Review

The Oregonian
Friday, August 26, 1994

Art shows decay of west myth
By David Sorsoli

From wild animals fighting over takeout food in the city to ghost towns where mobile missile launchers stalked the dusty streets, Michael Lindenmeyer explores the periphery of civilization and its leftovers.

In his series, “Critters/Western Town” at the Multnomah Art Center, artist Lindenmeyer documents the animals that live off the garbage of our culture.

A seagull eyes choice fish heads on the dock. A parrot, escaped to live the good life, watches the entrance to a roadhouse tavern illuminated by a sign’s tacky neon glow. Racoons, like two bandits, scrounge through trash cans for food. In these works, the word “corruption” hangs in the air like smog.

In “Varmit’s Den” a skunk pokes its way through old newspapers on a beach where condos and combers face each other across a well trodden expanse of sand. But this is not Disney and it’s not a flower the skunk finds, but an empty pack of Camels and a drink cup. Scattered here and there are human bones and newspapers, and in the empty blue glow of the city night, an owl watches from a crumbling barrier.

At stake here are our own ideas of the inherent nobility of animals. Perhaps we believe that animals would rather die than eat leftover macaroni salad or rummage through garbage for morsels of fast food, but they wouldn’t.

Many animals are scavengers and they have turned their talents to scavenging, not from each other, but from us. On an epic scale Lindenmeyer documents this new age of the wild animal in “Red Moon,” where snarling, slavering coyotes fight and howl over what clearly are the remains of takeout food. A red moon hangs impossibly low and huge, while skyscrapers rise up out of the fog like some giant and bizarre forest. Behind the coyotes lies the junkyard backdrop of barbed wire on an oil field.

Done mostly with pastels on black paper, these drawings seem like sick-and-twisted fairy tales. By focusing the work around one dominant color, Lindenmeyer conveys a feeling of fantasy or vision in the juxtaposition of wild animals in these cityscapes.

Combining disparate elements with high emotional content can also effectively revitalize imagery that has been too thoroughly explored before, and Lindenmeyer does this in his Western Town series.

We, the inheritors of the pioneer vision of free land and gold, of manifest destiny, and of just plain greed, have gotten used to the sagging barns, the crumbling shacks and the rotting farmhouses that pepper our landscapes. We’ve gotten used to the idea of ghost towns and old mines left to tumbleweed and the torpor of abandonment. Mythologized in movies and on TV, the Western goldrush town evokes an instant Kodak-induced rush of sentimentality. Landmarks of another age, such images are so fraught with nostalgia and cliché that most artists wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole.

Lindenmeyer bravely explores these leftover vistas of the West, in the hues of a post-atomic sunset or a Hollywood ending gone bad: opposing colors such as yellow and purple, pink and green. But instead of trying to capture the Old West like an amateur photographer, he interjects the effects of the modern world.

Above the collapsing house and dirt road leading to an old trailer and shack, jet fighters fly in a yellow and purple sky in “Shakedown Street.” Rambling through a ramshackle collection of Western facades, a Soviet missile launcher rolls through town a century after the last gunfight in “Scudscape.” No one’s left to try to save the town or even care, although it has become the focus for new war games.

Clearly, Lindenmeyer is fascinated with the intrusion of modern reality onto our myths of the West, of the folklore surrounding the remnants of the “pioneer spirit.”

In “Nevermore” the impression of a rustic brick room gives way under scrutiny. It’s a neon cactus in the window, after all, and the view isn’t chaparral but the lights of freeway traffic at night. There is nostalgia here, too. The sadness over lost dreams.

As in the arid “West of Mule Creek” where early surveyors decided that all Arizona needed was less heat and more water, we realize that the wonderful idea that progress will solve all society’s ills is flawed. We are shown what progress has brought us and what it has cost.

Lindenmeyer greets the grandiose dreams of the West, the great plans for the future, with a hard eye for the price paid. These are not just ghosts that have gone away somewhere, to love only in memory. The towns and buildings still exist and so do the animals, albeit distorted. He sees the corruption of our myths of the Wild West and of wild animals in terms of what our world has become rather than what we thought it was.