THE NEW PROPAGANDIST

    The Catskill Mountain House, perched on a cliff above the town of Catskill, New York opened in 1824. A year later Dewitt Clinton’s Erie Canal commenced operations. New York State (like the Mountain House) was at the precipice of its global reach and by the late century would approach the apex of The Hudson River School pastoral pastiche. Marquee names like James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Cole, George Innes and Washington Irving joined lesser knowns like Jasper Francis Cropsey and Rev. Charles Rockwell at the Mountain House to take in the views, hobnob with the ladies and soak up the local lore. Rockwell’s The Catskills and the Region Around 1867 is a collection of mythic tidbits garnered from the guests and staff at the Mountain House in its heyday. Chapter Seven- The Osterhout Narrative is predictably my favorite. But these canvases, stories and lies came later. 1824 was the formal beginning of Catskill tourism and men from Cole to Cooper to Cropsey were the propagandists of the day. It was privileged, upscale, nativist and decidedly white and Christian.1824 was three years before slavery was abolished in New York State and the Jewish diaspora was yet to come. Welcome to the Catskills.

     By the 1840’s, around the time Thomas Cole was dying, his young, very talented acolyte Jasper Francis Cropsey’s career was taking off. Cropsey had a palatial studio, christened Aladdin, built in Warwick, NY. Between trips to Europe the artist painted the Hudson Valley and Catskills with a syrupy, romantic’s eye. The light is almost art-nouveau. He has two paintings to his credit that interpret ancestral homeland— Autumn Landscape-Sugar Loaf Mountain 1867- 1875 (Jennings) and Catskill Mountain House 1855 (Osterhout). Both interpret family stomping ground in the nineteenth century. There’s no question as to his point of view. Neither place looks realistic. Cropsey was an unabashed pastoralist.

    

   Although I’ve lived in cities (Baltimore, San Francisco and New York) I am a country boy at my core and my favorite haunts are the flatlands of Orange County’s Wallkill River valley, where I grew up, and the rugged ridges and feeder lakes of eastern Sullivan County, where I spent my summers. This was, and is again, my Home. I’ll only leave feet first.

      I didn’t come here to be ignored. It is now a matter of policy for the New York Times’ art critics, like Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter (who both used to attend my gallery shows) to only concentrate their coverage on New York City proper “art.” If we country artists get any stray press at all it’s in the “style” or “real estate” sections of the paper. We hillbilly “eccentrics” make good copy for tourism. Already a bastion of urban elitism, the art press is now officially off the hook in covering the hinterlands. Except for the the odd self-generated PR puff piece, we are on our own. 

    So when I do projects in public locally I know that word does not spread far. I accept this, realizing the urban center has become more and more unwelcoming to the rural, car driving, upstate resident in general. Fuck me? Fuck You! This mutual marginalization in attitude and practice is again what feeds my antipastoralism. This is not the case with my neighbors. They can’t help but reach out to the urbanite. Being capitalists, they need the citiot; so put a bird on it. They romanticize for the buck. In contrast, my work reflects the sad realism of blow-up lawn ornaments and junk cars with trees growing from the back seat—the rot of the the everyday—nothing pastoral about it. But, for the boutique farmer, air B&Ber, shopkeeper, and poor rural kid who just wants to survive in the sticks, it’s a different story. I feel their pain of forced hospitality. “Pick our apples, buy our chainsaw sculptures…..maybe spend the night. Take in the view. Here, let me refill your drink. Come back soon….”  Christ, I’m exhausted just thinking about it.                

     But I also didn’t come here to quietly tend my garden and fade into comfortable straw hat obscurity. No! I came here to work, have fun, provoke, piss off, promote, form a community and ultimately die in peace. And goddamned if it isn’t working. We’re not a school like the Hudson River School. Not an art colony like Cragsmoor or Woodstock, or a high end marketplace like Hudson. We are a congregation of farmers, innkeepers, artists and misfits; revolving around the concept that a church can exist outside of religion and community can form without commodity or monetization. I am the new propagandist for the antipastoral here in the Catskills. Tear down your fence lines. Let the manque go feral. Forage. Hunt. Pray. Step it up. Burn your dollar bill right HERE!