Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy in suburbia sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.
I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Picturing Suburbia.
Duncan Crary(in interview): Jim, I’ve heard from a lot of our listeners who imagine that we’re in a studio. We’re actually in your home office.
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it’s sort of like a studio. It’s a professional place where good things happen.
Duncan Crary: If I can describe to some of the listeners, hanging on the wall are paintings of a burnt-out car, a somewhat dilapidated streetscape, and a car on a sort of a country highway…you know cars on the road—very beautiful paintings of cars on the road.
James Howard Kunstler: That’s not all that’s in here, but…
Duncan Crary: Well I’m selectively picking them out, but I think people might be surprised to know that you spend a lot of time painting the American landscape, which includes a lot of paintings of parking lots and McDonald’s and Mobile stations. When I first learned that you are a painter and I saw some of your paintings, I was really surprised at the subjects that you chose to paint.
James Howard Kunstler: Well maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve really painted my whole life. I went to a special school in New York City called the High School of Music and Art where we received a fair amount of decent training. It wasn’t fabulous. It was OK. It’s something I’ve carried on in the background of my life forever and I take it seriously. I do get out a lot. I’m what’s called sort of a sur la motif painter. I go out to the motif with my French easel — it speaks French. It’s a box that unfolds into an easel and I’m out there with the subject matter in the field. I’m interested in the landscape of our time and the landscape of our time is mostly about the highway.
Van Gogh painted the peasants sleeping next to the haystacks because he was in a landscape that was populated with human beings. I’m in a landscape that’s populated mostly by automobile, so I paint them.
Edward Hopper did something similar. Although we look at Hopper’s paintings today –his paintings from the 1920s and the ’30s when he was doing a lot of his highway stuff -– and we recognize that as a landscape that is now bygone because the scale of it is smaller and it all seems kind of quaint. It’s not as overwhelming as what we’ve got. But I’m very interested in it.
Now, there’s some additional things about it that people who haven’t tried this might not know. It is very hard to see what you’re looking at out there on a commercial highway strip with all the contesting signage and all the sort of visual clutter. So it becomes a great challenge to be able to make it legible and that’s one of the things that I like about painting the highway strip.
I also got really interested, as I was going out there, in the contrast between the natural light and the artificial light, especially at sundown.
So I would go out and set my easel up, let’s say in the juniper shrub bed of the Burger King, painting the K-Mart a quarter of a mile away with the sun going down in a certain way. So that the lovely kind of violet and purple and pink and orange and salmon-colored clouds would be contrasted to the bright primary colors of the electric signage and stuff. I found that kind of interesting and sometimes, it’s beautiful although it shouldn’t be construed as a reason to promote suburban sprawl. It’s out there, it’s what we’re living in. It’s not going to be there the way it is now in 50 years. And people will look back on these paintings, if they survive, people will see a landscape that looks different from what they’re living in.
Duncan Crary: When I first heard that you’re a painter, I assumed your paintings were going to be sarcastic — I knew that you were painting about these topics — but they’re not.
James Howard Kunstler: No, they’re not ironic at all. I’m not trying to make a joke about it. I’m literally trying to be a straightforward reporter of the landscape of our time and its many moods.
I do like to paint in the evening. I like to paint at night. I found one particular strip mall nearby where the supermarket had a particular lighting scheme under the soffit. It allowed me to see the colors of my palette and the canvas very clearly while the rest of the stuff around was sort of dark. You could paint the McDonald’s in the dark and still see what you’re doing and that was a great boon to me.
I also found a lot of satisfaction in the industrial ruins that are all over this area of the Upper Hudson Valley. In fact, in the time that I’ve lived here over the last 30 years, a lot of the factories have been bulldozed so that I was able to actually witness the process of demolition.
Duncan Crary: I just bought a book called Hudson Valley Ruins and it’s an excellent book that goes up and down the Hudson Valley, sort of giving you the history of all of these ruins, many of them are industrial. But here’s the little nugget I like: The Hudson River School of Painters, sort of America’s first formal “school” of painting, these artists were lamenting in their day that they didn’t have any ruins to paint.
James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and the figures in that period–Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church and all those guys–would go through this initiation rite of traveling all the way to Italy and painting the ruins there as young men. They’d stay for a year or two or three and they’d make their bones by painting the ruins of Rome. Then they’d come back to America and what they finally settled on was the idea that — OK, we don’t have ruins here but we do have this wonderful romantic natural landscape. Let’s make that our subject matter.
So that became the subject matter of 19th century American landscape painting in the absence of having ruins and it became a kind of a fetish.
The situation is different today. We have a lot of ruins out there. And when I go out there, I feel very privileged like I feel like Thomas Cole might have felt on the Roman Campania, painting the disintegrating aqueducts of the Roman Empire. I go out to Clarks Mills by the Hudson River and I paint the ruins of the wallpaper factory that are there and it’s sort of thrilling. It’s also a thrilling place to be physically because it’s a place of nebulous ownership.
The Georgia-Pacific company actually owns the site but there’s nobody there guarding it anymore. They’ve given up guarding it. The fences have big holes in it now so you can get in there. It’s become a kind of a strange natural park that has no supervision. But there hasn’t been a whole lot misbehavior there yet because it’s really in sort of a country place.
