Between Past and Present:
Personal and Collective Memory in the works of Jeff Lipschutz
by Tracey Fugami
Some experiences, art especially, you don’t forget because you feel you’ve lived them yourself, or even created them. – Jeff Lipschutz 1
Rebecca Caine’s essay on Christian Boltanski’s performance installations from the 1991 exhibition, “Places with a Past; New Site Specific Art,” draws a connection to memory as neither a precise presentation of an elapsed experience nor an entirely contemporary recreation. The author points out that a gap exists between experiencing and remembering a particular event, providing an opportunity for “artistic creativity.” She states:
In constantly questioning memory, we then hover in the in between, neither the true and exact presentation of a past event, nor an entirely contemporary reinvention. Memories are inextricably tied to the past yet cannot be articulated, viewed or shown without contemporary re-contextualization. Filtered through the present, they are what [Andreas] Huyssen calls a ‘Re-presentation’: problematic restored events or behaviors. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than lamenting it or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity.2
Caine’s observation of recollection and its temporal and alterable place in the psyche poignantly illustrate Boltanski’s underlying principles. Caine’s conclusion about the “fissure” between encountering an event and recollection is not only visible in the work of Boltanski but other artists such as Shimon Attie, which encourage a sensitivity to site, remembrance, and displacement. In “Lure of the Local,” Lucy Lippard mentions briefly that when a clan of people is dislocated geographically and culturally that memory replaces an official history. Lippard uses the example of Chicano art and its strength in a kind of “alternative historical memory” based on familial and spiritual imagery.3 Although less factual, this form of recall is as powerful as one which is derived from using text and other recordable methods. In the work of Jeff Lipschutz, many of these elements combust and come alive. Lived and remembered experiences are presented in realistic and dreamlike imagery. The continuous narrative that runs through his paintings springs from his childhood experiences and grows into a collective consciousness of all those who lived in Eagle Mountain.
Lipschutz grew up in one of the most isolated outposts of the Mojave Desert. Eagle Mountain, his hometown, began as a mining camp owned and operated by Kaiser Steel. The artist and his family arrived in 1954 and became part of the community’s first 500 people. His was the only Jewish family in a close-knit community populated almost exclusively by Southern Baptists. Eagle Mountain was void of police, restaurants, clothing or liquor stores. The flyspeck mecca of Indio, where the artist vacationed as a child, was sixty miles away. In 1982, the town was abandoned. Within a year, all citizens were moved out, and the sprawling, open-pit mining operation closed. 660 houses, and the small number of public spaces that existed, were transformed into empty shells. The artist speaks of leaving, and later visiting Eagle Mountain as “traveling through time... to a different civilization entirely.” The recollection of Eagle Mountain and the ghost town it has become animates his gritty and raw terrains.
Lipschutz uses a combination of site-specific and recollected imagery within his paintings. The artist often employs a photograph to guide the composition, but never accurately recreates the image entirely. In “Blind Man’s Bluff,” the desert and the figures that occupy these spaces are depicted in a rough representational style with recollected suggestions. The semi-aerial viewpoint on the pool is juxtaposed with an expansive background creating a photographic and imagined perspective. The palm branch jutting from the pool’s mouth and other elements represented, may or may not have been part of the original scene. The muted shades aptly describe the sun-bleached concrete, yet the pool’s stairs and shape of the structure seem invented from recall and a formal preference. Many elements in the painting seem grounded in realism, yet the viewpoint and loose style of painting hint at a dreamlike view conveying a realistic and remembered experience.
Another component in Lipschutz’s work is the mnemonic sentiment toward a site’s history, which is illustrated in “Blind Man’s Bluff” and “Curtains” by depicting what has been left behind. In “Curtains,” a vacant theatre is littered with garbage. The orchestra pit is in disarray and the curtains appear rustled from a wind offstage. The interior is unkempt and vacant. The debris left behind alludes to the people who at one point occupied the space. The theatre and the community are remembered by its remnants as opposed to what the town had accomplished or achieved.
For Lipschutz, his experience lies at the heart of the memory. The writer Orvar Lofgren discusses a collective way we process experiences that closely applies to Lipschutz’s paintings. The writer mentions that although we have experiences privately, we disclose them through a “representational” form. Lofgren notes,
Experiences always take place, but in ways that combine the realities of both the grounds we are treading and the mental images present. We neither have nor can be given experiences. We make them in a highly personal way of taking in impressions, but in this process we use a great deal of established and shared cultural knowledge and frames. And yet, we share experiences only through representations and expressions.4
Lofgren points out that memories are voiced through representations and expressions. This idea is often illustrated in the form of public art, such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam monument and the proposed World Trade Center site. While Lipschutz’s does not memorialize, he addresses the topic of “shared cultural knowledge” and experience by asserting symbols and meaning that illustrate this concept. In “Cerdo y Oso,” Winnie the Pooh and Piglet are depicted on the back of a billboard. The Spanish text reads, “Ta Ta for now, don’t forget your balloon.” The Spanish word for balloon, globo, also means globe. The artist says, “the words suggest we are not to forget our world, when we set off along the Devil’s Highway.”5 The depiction is of Pooh and Piglet walking into a distance with their backs to the viewer, the expansive desert scenery behind, while the text references current Mexican immigration across the southern U.S. border, by foot. A sentiment towards this group consciousness is subtle, but a powerful statement that links to his experience as a migrant to Eagle Mountain.
These are canvases that elegantly highlight the fracture that exists between a lived experience and a remembered incident. Amidst vast desert scenes, the artist asks us to consider memory as a culmination of the recollected and recreated. Lipschutz’s depictions of desolate places and disregarded sites constitute a distinctive voice in American landscape art, revealing a sentiment of loss without nostalgia. His perspective on landscape imagery is original, and his paintings express a deep sensitivity to place and memory.
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Tracey Fugami is the Assistant Director at Davidson Contemporary in Seattle, Washington. She has previously worked for the Whitney Museum and The Drawing Center in New York and currently contributes to Art Papers, Sculpture Review, and Afterimage.
1. Jeff Lipschutz, Author interview with the artist, February 2006
2. Rebecca Caine, “Christian Boltanski: Representation and the Performance of Memory,” Afterimage, July-August 2004, p. 10
3. Lucy Lippard, “Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society,” In Mothballs, New York, New York, The New Press, 1997, p. 102
4. Ovar Lofgren, “On Holiday: A History of Vacationing,” Berkeley, Calif.; University of California Press, 1999, p. 95
5. Jeff Lipschutz, Author interview with the artist, February 2006