By Vince Carducci

"To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. will become just another part of the world, no more, no less." –John Cage

“This country is a spread of localities,” the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey wrote of America in 1920. Whether he intended to or not, Dewey was heralding the aesthetic of the American Scene, which prevailed in art, music, and literature particularly in the period between the two World Wars. The American Scene sought to align cultural production with democratic principles, calling for representation to reflect the indigenous conditions from which it sprang and toward which it was directed. It went into hibernation in the waning moments of the Second World War as the United States awoke to its calling as a global superpower. In its place, a universalizing cultural impulse emerged, expressing itself in many forms.

The International Style in architecture and design embraced the grid as the basic structural element and adopted the smooth, spare surfaces of the “form-follows-function” aesthetic to project a cultural ideal not bound by any specific place or time. In the social sciences, structural-functionalism emerged, which sought to discover the general laws underlying all forms of human organization and interaction. Talcott Parsons's magnum opus The Social System (Free Press, 1951) delineated the values of “particularism” and “universalism,” the latter being the repository of norms and other drivers of social integration existing outside and prior to individual cathetic expression. In the domestic economy, regional markets were incorporated under what historian Lizbeth Cohen terms the “Consumers' Republic,” a brave new and improved world of tailfins, push buttons, branded packaged goods, and mass broadcast and print media uniformly delivered on the national level. On the political and cultural fronts, consensus prevailed in the orthodoxy of the “vital center,” somewhat paradoxically linking individualism in the domestic arena and hegemonic capitalism internationally against the threat of Communism.

In the visual arts, universalism was manifested in the formalist tenets of high modernism, which declared art a project of revealing each medium's essential conditions; in the case of painting, for example, the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane. The paragon of this theory in the immediate postwar era was the style generally known as abstract expressionism, which was held to be everything that the American Scene was not. It was nonobjective and therefore cosmopolitan whereas the American Scene hugged the shores of traditional representation and hence remained provincial in both form and content. Abstract expressionism was ostensibly apolitical where the American Scene was labeled jingoistic. Where the American Scene was considered culturally backward, abstract expressionism was seen as the logical progression in the evolution of modernist art, a transfer of the reins of aesthetic power from the School of Paris in old Europe to the School of New York in the New World.

This view held sway until the mid- to late-1970s when challenges to “master narratives” on many intellectual, social, and political fronts began to be asserted. In the process, the world-historical inevitability of the rise of abstract expressionism came into question. Perhaps the most well-known study in this regard is Serge Guilbaut's 1983 book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago). Guilbaut maintains the ascendance of abstract expressionism was as much due to ideology as it was aesthetics. It succeeded because its objectives matched the doctrinal needs of American politics in the postwar era. In particular, it was the freedom associated with abstract expressionism, Guilbaut argues, that became “the symbol most actively and vigorously promoted by the new liberalism in the Cold War period.” More recently, the thesis of creative expression as a tool of American foreign policy was taken up by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (Free Press, 2001), which alleges U.S. intelligence community involvement in certain magazines, journals, and other intellectual projects, beginning after World War II and continuing into the 1960s.

Equally instructive are perspectives that look at the fault line between the American Scene and abstract expressionism from the other side of the divide. One of the key legends in the mythology of the forward march of the United States to the position of international standard bearer of modernism is the oedipal relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, in which the father figure of American provincialism is buried under skeins of paint slung by the vanguard son. But in Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago, 1991), Erika Doss argues that rather than make a clean break with the social concerns of his mentor, Pollock sublimated them to the mandate of Cold War universalism professed on his behalf. As opposed to being simply a formalist exercise, Pollock's paintings challenge the constraints of Cold War ideology, expressing the anxiety of the alienated individual subsumed under the rationality of postwar universalism. “Despite claims to the contrary,” Doss writes, “both Benton and Pollock were bound to an art of social contract” (italics original).

Thus does the repressed return. Identity politics, the representation of demotic and autochthonous cultures, not to mention other things postmodern further seem to echo many of the same issues articulated decades ago by the American Scene artists. And with the Bush Administration's New Imperialist vision of worldwide manifest destiny threatening to turn into a national (and international) nightmare, a reconsideration of the imagined community of the artists of the American Scene may provide an opportunity for dreaming America anew. The visual artists of the American Scene followed the aesthetic of “local color,” which similar to their counterparts in literature prompted them to focus on the specific aspects of a region, such as the geography, the people, and the commonplace moments of everyday life. A clear of this idea of “local knowledge” is the group of artists who were part of what can be termed the “Great Lakes Scene.” These artists worked within a 500-mile radius of the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow body of water between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan approximately at the confluence of the three largest Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, and Huron). The period in which these artists were active begins around 1910 and ends around 1960. The Great Lakes Scene included artists working in and around Buffalo, Cincinnati, Duluth, and points in between.

