Fly Over Art And the Work of Chad Wys

Garage Sale Painting of Peasants with Color Bars, paint on found painting and frame; Chad Wys

For the last few weeks I have been deeply enjoying the work of fly over art, a gorgeous tumblr page that with each day brings a new contemporary artist working in that stretch of the continent between Ohio and Nebraska, Missouri and Minnesota. 

The site is also searchable by region, which can make some interesting interdisciplinary connections -- as we included Mark Brautigam's photography with yesterday's piece on the fiction of Jack Driscoll. Though the majority of the work on their page emerges from the larger urban areas within this region, rural work is represented; regardless, many of these midwestern cities are themselves populated by a rural diaspora, so the rural-urban binary yet again does not hold together.

Here's fly over art's mission statement:

fly over art features the work of artists who are either originally from or primarily based in the Midwestern United States.

We are always looking for new artists.  If you are interested in submitting your art please send 5-7 jpeg images of your work to flyoverart00@gmail.com and use “submission” as your subject.  Please also include a link to your website along with your birth city/state and/or primary location.  We can’t guarantee all submissions will be posted, but we do appreciate your involvement.

The image above, Garage Sale Painting of Peasants with Color Bars, takes on a new life in the context of fly over art's project. Chad Wys is an artist currently living in Normal, Illinois, and his work is striking: it's engaged in a number of aesthetic and critical ideas, but also has a sense of humor and (as can be rare in this kind of work) a sense of cultural perspective. It is always dangerous to impose ideas of place on a body of work, but, as with Daughn Gibson's music, there's a kind of clarity here, and a deeper critical turn, suggested by travel through a particular space -- that distance and horizontal sweep of Central Illinois. The artist's complication of pastoral forms seems to also comment on those qualities.

Please find below the opening paragraph to Chad Wys artist statement. The artist's tumblr page is available here, and a recent interview here:

I was born in Illinois in 1983 and I continue to live there today.  Despite always having had the urge to grab a crayon or a camera, I'm something of an apprehensive artist.  It has taken time for me to grow comfortable with sharing my work with others.  As my voice has grown stronger, with ideas and critiques, I have found the prospect of sharing experiences through art quite advantageous.  Incidentally, many of the conversations in my own work are about art itself.  What does art mean to me?  What purpose does it serve in my life and in the lives of other folks?  What are the "boundaries" of the art experience?  Are there any?

Course On Midwest Culture: The Paradox of Heartland Rock

Photograph from the insert to the Bruce Springsteen & E-Street Band Live 1975-1985 LP box set

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture editor

Last week in the New York Times, David Brooks cited Bruce Springsteen’s vast international appeal as evidence for “the tremendous power of particularity” -- place being one of the most vivid of these particulars. 



Along with more Midwestern-based acts like Seger and Mellencamp, Springsteen took up the mantle of Skynyrd and CCR (and, of course, the many older musicians from America’s folk tradition) and re-channeled myth away from the south and into America’s “heartland.” He crafted what Brooks calls a “paracosm,” a little mental landscape of sorts that guides our actions and thoughts.


But here’s the rub: if Springsteen was an artist of particular place known for capturing the zeitgeist of the modern “Heartland,” why does no one quite know the geographical location of this heartland?

 Though Springsteen himself would surely have acknowledged the power of place, the reality is that he was a New Jersey boy and his music’s mythical place was flexible enough to accommodate Mellencamp from the Hoosier State, Segar from Detroit Rock City, Tom Petty from Florida, and the Iron City Houserockers. Deeming such a group “Heartland Rock” reveals both the loose boundaries of the term “Heartland” and the Midwest’s paradoxical identity as an everyman, embodying only the traits that transcend the quixotic oddities of particular places. A Midwesterner is more American than Midwestern, at least in mythic identity.



Likewise, an explanation for the vast international appeal of “Heartland Rock” lies in its name. The myth of the heartland is not particular to the Midwest. More so, it is perhaps the oldest and most universal of tropes: a romantic fall from (an often pastoral) innocence. Adam and Eve pine for their lost garden. Milton’s Satan does the same. Doctor Frankenstein regrets ever leaving the peaceful Swiss Alps. Springsteen sings lamentations on the death of his hometown:


Herein lies the tensions of regionalism. We love art that vividly captures the color of particular place, but art forfeits its title if local color fails to capture human universals. This is why the rural is a fundamental part of Midwest identity and why pastoral myths will remain popular. This is why John Mellencamp can sing “Pink Houses” to a sold-out crowd for the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois in the midst of the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s:

Human history inevitably leads to Frankensteins and Rust Belts. We balance these Falls with our need for a mythic, pure landscape still untainted by the human imagination and its history.

Course On Midwest Culture: Ray Bradbury, RIP



By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

Perhaps tied with Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury may be my longest-running literary friend. His leatherbound anthology was on my nightstand for the past few months and I'd just read "The Last Night of the World," oddly enough.



His works initially sucked me in as a grade schooler on the mere creativity of their fantasy premises: incessant Venusian rains that could wash the pigments from one’s skin, a murderous hi-tech house, robot clones who fell in love with their masters’ wives. For a kid who liked comic books, the stuff was as golden as Martian eyes and apples of the sun. This initial luster was all LA and Hollywood--wizbang scifi ideas.



I kept returning to Bradbury, however, because the psychological depth of the stories grew with me. He was in that deeply-introspective American literary tradition of Hawthorne which I would grow to love.



And I return today to Bradbury to claim but a small piece of his Hollywood legacy for the Midwest. One obituary briefly deemed Bradbury’s work colored with “Midwest populism”--not taking the time to explain what exactly that could mean--and many others refer to him as a “Midwest surrealist,” mostly based upon his trilogy of bildungsromans based in his hometown of Waukegon, Illinois: Dandelion Wine (‘57), Something Wicked This Way Comes (‘62), and Farewell Summer (‘06).



