The lineage of Tom Hall’s concert posters – lovingly crafted, screen-printed swirls of psychedelic text and color-bearded imagery – is obvious. For decades now, posters by the likes of Wes Wilson, for concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore, or Nashville’s Hatch Show Prints have been recognized as iconic pieces of American art; works whose influence has reached beyond their countercultural origins into the very fabric of national consciousness.
Yet there’s something different here: An appearance by legendary Brit-folkies Incredible String Band, sure; but who says that a bill of three Pittsburgh bands at infamous Polish Hill dive Gooski’s deserves such dedicated craftsmanship – a show attended by, at most, 150 souls; a poster relegated to the beery, ash-covered floor by 10:30 that evening? The same goes for the smirking promotion placards printed by film renegades Orgone Cinema in early-’90s Pittsburgh for their screenings of other peoples’ long-discarded films. And for what, a few wayward cinephiles and art punks, perhaps fewer in number than the team promoting the show?
To Terry Young, a Pittsburgh-born artist recently returned to residency after years spent couch-hopping around Europe, it’s more than just good-old-fashioned artistic tilting at windmills. In his recent Three Rivers Arts Festival gallery show The Spring Event, Young hopes to show that this do-it-yourself mentality and honest dismissal of art-world “success” are Pittsburgh trademarks worthy of praise. To this end, he’s taken a broad range of underground Pittsburgh artists from the ’80s to the present, and attempted to unify them under the credo of their very independence: “The Appalachian School,” he calls it, and it’s what makes Pittsburgh’s art world dynamic, radical, and unique.
Art for art's sake
“The work’s all quite different,” says Young, “but the idea is that, ‘this is how we do things here’ – there aren’t any big commercial galleries here, there’s a different mode of production. I grew up in this way of doing things – with Orgone Cinema [and the like] – and I didn’t realize that this wasn’t how it was everywhere.”
After leaving Pittsburgh for New York, London and Berlin, Young realized that “how it was everywhere” in the art world was much more trend- and commercial-conscious, and much more gallery oriented. While artists in the art-world capitals were opening vast shows, selling pieces, and striving for an ever-looming specter of fame and success, the artists Young grew up around in Pittsburgh were generally just getting on with the business of making art.
If there’s nowhere to show it, someone like artist and independent curator Lauri Mancuso would simply open a space – she now curates Paint & Body, an artist-run space in Wilkinsburg. If no one is publishing artwork and creative writing, someone like Curt Gettman will start a publication – the Unicorn Mountain journal of Pittsburgh artists, writers and musicians which Gettman helped found features prominently in The Spring Event. The clubs and bars won’t host your band? Hit the basements, the lofts, or even the streets, like Appalachian School rockers Modey Lemon did to start out.
To Young, homesick in Europe, this mindset tied together a diverse set of artists, musicians and writers in the Pittsburgh area and beyond, spurred on by the combination of a desperate drive to create and the constant reminder that, in Pittsburgh, you have less chance of fame and fortune.
Then, “you’re just doing your work [for its own sake],” says Young. “There’re no big media outlets here, those things feel really removed from Pittsburgh. So there’s nothing to lose, and you can just be really creative with your space. There’s no pressure from commercial art.”
The history and mystery of Pittsburgh
Young argues that this attitude is more than just artistic rebellious spirit – it’s a part of the fabric of Pittsburgh. “The history of Pittsburgh is still really a part of how this city is now. There’s always a real consciousness of class here, and you don’t really have that in general American culture, you don’t really talk about it. But here, it’s the opposite – it’s hard to get rid of it. That really separates us.”
History and class consciousness pervade the work of The Appalachian School artists. Take Jennifer Lee’s twin portraits of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Warhol, in which the two Pittsburgh icons appear not just identical in their Warholian Mao-collared shirts, but in their dazed stares – Lear-like in their vacant domination of the city’s culture, even from beyond the grave. Or Young’s own textual pieces, which play on history and memory as fleeting and rhetorical: A wall, for example, imprinted with the huge text, “AIDS = RAINFOREST,” boiling the two headline tragedies of Young’s ’80s youth down to one cynical statement of the population’s yawning attention span. Or Dutch-born, London-based textile artist and designer Myrza Deva de Muynck’s dresses and swatches, inspired by the homemade clothes of Danish commune dwellers and appearing in The Spring Event like the remnants of once-inhabited buildings.
De Muynck’s involvement in The Appalachian School acts as a nod to the globalization of these ideas: With strong connections to Pittsburgh artists such as Young, and a similar mindset to the School’s ways, national and international artists need not be shunned by the city. It’s one reason why The Appalachian School, nebulous in form and membership, has a similarly unsubstantial name.
“You can’t send a postcard to ‘Appalachia,’” says Young. “The Appalachian School is really just giving existing ideas here a title, and I was really conscious of that, I didn’t want to kill something by putting a label on it, I wanted to give it as much space as I could – hence the multi-faceted word, ‘school.’”
Young’s The Spring Event showcased, in conjunction with the Three Rivers Arts Festival, a host of interrelated if vastly artistically different Pittsburgh artists, writers and musicians. But Young hopes that the show will serves merely as a marker; the beginning of a self-conscious appraisal of Pittsburgh’s School. Next on the agenda are a collaborative performance piece – Righteous Spring – between Young, choreographer Kyle Abraham and Brooklyn-based Pittsburgh musician Ian Williams (of the internationally acclaimed band Battles), to be performed as part of the Three Rivers Arts Festival June 3-4, and a possible Appalachian School group show at the Guest Room gallery in East London.
Justin Hopper is a freelance writer whose last article for Pop City was about Robo Cup soccer at Carnegie Mellon University.
Photos:
Phil Boyd and the Hidden Twin (Happening 01 at "The Spring Event")
Tom Hall serigraph
Terry Young and "Community Mural Project" (by Terry Young and Tom Hall)
Curt Gettman and "Unicorn Mountain" #01
"Andrew Warhol" and "Andrew Carnegie" (oil on canvas, by Jennifer Lee)
Lauri Mancuso at Paint and Body gallery
all photos copyright © Jonathan Greene
except Happening 01, Tom Hall serigraph, Jennifer Lee paintings; courtesy of Terry Young