The artists of the Great Lakes Scene responded to the water, the land, the culture, and the activities that comprised day-to-day existence in the Upper Midwest. Many of these artists are represented in the Inlander Collection of Great Lakes Regional Painting, recently acquired on behalf of the Flint Institute of Arts (located in Flint, Michigan, nearly at the geographic center of the Upper Midwest). The collection takes its name from a journal entry by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967): “I will always be an Inlander in spirit.” The work is also surveyed in the recent book by Michael D. Hall and Pat Glascock, Great Lakes Muse: American Scene Painting in the Upper Midwest, 1910-1960 (Flint Institute of Arts, 2003). The production of the Inlanders is a material record of a place in time in the development of the nation's culture, a topology and typology of the heart of America, an imagined community of Tocquevillean dimensions.

To be sure, at the time Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1830, only the lower reaches of the Upper Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) had been officially incorporated into the Union. The rest was part of the Michigan Territory, which at one point included what are now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, as well as parts of Iowa and the Dakotas. Yet it was in these still-developing lands north of the Ohio River and to the west that Tocqueville saw democracy in America ideally fulfilled in the productive diligence of common people. The South, Tocqueville felt, was immobilized by the curse of slavery. And New England, while it had given birth to the Republic under the ethos of Puritanism, was susceptible to evolving a new aristocracy based on the power and wealth derived from the inequities of the division of labor and economies of scale of industrial manufacturing.

Moving into the twentieth century, the Upper Midwest developed a diversified economy and culture, mixing natural-resource extraction, trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, and rural and urban environments. It was a microcosm of modern America, as Tocqueville had presciently envisioned it. (By the mid-1930s, nearly a third the nation's population lived there.) So it should be no surprise that its cultural production during the first half of the century fused the two main tendencies of the broader American Scene, the regionalism of the Heartland (exemplified by the “Triumvirate” of Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry) and the social realism of the urban centers (represented, for example, by the Ash Can School, John Sloan, and Reginald Soyer). Taken together, the art of the Inlanders constitutes what interpretative ethnographers term a thick description of the lifeworld of the Upper Midwest in the times up to the Cold War.

The rural setting of Lawrence McConaha's (1894-1962) Indiana Pastoral (c. 1936) shows four cows in the foreground grazing on a low hill in the shadow of a line of trees, with cultivated fields, farm buildings, and the horizon behind them. Ore Dock, Duluth (1953) by Constance Richardson (1905-2002) is a panorama of the Minnesota town's harbor, with railroad lines and trestles connecting up to hoppers and docks, the other structures and equipment of a massive processing facility sprawling out, and the vast expanse of Lake Superior seeming to stretch back into infinity. Matt Daly's (1860-1937) Port and City (1925) is an impressionist view of the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago as seen from the river. Each picture, and others too numerous to detail here, presents a different, specific aspect of the local environment.

And like August Sandler's project to record the various character types of the German people, the work of the Inlanders captures the diversity of the local population. The legacy of the region's early European settlers is present in Frances McVey's (1903-1984) The School Teacher (1942), a fair-haired blue-eyed solid woman, likely of Norwegian or Swedish descent, seated at her desk. Bag Ears (1944) by Edmund Brucker (1921-1999) is a portrait of an immigrant worker's son holding his sled in an alley in Cleveland's “Little Italy” neighborhood. Roman Johnson's (b. 1917) painting of his father, Dad (1939-43), leaning, pipe in mouth, against a fence in front of a farmhouse outside Columbus is a metonym for those African Americans who crossed to the “right bank” of the Ohio River, seeking to escape what Tocqueville described as the “abyss of evils” of race relations in the South. The confrontation between dominant (which is to say white) culture and its “Other” is given tongue-in-cheek expression in The Medicine Man (1932) by Clyde Singer (1908-1999), a nighttime depiction of what appears to be a combined patent medicine/minstrel show near a small town in eastern Ohio.

