional conventions by pushing up the horizon line, in many cases to the top of the canvas, so that we’re not allowed to see much sky. Nevertheless anyone who has spent time in the desert knows that the true thrill of being there comes not from what you see above the horizon line but in the mysteries underfoot, of stepping out, as if debarking from a lunar module, onto the desert floor.

With his landscapes, especially those of large boulder formations and of desert crossroads, Lipschutz joins company with the Post-Impressionists. The great rock sculptures that characterize this desert suggest comparisons to Paul Cezanne’s landscapes of Bidemus Quarry and of Mont Sainte-Victoire beyond, images that would in their time revolutionize the very nature of the picture plane. The Salton Sea is another world altogether, once a watering hole for the rich, but now in its discarded state a playground for a rich assortment of birds. With Tempest, Salton Sea, amidst a rusting geothermal tank and a curved drainpipe, two pelicans cross beaks while others rest in repose, gaze at the azure sea or take flight. As with much of his work, Lipschutz establishes a rhythm among his live species and inanimate objects, a subtle invisible inference about their relationships.

The shimmering white crossroads of Devil’s Highway, however, open up new rich arteries for the artist to explore. El Camino del Diablo, an historic route traveled from Sonora, Mexico to Spanish settlements in California, confounded most of its quixotic travelers, many of whom gave up hope and perished before completing the journey. The phrase “devil’s highway” is used mostly as metaphor, as with Lipschutz’s paintings, to conjure a site of hope in the face of adversity. With the first highway painting, the faint worn tentative path appears almost like a flattened ghost. Like cartoon books with only the first colors filled in, El Grito, along with its compadres Desert Crosser (Sobreviviente) and Cerdo y Oso (Pig and Bear), construct the area not as a journey from east to west but as a southern passage to El Norte. The title, El Grito, refers to the word “cry,” both the Spanish word assigned to Edvard Munch’s Scream and to the cry of independence, celebrated with a Mexican fiesta each September 16. The smiling figure looms over a plywood road sign in the shape of Wisconsin, marked with Munch’s figure, destinations, and the barbed-wire border, testimony to the increasing presence of immigrants from the south, even headed toward the frozen tundra.

With Angel of Security, Waters of Babylon, and War and Romance, Lipschutz has tapped into another historical strain of his preternatural homeland. Now that the generals of the military industrial complex are set loose again, Eagle Mountain and its environs becomes the metaphorical staging ground for this new desert warfare, joining the remembered explosions outside the classroom window and of Patton’s ghost, with the onrush of military steel toward the Middle East.

Though historian Frederick Jackson Turner, from the vantage point of his classroom in Madison, pulled the curtain on the western dream over a century ago, with his declaration of the end of frontier, the natural beauty and social richness of the desert still beckons to Jeff Lipschutz for new possibilities inherent with each homecoming.

 

Teri Tynes is a writer and critic specializing in contemporary visual culture. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of South Carolina.