Rewind: John A. Schweitzer
Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
In a new collage series entitled Fresh Kills: XXIV Elegies, John A. Schweitzer introduces notes of lyricism into a far-reaching meditation on contemporary catastrophe. The theme of the series is the historical turning point of September 11, 2001. The artist contemplates the aftermath of the tragedy and explores sociological and psychological reverberations of the destruction of the World Trade Center. A trail of allusions, ranging from the easily decoded to the cryptic, tracks the aftermath of 9/11 as it plays out internationally and in the United States.
Schweitzer's intertextual strategy combines visual clues and textual elements. Material and textual fragments achieve conceptual expressiveness in the series. Schweitzer speaks of "interinanimating" elements. In the intertextual collage, even the title is an appropriated fragment. The series is thus an open work allowing multiple readings.
The title Fresh Kills epitomizes Schweitzer's intertextual method. He invests the geographical name with overwhelming semiotic importance. The ideal viewer of this series should be a discriminating reader of textual markers. On an initial level of chromatic interpretation, the spectator may appreciate the contrast of saturated reds, blues and greens and the aggressive traces of black as colour markers of tragedy. The interplay of rectangles, squares and circles with Bauhaus overtones is equally notable. On a second level of interpretation, the series title becomes an important referent. Fresh Kills designates a Staten Island landfill in an area formerly referred to as kuylls, meaning "valley" in Dutch. In fact, New York was originally a colony named New Amsterdam. Six months before tragedy struck, Fresh Kills was closed as a landfill. Yet it was reopened after 9/11 as a forensic site for wreckage containing nearly atomized remains of human bodies.
Individual collage frames are called "elegies," or "songs of lamentation for the dead," in a translation from ancient Greek. Yet elegies are also nostalgic, plaintive poems. In Fresh Kills, the elegiac mode becomes tragic and emphatic, maintaining Schweitzer's keynote contrapuntal mode. References to cherished New York shopping, hints of erotic experiences and pages of the New York Times, venerable metronome of historical time, abound in the 24 collages. Adopting a meditative stance, Schweitzer uses collage to survey the sequels of tragedy over a two-year time span. A pictorial rendition of tower collapse is largely absent from the works.
Successive frames include referents such as the numeric figure zero (as Ground Zero), the American flag, the cover of a book written by former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and a paper grid symbolizing complex world politics. In the last frame, two burning candles may represent hope with religious overtones.
The artistic vision, including non-linear time referents and the presence of elements allowing multiple conceptual links, relates the series to the philosophical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze. Schweitzer's narrative is clearly postmodern, non-linear, circumscribed by a range of signs. In analogy to the symphonic mode, colours move from clashes of primaries to contrasting half-tones, evoking the shift from the major mode—tragedy—to the minor mode—the aftermath.
Spring 2004
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