Avoiding
the picturesque entirely, Julie Bozzi creates American landscape paintings that
portray the antiheroic. The artist works sitting in her car, usually at dusk,
looking through the windshield at her chosen site. Her process is echoed in the
format of her paintings, which depict narrow stretches of land that, although
anonymous on many levels, have a distinct familiarity as American places. The
seemingly natural locations she depicts are actually man-made, utilitarian
spaces often designed to act as sight or sound barriers on the sides of
highways or on the edges of cities and suburbs. Because the titles of these
works occasionally name the site depicted, such as Periphery of Botanic
Garden (From Remote Parking Lot), 2001, the place can be pinpointed by anyone who knows the
area. However, the artist’s intense treatment of each location puts it in an
entirely new light. In fact, there is an undercurrent of anxiety that keeps
Bozzi’s scenes from being benign. These are “outskirts”— the pockets of land
where you find the empty six-pack. This is where people go who are themselves
on the fringe.
Bozzi
acknowledges the mythic aspect of Texas and its influences on her imagery. She
is particularly drawn to the ominous sides of the myth: the infamous grassy
knoll in Dallas linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin that deranged
Vietnam veteran Charles Whitman climbed in order to gun down innocent victims,
the roadside field on the outskirts of Denton where the notorious serial killer
Henry Lee Lucas dumped the body of his girlfriend, the prairie field near Waco
where the Branch Davidian standoff ended in flames. These events occurred in
various nondescript patches of land in Texas, any of which could be the subject
for Bozzi’s landscapes, making the works disturbing in that we suspect what
might be present, even when it remains concealed.
Considering
the foreboding, isolating nature of a Bozzi landscape, it is not surprising
that one of her favorite American painters is Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917),
recognized for his enigmatic pastoral scenes and imaginative, poetic personal
vision. Ryder looked to the Romantic poets and authors for inspiration, Byron,
Keats, and Poe among them, to create highly symbolic works, including nocturnal
seascapes, romantic landscapes, and literary subjects. His unorthodox work ran
counter to the masculine transcendental Hudson River School painters, and for
his unique style and subject matter, he was revered among the early modernist
painters of the twentieth century. Although he often depicts figures within the
landscape—in works such as Death on a Pale Horse
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, c. 1896–1908, one of his most
important—it is again not surprising that one of Bozzi’s favorite paintings of
his, Weir’s Orchard,
1885–90 (figure 4) is a brooding, unpopulated scene. Like her works,
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>it displays a simplification of
form and an atmosphere imbued with mystery.
Bozzi’s
imagery also represents an eccentric synthesis of postwar portrayals of the
American landscape. With progress, westward expansion, and a shift from
agricultural to industrial development at the turn of the century, landscape
painting evolved from projecting “the promised land” to mirroring a changing
nation. Rejecting the romantic grandeur of their predecessors, the early
twentieth-century Ashcan School created politically charged urban scenes with
an imagery that acknowledged social problems. Artists involved with the Ashcan
School, such as Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, and John Sloan, depicted, much
to the distaste of their critics, scenes such as the alleyways and slums of
inner-city dwellings. In the 1930s and 1940s, nationalism resurfaced with the
Regionalists, among them Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart
Benton, who celebrated the American lifestyle by depicting rural scenes in a
concise manner. Bozzi, with her use of urban sites that can appear rural, might
be seen as creating gentler versions of these two extremes. However, more than
the Ashcan School or the Regionalists, Bozzi’s work pays homage to the
influential American painter Edward Hopper, who was painting at the same time
as Benton and the Regionalists, but operated on the opposite end of the
landscape spectrum.
Hopper
painted the so-called “American scene,” but rather than being nationalistic,
his works are personal and charged with a psychological impact, often conveying
loneliness and the vacuity of city life. In his “Notes on Painting,” Hopper
writes, “The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.
In general it can be said that a nation’s art is greatest when it most reflects
the character of its people.”
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Bozzi’s work indicates that she, like Hopper, acknowledges a darkness within
the American character. Her imagery also relates to Hopper’s in terms of
composition, often presenting a horizontal, highly representational space with
nearly flat masses of color. Her Nondescript Border of Mixed Varieties of
Trees, a gouache
from 1993, for example, depicts a stacked view of a road and trees. From the
foreground to the background, the picture frankly describes a narrow strip of
asphalt, grass, a row of trees, and a still blue sky with a few scattered
clouds. When compared to a late Hopper entitled Road and Trees
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, 1962, the visual similarities,
choice of subject matter, and atmosphere come together to create a clear
lineage from the older to the younger artist. Bozzi’s work is extremely scaled
down and condensed, but both artists depict a straightforward, sober American
landscape without epic markers or glorifications.
