By Claire Walla
In the days of caravans and traveling road shows, it used to be that great works of art and artistic performance would come to you … all you had to do was wait.
Perhaps the idea is cumbersome in a world fixated on instant gratification and high-speed Internet. But, to artist and North Haven resident Erich Fischl, wheels can do what neither the Internet and the art world can't. They can bring art —physical works of art — not just to the metropolitan areas where they are regularly hung in world class museums and performed on the stage, but to small pockets of the American landscape otherwise isolated from the art world at large.
“America: Now and Here” (ANH), a project found by Fischl, himself a world-renowned artist, is basically such a caravan. In theory, it is a collection of six 18-wheelers filled with work by notable American painters , playwrights, musicians and poets such as Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Edward Albee, Lou Reed and Joan Baez, among many others. And just like those traveling road shows of old, this veritable caravan of crafts will roll-up in towns across the nation, putting hundreds of pieces of art on public display, ultimately doing what traditional museums can't — bringing art to the people.
"My thinking about this show was: let's try to break down some of the walls that separate people from art," Fischl said. "I thought, it would be so cool to see these trucks pull up into a parking lot, or a football stadium, unfold, connect to one another and then — all of a sudden — you've got a 4,000-square foot museum sitting in the middle of a parking lot."
While the trucking display won't be in high gear until ANH completes its capital campaign (projected for sometime in 2012), the ANH artwork will be displayed in a couple of venues in different parts of the U.S. this year, beginning with an exhibit in Kansas City, Missouri on May 7 and continuing on to Detroit from there. Fischl, who founded ANH, hopes these exhibitions will plant the seed for the concept, hopefully generating enough interest on a national scale to get the entire road show — all 108 wheels of it — fully up and running.
Fischl got the idea for the show about four years ago after he noticed a number of the conversations he had been having with friends and acquaintances eventually turned "unsettled." In this post-9/11 America, discussions on everything from artistic works to walks in the woods, he said, were riddled with anxiety and/or fear.
"It made me realize we've shifted off our center," he explained. "We're no longer confident."
Fischl sees ANH as an attempt to spark a national dialogue, using art as a common denominator.
And he was shocked by how many people agreed.
"It's quite a who's who, which is really saying something," he noted. "I was completely frightened when I started to ask these artists [if they wanted to participate] because I thought, they're just going to say forget it, it's not my thing. But I thought, this is like a national crisis, let's ask America's best. So I did. And I was surprised at how many of them said ok."
Working with 11 different curators, Fischl said the show has already made great progress. In addition to traditional modes of art, the show will present original songs and three-minute dialogues, as well as a single poem written collectively by 54 well-known poets across the country.
"It's the first big flower to come out of this," Fischl said of the document, which is set to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux sometime this week.
Poetry curators Carol Muske-Dukes (currently poet laureate of California) and Bob Holman (founder of the Bowery Poetry Club) oversaw the production process. Using a Japanese form called Renga, Muske-Dukes and Holman restricted each writer to 10 lines before handing the document over to the next poet in line.
"It starts with Robert Pinsky, who's writing from Massachusetts, from the Atlantic Coast, and it ends 540 lines later with Robert Haas looking out over the Pacific [Ocean]," Fischl explained. He added that the body of the work ranges from hip hop to canonical.
"So, it really is an American poem in the truest and most democratic sense of the word," he said. "It's an amazing historical document in itself."
In order to stimulate conversations in each place the exhibit visits, Fischl said efforts will also be made to reach out to local art communities, involving local artists with the show and fostering ways of bolstering community work.
What's more, college-age artists have already contributed to the effort through a branch of ANH called Artists Corp. Fischl envisions these young artists, who have offered their own works of art, to be involved with the show in some way, perhaps curating the exhibits.
At this point, ANH organizers are not sure how many stops the tour will make, nor are they yet sure where those stops might be. Fischl explained that, because the show will be free for all to attend, the [geography] will depend on whether or not private donors, from corporations to individuals, will be able to front the nearly $500,000 it costs for the show to stay for its desired six to eight week run in each region.
While Fischl said trucks are not necessarily an integral part of the ANH concept, the method feeds very well into what he's trying to achieve.
"Most Americans get the vernacular of a truck. If you show up in a town with something in a truck that people can go in and see, they'll be curious enough to go in and see it," he said. "It's not an ivory-columned museum, where people are going to be made to feel poor, or made to feel stupid. They'll go in because — what's intimidating about a truck?"