Bradbury’s status as a Midwesterner--more accurately a dual-citizenship with LA--seems safe to me based on these three novels alone. Even more, though, this Midwestern-ness spills into his other works.



Growing older, I discovered in Bradbury’s short stories echoes of that Midwestern opus, Winesburg, Ohio. They weren’t just deeply, Protestantly introspective--Faulkner too grew out of Hawthorne in that respect. They were laconic, more restrained (or repressed) than violent. The extraordinary sci-fi premises of Bradbury’s stories--the Hollywood--were always captured in the plainest of prose and set in motion with rather ordinary characters and their rather ordinary, quiet struggles. Bradbury’s Anns, Toms, and Susans were bourgeois, heartland vanilla. Moderate. Normal. Nice. But amazing stories lay just beyond their heartland propriety.



The Illustrated Man and his interlocutor are representative. 

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky...

    ...He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he spoke his first words:


    “Do you know where I can find a job?”


    “I’m afraid not,” I said.


    “I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,” he said.


    Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.


    “Well,” he said at least, “this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do you mind company?” 


    “I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,” I said


    He sat down heavily, grunting. “You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,” he said. “Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking. Here it is, early September, the cream of the Labor Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist at any small town side show celebration, but here I am with no prospects.”


    He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. “I usually keep a job about ten days. Then something happens and they fire me. By now every carnival in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”


    “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.


    For answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. He slipped his fingers in to feel his chest. “funny,” he said, eyes still shut. “You can’t feel them but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they’ll be gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days, baking, and hope that my sweat’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still there.” He turned his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. “Are they still there now?”


    After a long while I exhaled. “Yes,” I said, “They’re still there.

    The Illustrations.

..   

   ...“How long have you been Illustrated?”


    “In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It laid me up, I had to do something to keep my hand in, so I decided to get tattooed.”


    “But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?”


    “She went back to the future,” he said. “I mean it. She was an old woman in a little house in the middle of Wisconsin here somewhere not far from this place. A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years old the next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know better.”

    …“So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts.”

    …I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent, and the pictures were beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted to get out and away from such babbling. But the Illustrations...I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person would go a little mad with such things upon his body.


    The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the distant ravines. I lay with my body sidewise so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed. Whether the Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him whisper, “They’re moving, aren’t they?”


    I waited a minute.


    Then I said, “Yes.”

••••••••••

POST-SCRIPT + PREVIEW: With the wonderful response on AOTR’s facebook page, I’ve decided to include this “PS+Preview” at the end of every post. Here I’ll look for your response to the current post and input on the post to come—to keep this experiment as democratic as possible.

PS: Is Bradbury more Hollywood or more Midwest?

Preview: My next post will risk boredom by looking for secondary rather than primary sources on the Midwest. Are any of you involved in some form of “Midwest Studies” (publications, conferences, societies, etc)? Does such a field formally exist? Do you have any favorite secondary publications on the culture of the region?

Introducing A Course On Midwest Culture

Steam Coming Off The Grain Bins, Outside Sioux Center, Iowa; Kenyon Gradert

Art of the Rural is excited to announce A Course On Midwest Culture, a new series that promises to apply a wide interdisciplinary lens to a region of the country often relegated to reductive myths and cliches. 

With this, we are also pleased to welcome Kenyon Gradert to our staff. Kenyon is a doctoral student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis with primary research interests in religion and philosophy, romanticism, and nineteenth-century American literature. He was raised on a third-generation grain and cattle farm in northwest Iowa. His father and younger brother continue to live in this region and work as cropdusters.

Kenyon will curate the Course on Midwest Culture series, a project that seeks to utilize new media to find a common ground between the discussions that occur within the Academy and those that take place everyday in the American Midwest. His introduction to this effort begins below.

••••••••••

The Midwest holds a complicated spot in American cultural thought. While it has competing claims to both blasé “flyover” and that core of American moral fiber, the “Heartland,” other regions encroach upon its cultural capital. The South seems to have a monopoly on popular rurality and the East coast keeps old-school cosmopolitanism tucked in its pocket, never mind the lake cities’ key role in our industrial revolution, the historical centrality of St. Louis and Chicago in the 19th-century, and the rather straightforward fact that the Midwest today has almost twice as many farmers as the South.

Culturally, the Midwest may seem nothing more than that quaint vacuum between New York and LA without even the literary charm of the south. Indeed, some may think “Midwest culture” the height of oxymoron.

But the region has been home to significant literary endeavor--and long before the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Someday I’d like to use this literature to form a college course that challenges presumptions and assaults (im)pieties both within and towards the Midwest, a place that is neither quaint Georgic pastoral nor vacuous meth ghetto. Perhaps a bit of both, with much in between.

A Course on Midwest Culture will be a recurring series, a syllabus in the making, if you will. I’ll post a brief excerpt of a possible primary text along with my own brief observations and arguments for why such a text should be in such a course. 

Like the internet itself, this cultural studies project will be interdisciplinary. Mosaic-like, I may use a post on Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw” to examine the rural complications of Marxist thought, meanwhile providing web links to Johnny Carson’s Public Service Announcement for the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s, a University of Missouri sociological study on rural versus urban poverty, or even John Mellencamp’s first Farm Aid show on the University of Illinois-Champaign campus.


Most importantly, I’ll look for your feedback. 

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that this project demonstrates the necessity of such a course offering, which I might teach at some point in my time as a doctoral student. Thus, with your help, this series becomes an experiment in a more democratic course-construction. 

Professors most often go to other professors via listservs to determine course material. Why not let Midwesterners outside of the academy help?