Interview with Lexie Mountain, Part 1

 

 A Portrait Takes Two People (Pinchy Goes on Tinychat), 2013

Lexie Mountain is a Baltimore based polymath. She is constantly in motion. This is her twitter and her website.

Booze Clooze: OK, first question: You're originally from New England. When I think of lobsters, I think of New England. Did you choose the lobster as a subject in part because of a regional affiliation? If so, what is your opinion of the idea of regionalism as one of the central taboos of Modernism? Like in architecture they came up with the International Style to replace the local types of buildings. Or how in Ad Reinhardt's "How To Look at Modern Art," regionalism (a weight on the lower right) is outside of the purview of "true" art?

Lexie Mountain: I do have a regional connection to the lobster because of my time in Massacusetts and Maine where I ate dozens of them in the course of my lifetime and didn't think much about them except to occasionally race them on the kitchen floor with my sister. A passing interest in lobsters began some years ago while on vacation in Truro MA, when my father started buying lobsters from the Souzas, a family that kept saltwater holding tanks in their garage. The husband Bill fished with his sons, and the wife Cheryl managed the stock and sales. Affectionately known as "The Lobster Lady" she was voluble and friendly and never hesitated to pull specimens of unusual size or coloration from her tank to show my sister and I. 

I began to rethink my connection with the lobster more aggressively when I visited the Olson House in Cushing, ME, the location and residents of which were the inspiration and subject matter for Andrew Wyeth (specifically Christina's World). The pine-tree-lined streets lulled me into a Sunday-drive haze; I drove right by the Olson House and barn featured in Christina's World, past some ramshackle livestock pens featuring a hangdog horse wearing a dog collar, and suddenly found myself in the parking lot of the lobster wharf at the end of the road. I wrote about the trip here and here. The nature of my trip was to re-enact Christina's World for video, and I was totally dumbfounded to learn that the wharf was owned by the Olsons, specifically Christina's great grandson Sam. I had been looking at lobsters in my work and came to that area of Maine to film them, but I hadn't been expecting the connection to be so direct. I had already drawn them together in my mind as a place of objecthood upon which values and significations of luxury, mythos and sustenance could be written, and the immediate link, quite literally the road from the Olson house to the wharf, somehow bridged that gap even more intensely. 

I was more interested in artist/subject relationships and was interested to see if I could change my view of the lobster, so perhaps I am attempting to use the lobster as a vehicle by which any regional sentimentality could be divested or replaced with a different or more mature relationship. In a way, I could see this particular Modernist taboo as something of a weakness in the work, an available nostalgia which colors my view of them, which is perhaps why I feel more of a connection to the Realists and often the Romantics. Courbet's "Oak at Flagey" could be a visual correlation: the Oak stands for the triumph of liberty, it is a symbol, as the lobster is in my videos made to be seen (hopefully) as hyper-real, brought to the viewer in pieces that are so high definition they could not be confused as anything but representation. Courbet has leaves made out of brush-strokes, I have the depth of 1080p and grading plug-ins.

Every movement is itself a reaction to and a revisitation of what "true art" is capable of and should aspire to, it seems, and I have no idea what tradition I am parsing from, what hole I'm standing in. I grew up in the eighties, with postmodernism, but now? Post-post modernism? Alter-modernism/ transmodernism? Something that is on the outside cusp of Transmodernism? Maybe I'm looking at all the tropes that Reinhardt sees as crippling weights (still-lifes, regionalism, nudes) because they do weigh so heavily on artistic tradition to the point of caricature, and I want to zoom in as far as I can on the pores of caricature (specifically, the red silhouette of the lobster on the side of the clam shack) to see what might live there, what bacteria are milling around creating a porous surface.

Gustave Courbet, Oak at Flagey, 1864

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866

BC: Wow, great answer. That must be what it's like for Joe Flacco when he hands off to Ray Rice. That direct connection to Wyeth is pretty amazing, too. Personally, I think the regionalist critique is a good example of the kind of outmoded ideas that permeate a lot of art school thinking. There's nothing less regional and more Modern than a McDonald's drive-thru, but it sucks. The clam shack in Rockland is much more appealing. 

   I love Courbet, too. You said you were into him partly because of the texture, but these two Courbets, The Trout and The Origin of the World, seem like they might be thematically relevant. What about this painting by Willem Kalf, Still-Life with Drinking Horn? Do you feel like there any connections between this "portrait" of a lobster and your own?

Willem Kalf, Still-Life with Lobster, 1653

William M. Harnett, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit, Champagne and Newspaper, 1882

LM: Talk about regionalism, talk about the Ravens! Boy I only wish I could be half the man Ray Rice is. Every great movement that carries a dogma is in danger of instantly outmoding itself, and it seems that every new genre that arises may accidentally bury part of its own head in the sand. I think about Courbet's "Origin of the World" quite a bit, and I would say that it is thematically relevant at least aspirationally! The segmenting of the subject, the expansion of the symbol, and the sheer voyeurism of the image are all analogous to the types of issues that I would hope to engage in this lobster work. Ha ha "Lobster Work." I hadnt seen the Kalf painting before, but it is absolutely the type of image that I have been looking it and thinking about in creating my videos. I was also very taken with this painting by William Harnett, for a more prosaic view of a kind of everyday luxury, if that is even possible.

     In both these images we can see that the lobster is a central figure, the red is unavoidable and talkative, and the positioning is a sort of mirror image. I wanted to go beyond the redness of the lobster's representation to a more Courbet-based exploration of the darker tones and the washes of depth that were possible in close viewing. I still have a soft spot for the "red lobster" so to speak (without copyright associations) and I believe it is possible to have a conversation with these still lifes that gives them some context beyond their representation as luxury objects. 

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