The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It’s a gray November;
The leaves have all turned brown,
And all the birds of summer
Are packing up to leave town.

Drizzly gray November,
The year is winding down,
And in the sky the sun pales like an ember…

And so it goes –
The year draws to a close
Another year’s beginning.
And so it goes –
It won’t be long now, I suppose
‘Til I must sing my own November song.
                                – Words and music by Winfield Shaw Clark

November, I think, is the direst of all months. It’s gray, it’s cold, it’s denuded and dead as the autumnal tree canopy, and ahead looms only the blank whiteness of winter. If October is our worst month financially—with the stock market crashes of 1929, 1987, and 2008 all occurring in this month—then November is the month we all feel the psychic repercussions of our profligacy.

November, if it were a flavor, would be burnt resin. If it were a profession, it would be a knacker in the midst of a livestock pandemic. If November were a sound, it'd be a foghorn peeling out across the Bering Strait. It’s appropriate that November begins with two holidays dedicated to death, and ends with a holiday many people would rather die than celebrate, as, culturally speaking, November is a lull before we come back to life for the Holiday stretch-run. The November calendar is dreary with graduating student shows, all-volunteer or all-member exhibitions, and other cheap but meaningless attempts by struggling art organizations to pander to some marginally supportive constituency or another. The only exceptions to this rule are those arts organizations who’re finally surrendering in its struggle to survive and going dark, a suitably November thing to do, or the news that the economic end times are swiftly swallowing up the national art market.

Time weighs heavy on the heart in November, so much so that I almost didn’t even read, or follow up on, the email I received  on November 6 from the Weinstein Gallery, virtually announcing a new body of work by Alec Soth, “The Last Days of W.” Minneapolis-based photographer, one-time blogger, and occasional publisher Soth, for those of you who are unaware, first came to prominence as an artist after he was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition. I wrote a feature article about him and his work process long ago in the much brighter year of 2003, in the much brighter month of September, back before his inclusion in the Biennial had been announced and well before he became such a local, and national, institution. One of the more interesting aspects of Soth’s work, I learned then, is how he works on thematic scales—as a sort of epic storyteller through images. Indeed, his work has been collected, thus far, in three books

The Weinstein Gallery has represented Soth since about 2005, so my guess was this email was meant to announce the availability (for those 5-6 people who may have actually been untouched by the recent economic turmoil) of a new body of Soth’s work for sale, or that maybe will end up in another book. Whatever the case, the email’s timing was impeccable for two reasons: First, because this November was indeed the final curtain of the president known reductively as W., and second, more to the point, these are images that reflect, indeed embody, the cold hard spirit of November.

Because you and I can only, at this point, see these images in pixels on a computer screen, I won’t belabor my descriptions—lest I miss some crucial detail or another. I’ll only describe in quick terms what seems to be perfectly clear despite the multiple electronic layers of mitigation—such as the fact, for instance, that these images are bleak. They are satisfyingly bleak, and as a rule they confirm the long-held conviction that you and I have had—despite the p.r. flak and clench-jawed sloganeering of the past eight years—that the country’s really gone to pieces.

Consider the concrete steps going nowhere, the broken window glass, the accumulated corner detritus in a ramshackle urban residential space in Soth’s “Buffalo, New York.” This is an image emblematic of a certain kind of American disintigration, a perfect representation of the fallen promises of late market Capitalism. Whereas once this space, these funky steps, this scene could have been full of promise, now it, like the American city itself, has succumbed to a sad fate. This dismal quality is clear too in the surprisingly spare and rundown setting in “Dorm, Northfield, Minnesota.” Is how college kids have to live these days? you wonder, as you observe the chipped plaster walls, the hard and uncomfortable furnishings, the exposed wiring, the bleak industrial carpeting, and a TV with the Orwellian face of Rumsfield looming overhead in the presumptive room of an unfortunate modern student.

Soth has always been drawn in his work to the Gothic bleakness of this country’s outskirt towns, bleak back woods, and other cast-off places, and in this body of work he explodes his fascination to great effect. In “Avenue Theater, Dallas, Texas,” Soth flatfootedly depicts a former movie house that has been cheerfully, with plasticky red-white-blue paint, turned into that most American symbols of failure and failed enterprise, a pawn shop. The imagery in “Salt Lake, Utah,” and “Nome, Alaska,” which reveal a dead salt flat and a seagull-frenzied dump, respectively, are poignantly beautiful in their bleak minimalism, even as they make the skin creep and crawl. And then there’s the piece that hit most home for me, “Camp Purgatory, Ontario, California, " an image of  a tent city for homeless people located near the Ontario Airport in California, about 45 miles east of Los Angeles.

This image speaks to me as certain passages in certain great stories speak to certain people. It speaks not because it’s a particularly stellar image, but rather because it hits perfectly home. I grew up about three miles from the spot. In fact, my grandfather passed away at the beginning of this November just down the road from the scene. And so this picture of Camp Purgatory is a depiction of the symbolic gap between the youthful hope of my 1980s childhood in booming and sprawling Southern Californian suburbia and the bleak picture I see now as I stand on the edge of middle age in November of 2008. The humble tents and tarps, the ruined lives contained therein, and the upside-down American flag that flies over the entrance to the camp, all are a symptom of these rather ruinous days at the close of another year, era, lifetime.

Dedicated to the memory of John Barnes