An Epic Love Song
By Diane Barber
Catalog essay for Michael Jones McKean: The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows, published in the Spring of 2007
The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows is an installation that centers on the element of water. It unfolds as an odyssey that references ideas of heroic—but sometimes doomed—endeavors, dangerous journeys, and travelers lost at sea.
The odyssey begins in the shadow of a threatening presence. At the entrance to the gallery a giant fan positioned on a carpeted wooden platform creates a wind. Whirring ominously, the fan seems to signal an approaching storm.
Inside the gallery, a ghostly riverboat sits, tilted as if marooned in the shallows of a river. Though no characters are present on the wreck, a cast of disparate beings haunts the boat like a cast of players who have exited the stage, their presence evoked by audible and visual clues positioned throughout the room: Sailor Donald Crowhurst, jazz legend Albert Ayler, Spanish navigator and conquistador Hernando De Soto, ocean explorer Jacques Piccard, Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, Mark Twain, 80s pop music duo Darryl Hall & John Oates (aka. H2O), and filmmaker Werner Herzog. Artist Michael Jones McKean says of his installation, “With this project I was trying to imagine an eccentric group of tragic, martyr-like figures racing through time and meeting up on a strange, bygone craft; a riverboat.”
McKean intentionally collapses their stories into one, forcing connections, some of which don’t quite make sense on the surface. In the case of Crowhurst, Ayler and De Soto, however, the association is clearer: Each of their deaths is tied to water. Crowhurst vanished in the Atlantic Ocean after he failed to circumnavigate the world solo. Ayler’s body mysteriously washed ashore on the banks of the East River. De Soto, after a lifelong pursuit of gold and fortune, died of fever and his crew gave him a mariner’s burial in the Mississippi river.
These ghosts interact within the space through strange juxtapositions and incongruous pairings. Yet, the characters find commonality in their intense drive to achieve something grandiose. For many of them, the quest was a perilous one ending in tragedy and failure.
Nowhere is the idea of peril more evident than in the large room constructed at the back of the gallery. Here McKean employs cinematic framing and theatrical special effects to create an illusion that is as disconcerting as it is beautiful. Through a small window in the side of the room one catches sight of a ship’s pilot house perched atop a rocking platform that is being pummeled by wind and rain. The scene is convincing in its clever use of forced perspective, lighting, mist and movement. However, a glance to the right quickly dissolved the illusion. To the right of the rain room, McKean has left the systems used to create the illusion exposed. Just as the deck of the riverboat serves as a stage, this intentional and choreographed display of the rain room’s mechanics takes us backstage to expose the artifice behind the illusion.
Positioned to the left of the rain room sits an 800 gallon plexi-glas tank. Immersed in the tank are sheets of colored plastic that give the water an intense blue glow. Massive in size yet minimal in construction, the tank eludes immediate explanation. Here again, the impetus behind the work is barely perceptible and can be understood only with effort and imagination.
In some ways, McKean has provided for us the mental blueprint used to create the installation. A wooden box on the floor behind the riverboat houses a collection of binders containing volumes of information he amassed in preparation for the project. One of the binders, labeled “Marianas Trench,” holds material—drawings, photographs, research—pertaining to trench, the absolute deepest point in the earth’s ocean. Explored in a submersible vehicle in 1960 by Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard, the trench remains one of the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth. From the side of McKean’s tank, one can envision this trench. His placement of flat sheets of plastic inside the tank create lines that intersect and interact with the structure of the tank itself, thus leaving us with the image of a curving gash cutting through the blue that is the ocean.
The soundtrack for the exhibition is as mysterious and incongruent as the installation itself. An absurdly oversized, meticulously crafted and strangely positioned stereo cabinet shifts between Hall & Oates’ I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) and an elegy performed by saxophonist Albert Ayler on the occasion of John Coltrane’s funeral. Hall & Oates, known for their large catalogue of love songs, provides an oddly appropriate accompaniment to the majestic riverboat, a romantic reminder of a bygone era. Ayler’s haunting score sets a more somber tone by filling the space with a beautiful yet mournful sound befitting the fates of the tragic cast of characters referenced throughout the installation.
Unusual in approach and complex in execution, The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows gives rise to as many questions as answers. Yet, at the root of the installation lies a mysterious and ethereal beauty. By manipulating scale, composition, time, history, and memory, McKean has created an elusive, disjointed new reality that frees us from the constraints of the natural order.
I think McKean put it best when he said, “Maybe you have to be preoccupied with something extreme or distant or incongruent for the result to be beautiful. It has to travel beyond logic to a place that’s completely awkward and wild and unimaginable, a place that you have to open up space in your brain for it to exist at all.”
Diane Barber
Co-Executive Director/Visual Arts Curator