So it’s thrilling to be out there alone with an easel by the river. It’s starting to get populated, too. There are people who are going through the fence and fishing along the river. So finally there’s some human figures out there.
Duncan Crary: Speaking of Thomas Cole, one of the paintings series you mentioned in The Geography of Nowhere is…
James Howard Kunstler: The Course of Empire.
Duncan Crary: Tell us a little bit about that painting series and how it influenced you.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, I don’t know that it did influence me. I certainly appreciated it, although I haven’t done anything remotely like it.
Well, Thomas Cole, the great American landscape painter, was interested in painting series of things. He did one called The Voyage of Life, which I think was a four-panel series in which a young baby starts out in a river in a basket like Moses, floating along a river. And then he becomes a young man fighting the gales and storms of life. And finally as an old man he’s delivered into some quiet eddy where he will be born to Heaven by the angels.
He has another called The Course of Empire which depicts in, I think, five panels, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, really, although it’s never stated — going from the pastoral phase to the big buildings being built up, and finally the climax of it is this huge pageant that’s going on and this gigantic kind of amphitheater on the water. It’s like a harbor but there seems to be some great spectacle of empire going on.
Somebody has just returned from a remote land with giraffes and elephants and being born on litters and all this stuff. And then we get a little further and there’s nobody there anymore and the buildings are disintegrating and there’s some kind of war that’s taken place. It’s left a lot of damage. And then finally, the utter desolation of the ruins hundreds of years later.
Duncan Crary: You can identify…there’s like a hill in the background in every painting so you can kind of tell…
James Howard Kunstler: All the canvases are done from a similar perspective. I don’t think they’re absolutely identical but very similar. And, yeah, there’s a landmark in the background and it’s quite a tour de force of paintings.
Duncan Crary: Well, the funny thing is that if I were to come up with a more recent example of the same thing, I would think of Robert Crumb’s A Short History of America. You know that cartoon series?
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, it’s a fabulous thing, showing the development of a little country road into a small town into the beginning of the automobile age and all of a sudden the small town starts to fall apart and finally it ends up in like the 1980s as a Pizza Hut or a convenience store, surrounded by all this crap of technology: the horrible broken signage and the telephone poles and the condensers and the electric installations and the trucks and just all the crap out there.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. But that’s not exactly what your paintings are like, though. Are you interested in exploring that area a little bit more?
James Howard Kunstler: Well like I said, I don’t really have an ironic attitude about it.
Duncan Crary: You think Crumb was being ironic?
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely. Well, in the sense that it seemed to be remarkably straightforward reportage of what was going on there. In fact, in that movie with Crumb, they show him drawing that kind of scene and he’s sitting there saying, “You can’t make this stuff up. You have to really pay attention to the details.”
Duncan Crary: As soon as he said that, and this is the documentary, I think it’s called Crumb.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.
Duncan Crary: I think he mentions something about how once you start paying attention to transformers in the air and all the wires, it just ruins it. That’s all you can focus on. And that happened to me for months, that was all I could focus on. There’s so much of that crap up there that you just ignore.
James Howard Kunstler: Well, there is! And when I’m out there painting that stuff, I edit some of it out. But I leave a lot of it in. If you tried to put it all in, two things would happen: it would become as visually illegible as it actually is, and you would drive yourself crazy.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. So Jim, out there in the field, painting, you had some encounters. Right? Isn’t there some story of you painting a Burger King?
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I was doing one of my paintings at a Burger King and the manager guy came out, this young man with a 23-hair mustache came out and said, “That ain’t allowed here!” And I wanted to mess with him a little bit so I said, “What? What ain’t?” And he said, “That there!” I said, “What?” He said, “You know! What you’re doing there!” I said, “Painting’s not allowed, huh?”
So finally we went through this for a while and I thought the situation was so ridiculous that I really wanted to have fun with him so I finally said, “Look. It’s fine with me if you go call the sheriff and he can arrest me for painting at Burger King on their property. I’m sure that’ll be great public relations for your company. Because I’ll make sure that lots of people know about it. And it’ll be real cool.”
Duncan Crary: Do you know if that actually did happen, it’d probably make the Associated Press wire.
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, absolutely.
Duncan Crary: And you’d probably sell that painting for three hundred grand.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah. Dude. I should have encouraged him. I should have actually been more provocative because then I would have made more money on the painting.
Duncan Crary: Well Jim, thanks a lot for talking with us about your paintings.
James Howard Kunstler: Well thank you for being here.
Listener Caller: Hey guys. This is Ben Lowe from San Francisco. You guys mentioned in your last show that schools look a lot like prisons, I think, at one point. And it actually reminded me that my high school was designed by the same architectural firm that designed the prison in my hometown where I grew up. It was explained to me that the school architects were chosen because the idea was industrial-style throughput. That schools were pretty much student factories and to have students there and sort of crank them out just the same way that prisons process prisoners.
So it made sense to hire an architect who had experience dealing with the same type of crowd. So, as a result, my high school looked like a medium-security prison. So it’s really not a surprise when you end up with the same results when your goals are the same going in. Thanks for your great show, and I can’t wait to hear the next episode.
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Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll-free at 866-924-9499.
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I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.
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