Rose Marasco The Maine GrangeRecovery and Hope – an introduction by Frank Gohlke The exhibition and catalogue before you grew out of a crisis in one artist’s understanding of what constitutes her responsibilities to her subject. Rose Marasco’s curiosity was aroused by the ubiquitous Grange Halls of Maine, and she thought that to portray their four-square sobriety against the changing fabric of rural Maine might suggest a story about where we’ve come from and where we’re heading. As she worked, a realization dawned: the story was much larger-more interesting, more instructive, more moving––than she imagined; and the story in all of its growing riches could not be extracted from the exteriors of the buildings alone. A single kind of picture could not possibly do justice to the world in which she was becoming immersed. Rose has resolved her crisis by dispensing with style (in its sense of an unmistakable visual signature) in favor of an aesthetic of maximum flexibility; her approach as it has evolved makes use of accumulation, accretion, combination and recombination, text, collage, sequencing, and superimposition. Rose surrounds the viewer and the subject with such a variety of visual forms that we are kept slightly off-balance as we move from one to the next; our stance toward the material is thus active as well as contemplative; we are engaged by the imaginative effort involved in continually shifting and enlarging our frame of reference to include new aspects of the subject and of Rose’s involvement with it. What is the Grange? On first encounter it is a frame building one to three stories tall with little or no adornment, well-kept or deteriorating, sitting at a crossroads or in the middle of a commercial block in a small town or on a village green or in a field. The grid in which Rose has arranged these building portraits suggests that there is an unending supply of them. The grid allows us to see both the common plan of the buildings and their individuality; each contains a story unlike any of the others. The grid reminds us how specific the things of the world are; and, although this was not her intention, it is a testament to Rose’s inventiveness-all of those photographs and no redundancy. What is true of the exteriors is true of the interiors, but here the invention is seen to reside in the way the members of each Grange have taken a minutely prescribed arrangement of space and furniture and made it their own. The shift to color in these photographs is important, because color is central to the way these ritual spaces are individualized. Rose keeps a consistent, respectful distance from the elaborate tableaux that dominates the rooms, thus neutralizing issues that might arise from differences in the taste between the makers, viewers, and herself. This is characteristic of her attitude, which is exemplary in its refusal to claim either privileged viewpoint or unwarranted identification. She is insistent on her position as observer; when we are “inside” an experience-as in the irregularly shaped composite which reads like memory flashes of the potato harvest in Maysville Center, or the more straightforward narrative sequence of the North Scarboro Bean Supper—it is clearly Rose’s experience. Her fictional license does not extend to placing herself in another’s consciousness. Rose’s scrupulous adherence to the stance of an outsider is not a denial of her sympathy and affection toward the Grangers and the ideals they represent; it affirms them. We are reminded that the highest service the present can perform for the past is simply to try to see it clearly. Rose is acutely aware of the difficulty of that enterprise. She knows that to recover something useful from the past we must first admit that it is past recovery, that whatever we take from it must be recast in terms appropriate to our own circumstances, a transformation that may render it unrecognizable. Emblematic of this understanding are the images in which the scores of Grange hymns are superimposed on photographs of Grange halls. The songs obscure the buildings, the buildings obscure the songs, but the conviction that suffuses the words comes through nevertheless, heightened and transformed by the effort of reconstruction. The Grange’s vision of communities based on mutual interdependence, equality of the sexes, local control of resources and markets, and the vital cultural life touches yearnings in many of us for lives that are more deeply connected to fundamental human needs. The Grange may no longer be able to provide the detailed patern for a life of reliable satisfactions; the world does not stand still. But the Grange formula, devised and given living form by people not markedly cleverer than ourselves, did work in many places for many decades, and that is ample occasion for hope. We should be grateful to Rose Marasco for having brought so much of this vital and instructive history to our attention. |