Since
the advent of John Guare’s marvelous play “Six Degrees
of Separation,” it is impossible to deal with combination of
seemingly unrelated personalities without making some play on this
famous title. How is it possible, the questioner might ask, for one
person to relate so closely to a group of other’s without literally
sharing their space, if not their actual lives? As the playwright
Guare would have it, it is all-possible through that chicanery that
is art, art that makes people, spaces, and worlds collide. I began
thinking in these terms when contemplating some words on the art of
Ed McGowin. Was the artist not someone who I had known for almost
twenty years? Were his art works, some of which I own, not the product
of an individual who carried the name of Ed McGowin? Or had I been
defrauded, quite adroitly, both in my friendship and connoisseurship
by one shrewd cookie? As I was to learn, neither was the case.
Beginning
in September of 1970, Ed McGowin initiated his Name Change project
which was to culminate two years later in a body of screen prints,
site-specific installations, and multiple objects that was to be shown
in an exhibition of the same name at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Seen as a creation of its time, the complete Name Change project easily
fits midst the serial manifestations of artists such as Sol Lewitt,
Hannah Wilke, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, and Eleanor Antin. And yet,
it is probably in the company of the only Antin and Nauman that spiritually,
McGowin’s output comfortably fits. Only in these three artists’
works does one find the proper admixture of story telling both horrific
and humorous that properly fits the Grand Guigniol that is the American
Myth. Only real blood and guts Americans can be comfortable with the
devious and boring elements of a seriously diaristic, soap opera mode;
Europeans, even Marcel Proust turn it into grand opera, and that is
something else all together. McGowin further sets himself apart from
the other members of this quasi-theatrical trio in that he has seen
fit to work not only in various investigatory modes but in the person
of different sleuths as well.
At
this point one might be tempted to classify McGowin with the psycho-analytical
diagnosis of a being with multiple personality disorder recalling
the nineteen-fifties melodrama of The Three Faces of Eve. Yet that
clinical analysis falls apart quickly. In a classic case of multiple
personalities, the various persons can at times remain totally unawares
of one another, only to jump out of hiding at certain catalytic moments
which generally result in the complete collapse of the individual
who has, thus far, kept they glued together. McGowin always knew who
his various artistic characters were and when they should and would
emerge, especially so in the case of Nathan Ellis McDuff, once appeared,
did his job as the time dissembler and then was gone. Or in Ed McGowin’s
own words “is dead,” nevermore to appear. ‘Why?’…Simply
because his job was done, time could once again return to its regular
pace, logic could return, life could go on. But who then were Alvah
Isaiah Fost, Lawrence Steven Orlean, Irby Benjamin Roy, Eure Ignatius
Everpure, Isaac Noel Anderson, Nicholas Gergory, Nazaianzen, Ingram
Andrew Young, Melvill Douglas O’Connor. Edward Everett Updike,
Thorton Modestus Dossett, and even Ed McGowin? Each legally verified
and registered by law, but only one, registered at birth.
Ed
McGowin tells the tale of his process of creating, becoming different
people-different artists, to belie the traditional, modernist notion
that creativity is linear and ever progressive, never regressive.
I believe that he believes this version in all of its seventies-conceptualized
sterility. For me, it is simply too clean. I know that something else
is and was going on here. Perhaps, something, that is even too bred-in-the
bone, for him to see.
As
he constructed the ever-so-delicious anagrams with which he would
be re-christened, he was thinking of the efficacy of each and every
personality. He must have posed a number of questions: Would or could
each and every one of them have the tools to do the job, understand
the syntax and grammar of the realm in which he would be forced to
navigate? Could he cut through the troubled waters and make it to
safe harbor, and bring the ship home? More simply put, if each personality
had a style, what purpose did the style serve? Which style could best
tell the story, make the point, or evoke the dogma with the strongest
possible force? And like a master tennis player, which stroke, whether
of the brush or the racket, would finish off the game. Was it Orlean
the raconteur? Or Roy, the bizarre poet who conflated fact and fiction?
Or Young, the ironic absurdist
who is the most innately Southern? Or Updike, whose dog pictures lash
out when all of the other voices are too angry and frustrated, and
have become too impotent to act?
Maybe,
not so surprisingly, Dossett and McGowin, are the ineluctable Siamese
twins. They stand at the forefront most of the time. Maybe, that is
because neither of these too artists are anagrams but rather, to various
degrees, are denizens of the same land, the American South, a land
riven for the past hundred years by two stories, both sad, both debilitating.
One story is that of the Black South, of a nation degraded, debased,
and almost destroyed. The other is the story of the White South, the
ruling oligarchy, which even while in power began its demise and,
once the real demise had come during the Reconstruction, finally fell
again crossly the Black South yet again. Both Dossett and McGowin
know these stories - both of them. They live them still. They tell
the stories again and again, because no one will believe them. Or
worse, people forget. The story must be told again, in another voice.
And
there, I am firmly in the realm of voices. And finally it comes to
me: Pentecost! The story in The New Testament, Acts of the Apostles
II: As the story goes, “In the days following the Ascension
of Jesus, the apostles and disciples, feared for their lives as the
early Christians were persecuted and killed. There was no one to lead
them. Then one night as they cowered in the upper room, perhaps the
same upper room of Maundy Thursday, the Holy Spirit appeared to the
collected believers and placed flaming tongues of fire above each
and every head. And soon they were speaking in many tongues. And soon
they left the upper room, enabled by these new voices, they could
now travel the world, spread the message, and yet, tell the same story,
different voices for different rooms.
And
there it is. Like those apostles, speaking in strange tongues, the
eleven voices conjoined in the benevolent person of Ed McGowin are
present to be called upon, when a new listener, a new realm is being
approached. I know that is why each one of Ed McGowin’s art
works carry such clear and resonant message, they each speak through
the key, the gesture, the tone, and the style that never let them
fall one deaf ears. Not a Tower of Babel, but a coherent chorus of
numinous strength and beauty, singing a song that must ever be sung.
Will the final version, the final canto, the last verse ever be made,
probably not, but it may come closest in the Delta Project that Ed
McGowin has for so long wished to complete. And when it happens, its
message like the Tongues of Pentecost will ring out clear and beautiful.
Thomas Sokolowski
July 2006
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