The painters of the Great Lakes Scene also mapped elements of the region's social and cultural life. For example, the production cycle is recorded from point of origin in places like the Mesabi Range in upper Minnesota, as in Cameron Booth's (1892-1980) Iron Ore (1934), to the end of the commodity chain on the Assembly Line (1954) by Detroit painter and life-long Ford Motor Company employee Jack Keijo Steele (1919-2003). Holidays and daily recreations are documented in Fourth of July (c. 1938), a view of fireworks over residential rooftops on Chicago's North Side, by Ethel Spears (1903-1974), and Movie Palace (1936), a street scene outside the Rialto Theater in Pittsburgh, by Virginia Cuthbert (1908-2001).

For the most part, these works express solidarity on the part of their producers with the values and constituencies of their local environs. This contrasts with the avant-garde model that typically sets the artist in opposition to the mass of society. Philosophically and politically, the former is communal and egalitarian, the latter individualistic and libertarian. And in contrast to the realisms administered from the top down in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and against which it has been erroneously compared (primarily for political reasons), the art of the American Scene, including that of the Inlanders, was truly of, by, and for the people.

It is worth noting in this regard that, for the most part, abstract expressionism and its vanguard successors never achieved the popular acceptance American Scene painting did in its heyday. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, among others, has persuasively shown, so-called high art has instead often served to reproduce certain forms of social inequality and institutions of domination. The obvious exception, of course, is Andy Warhol, son of Polish immigrants and displaced Inlander from Pittsburgh, who took as his muse the imagined community of democratic America, i.e., its popular culture, warts and all, a project for which he is still vilified in certain mandarin quarters.

Furthermore, the solipsistic existentialism embedded in the ideal type of the Western avant-garde artist carries with it the potentially corrosive effects Tocqueville identified as despotic in democratic society. “Despotism,” he writes, “which is in its nature fearful, sees the most certain guarantee of its own duration in the isolation of men.” For Tocqueville, the best protection against these corrosive forces are the “local freedoms” of civil society, propagated by the reciprocity of social relations that arise from grassroots associations, both institutionalized and spontaneously made by human interaction. What this reciprocity might look like is made visible in the art of the Inlanders in their representations of the interrelated networks of the political, social, and cultural systems of the Upper Midwest. This is what Doss means to imply when she speaks of art as a social contract.

In addition to being almost literally in the midst of Inlander territory, the city of Flint (where the Inlander Collection now resides) has a history that is central to the region during the period in which the artists lived and worked. As the location of General Motors Corporation's main production facilities, Flint was pivotal in the rise of workers to self-determination and middle-class status when the UAW brought the company to its knees in the Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37. Prior to and during its height as an automobile production hub, it was also a center for trading and shipping, with great rolling farmlands surrounding it on all sides, epitomizing the urban-rural dialectic of the Great Lakes Scene. With the decline of domestic automobile manufacturing since the 1970s, it has also typified the vagaries of “Rust Belt” deindustrialization and globalization. (Michael Moore's first feature film, Roger & Me, is set there.)

The dichotomy between the virtual world of the Inlanders and the material history of the city of Flint reveals a tension in thinking about the Great Lakes Scene. This tension is the one that exists between what Benedict Anderson calls “simultaneity-along-time” and “homogenous, empty time.” The former is the “always was and ever more will be” of traditional culture and the latter the forward march of the contingent clock time of modernity. The one embraces timeless values of the land and community, the tropes of the American Dream; the other registers all that was once solid that has since melted into air, the evidence of the creative destruction under capitalism experienced by three generations of Upper Midwesterners. One suggests the possibilities of the particular, the other the limits of the universal.

“Breakdown of particularistic ties is the first condition of extension of the power system,” Parsons aridly opined in 1951. In its particularity, the art of the Inlanders maps the terrain for reversing the process, for re-provincializing America in what may be termed the next new world order, one based on sustainability and a just interdependence. Unfortunately, we now seem to be living in a time when Tocqueville's bleakest premonitions have come to be. The owners of capital, hidden from view by the anonymity of limited-liability shareholder corporate structures, indeed appear to have evolved into a new aristocracy, much of it congregated in the Northeast of the United States. There is despotism, not democracy, in America. For Australian Aborigines, “Dreamtime” is the part of their belief system that explains the origins and culture of the land and its people. Against our dark and forbidding night, the Dreamtime of the Inlanders augurs the return of a brighter, better day.