The Real America

Last Saturday, I sat in a country bar listening to a man tell his
life story. A Hank Williams song played, and the man sipped on a Busch
and said he’d lived in Lake Tahoe; Louisville, Kentucky; West Palm
Beach; Los Angeles; and Ellensburg, Washington. The place he finally
settled is a few miles outside Ellensburg, in the Kittitas Valley, in
Thorp, a town of a few hundred people, where this bar is based. The
floor is coated lightly in peanut shells and sawdust, Bob
Ross–style paintings of mountains and rivers hang on the wall,
candles burn inside glass mason jars, and there’s a deer head above the
bar and a (fake) fire burning beneath it.

Yet outside this room is Seattle, not Thorp, specifically the
eastern edge of Pioneer Square, which is studded with art galleries.
Justin Colt Beckman, the man who lived in all of those places and
finally settled in Thorp, built this bar himself, transplanting a
little of his chosen hometown to the city. Beckman is one of the
artists who run the gallery PUNCH, and he has transformed the urban
white cube into a functioning honky tonk for the duration of his
exhibition there this month.

When people come in, they often think the art show is what’s on the
walls. They don’t know that they’re in it, part of it, already. Some
discover that if they ask Beckman for a Busch, he’ll go behind the bar
and give them one. Beckman is not only the barman, he’s also the
“performer” on the bar’s stage: Curtains frame a life-sized video of
him wearing the hat, shirt, jeans, and boots of a country singer,
strumming a guitar and lip-synching to the country songs playing on the
speakers. Cowboy is a role he has down, all the way to the good-ol’-boy
crooked smile, and that more caricaturish version of Beckman contrasts
with the Beckman sitting there chatting with customers. (His presence
is not officially part of the installation—he just happened to be
minding the gallery when I was there—but ideally it would
be.)

People tell Beckman, understandably, that his art reminds them of
the 1960s trompe l’oeil sculptor Ed Kienholz. His acknowledged
influences also include Wynne Greenwood’s video “band” Tracy + the
Plastics, Phil Collins’s karaoke installation, and Pipilotti Rist’s
vampy 1990 music video You Called Me Jacky. The tone of
Beckman’s work is warm, open, and friendly, more Greenwood than Rist.
It relaxes things, keeps them from getting too meta.

After all, people may not be getting Busch from a real barman, but
it’s real Busch; they may not be sitting on benches in a real bar, but
they’re sitting on real benches and talking to strangers with drinks in
their hands. The day I’m there, I’m joined by a homeless woman named
Cynthia, an older man named Gary, and a middle-aged man who doesn’t
give his name but shares that Ellensburg once had the nation’s highest
number of bars per capita and now holds that title for coffee stands.
“Sedatives to stimulants,” he says. Beckman does not labor to bring the
conversation back to the fact that we’re in an art installation.

Beckman is not the only youngish (he’s 36) artist to move to Thorp
and show at PUNCH, but his work most consistently explores the
rural-urban overlap. He feels that as a person he represents the
opposite, a cultural no-man’s land; he isn’t a Seattleite, and he isn’t
from of one of the families who have lived in Thorp for generations.
His art brings the two together without the disingenuousness of
hipsters wearing trucker hats or new restaurants hanging dead animals
on the walls and serving ironic-chic dishes like wild-boar sloppy joes.
He’s neither here nor there. It’s apt that he rehearsed his video
performance in the literal space between—by singing in the car on
his commute between Thorp and Seattle.

Beckman’s Honky Tonk is comfortable in Seattle, and Seattle
in it, which raises larger questions than whether this is a city boy
bringing bumpkinness around to be ogled and mocked (which it clearly
isn’t). Have American cities simply evolved to become more rural?
People are tearing out their lawns to grow food; there’s talk of
extending farmers markets year-round; the DIY movement is another
version of old-stock self-reliance; used-clothing stores and
home-salvage stores are like communal hand-me-down systems for a large,
thrifty, self-contained family. When I posed this on The
Stranger‘s blog, Slog, a commenter wrote, “if artistes live there,
thorp ain’t country.” You tell it, Sarah Palin. The only “real” America
is the one that defies stereotype, and the stereotypes are not so much
actual places as obsessively tended facades. Shoreline artist Grant
Barnhart—neighborhood matters in this discussion—has
devoted a new body of work to those powerful, frightening facades and
their toxic residue, which leaves red, white, and blue stains on
certain of his canvases, underlying his imagery.

Football players, fireworks, eagles, cowboys, roadside motel signs,
cheerleaders, rodeos, and beauty-pageant winners all share space in his
carefully composed visual traffic jams. His leveling of the symbolic
field calls to mind Lari Pittman’s finely calibrated cacophonies.
Barnhart, 30, who is from Topeka, Kansas, and went to art school in
Columbus, Ohio, layers the aspirations of abstract expressionist
gestures—the old pathos of drips and stains, which here becomes a
kind of nostalgia—under the garish rituals and sign-symbols of
country pop. He monumentalizes the nightmares and fantasies of the
hinterlands in urban terms, in crowded neon images using colors that
look anything but natural.

When he’s painting the complex machinery of motorcycles or
orchestrating an entire web of imagery using the lines on a football
field as a compositional grid, Barnhart is on sure footing. He seems
less sure of his own intentions when it comes to the construction of
human faces. It’s not that he isn’t technically adept. It’s that he
doesn’t seem to know quite how to position these people and their
subjectivities. The most successful have the blankness of expression
you see in racist mammy dolls; the faces are not connected to a spirit
inside their bodies, but instead have been self-consciously constructed
from without, like people striving to live up to stereotypes—the
football player, the cheerleader, the cowboy. Barnhart’s more
realistic-looking faces are expressionless in a more banal way.

Most of Barnhart’s work is not specific to any time and place, but
he sure can nail a particular moment. The four-by-five-foot painting
Dream Catcher is a portrait of the hard hit by Chuck Bednarik
(whited-out, celebrating) that
knocked Frank Gifford out cold in a
1960 Eagles-Giants NFL game. It was a hit that changed both of their
lives, and Barnhart paints it as a spiritual moment, a moment when
something is transferred between bodies, an out-of-body situation
physicalized in paint, that fleshy medium. (It reminds me of The

Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio.)

It’s perfect that the drum line from Garfield High School
accompanied the opening night of this exhibition of luscious American
portraits. The players and their crowd spilled out onto the Ballard
street in a loud celebration—not of any athletic triumph this
time but of the
winningness of the paintings themselves.