While
typical landscape paintings invite the viewer in along diagonals receding into
space, Bozzi’s compositions are invariably frontal. The illusion of space is
created almost entirely through overlapping. In many cases, a barrier such as a
wall, hedgerow, fence, or road makes up a significant part of the composition,
denying easy access to the space beyond. In this way, her landscapes reflect
the acute objectivity of her own time. As she matured as an artist in the
1970s, Minimalism was in full force, and Bozzi was clearly influenced by
elements within the movement, applying some of its characteristics to
representational objects. Her non-hierarchical compositions, stripped-down
colors, and the frontality of her pictorial field relate specifically to
Minimalist sculpture. An early work, Immature Tomato Field and Mt. Diablo,
Davis, California,
1977, clearly exemplifies this format. Bozzi uses a frontal composition
(without perspective points to create depth) with bands of color moving from
front to back to describe a green tomato field as seen from the side of the
road. This type of format and treatment of the landscape has developed into her
conscious and permanent style.
Bozzi’s
close-cropped imagery also signifies her interest in and involvement with
photography, perhaps most clearly relating to a new wave of photographers who
emerged in the 1970s in the wake of Minimalist strategies, summarized within
the movement known as New Topographics.
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This group of artists depicted a landscape severely drained of romance,
nostalgia, and heroism, creating works with a reverse sensibility of the
landscape photographers who came before them, such as Timothy O’Sullivan and
Ansel Adams, who, like the early landscape painters, exalted the American West
in their imagery.
Robert
Adams, considered part of the New Topographic movement, used photography to
record an unflinching look at man’s impact on the land. A mobile home park, a
row of cookie-cutter houses with almost bare lots and overhead telephone poles
and electrical wires, and a tree surrounded by litter in a ditch on the side of
the highway all become subjects of Adams’s work. Like Adams’s photographs,
Bozzi’s landscapes portray transitional spaces, which are often obsolete or
“dead.” In Damaged Hedgerow, 1987, for example, a row of shrubs, obviously planted as
part of a city or state plan, has been neglected to the point of appearing to
be in a shabby state of ruin. Yet each damaged shrub is transformed into a
thing of importance by Bozzi’s isolated and concentrated treatment of it.
Although she jokes about her technique and subject matter, referring to herself
as “a voyeur of the mundane,” her scenes contain a sense of romance absent in
Adams’s work. Bozzi presents something less overtly bleak or political—hers are
more subtle, lush, and intimate spaces of discomfort.
In the
catalogue that accompanied the 1992 exhibition of her body of work depicting
food, American Food: Julie Bozzi, the artist quotes a question posed in the 1981 film My
Dinner with Andr�:
“Why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one
moment of reality?”
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That question sums up what Bozzi’s landscapes, as well as her food motifs,
repeatedly ask us to consider. Choosing the atypical view and avoiding the
panoramic vista, Bozzi creates landscapes that are, rather than romantically
sublime like early American painters and photographers, or romantically void,
like Adams and the other New Topographers, perhaps somewhere in the
middle—romantically bland. They make us take note of the places we usually
ignore, and they instigate a search for meaning in the landscape. “In my work,”
Bozzi explains, “the neglected is treated very seriously, imparting value to
the valueless, and this feeds into my ideas of myself as an explorer, like
Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle, finding things of interest that
others have overlooked.”
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> Edward Hopper, “Notes on
Painting,” quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Catalogue for Edward Hopper
Retrospective Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry
N. Abrams, 1950): 162. Originally published in A. H. Barr, Jr., Catalogue for Edward
Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1933).
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> The exhibition New
Topographics: Photographers of a Man-Altered Landscape,
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>curated by William Jenkins and
presented at the Eastman House in Rochester, New York in 1975, featured Robert
Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon, and others. The
exhibition established the movement in a public way.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> Wallace Shawn and Andr� Gregory, My
Dinner with Andr�
(New York: Grove Press, 1981). Quoted in American Food: Julie Bozzi
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>(San Diego: Museum of Contemporary
Art, San Diego, 1992). See Biography of the Artist for exhibition dates and
tour details.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> Letter to the author, April 25,
2003. Darwin set sail on the H.M.S. Beagle with Captain Robert Fitz Roy on a
circumnavigational voyage that lasted from 1831 to 1836. Darwin, the ship’s
naturalist, eventually used his resulting notes and research to formulate his
theory of evolution by natural selection.
Credit:
This is a shortened version of the catalogue essay that accompanies the
exhibition, Julie Bozzi: Landscapes 1975–2003
style=’color:black’> (from November 23, 2003–February 22, 2004, at the Modern
Art Museum of Fort Worth.) Andrea Karnes is an associate curator at the Modern.
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