Episode 58: Matthew Fluharty - Art of the Rural - Chapter 2

Matthew Fulharty - Art of the Rural - Chapter 2

[: 00:00:00

It was, um, like a moment of really deep awareness. For me, part of my practice is within a Zen tradition, and I could describe it any number of ways in that way, but it was a moment, a really powerful moment for me. I just, like, I pulled over and when I had stopped heaving and tears like it, it just was a moment that Rilke says this in his poem The Archaic Torso of Apollo.

Just that moment where you realize that there's no place that does not see you, you must change your life. And that really was the point where I just started to get a little more serious about what are the connections here between this thing I'm studying and the places I'm from that I value.

[: 00:01:11

This is Change the Story, Change the World, my name is Bill Cleveland.

Part Four: Nostalgia

I'm hearing two things coming from you. One of them is something I think that America is really struggling with now, which is: What's our story? And, What are the parts of my story that are connected to your story that we can honor and not feel defensive about?

And the other one is a recognition that this stuff is all there, and we don't have to decorate it. We don't have to get special lighting for it. We don't have to create an edifice around it. We don't have to make it any more precious or any more hard edge than it already is. And you've touched on this in your writing about nostalgia and the role it plays in the dueling, bifurcated stories we're telling ourselves here in America about our pastoral past. With one being the yearning voice, you know, of a home place, the geographies of loving the land and its history, and the and the other kind of heroic myth of loss and victimhood and resentment -- the kind of thing I experienced in extremis in Serbia during the time of Slobodan Milosevic. Could you say more about that?

[: 00:03:03

It's, it's interesting like. I, for our work with High Visibility, which is a collaboration with the Plains Art Museum and creativity amongst Native Americans. And we've done an exhibition, and a newspaper publication, and a podcast. And it's interesting how in talking with a lot of artists, a lot of artists who are working beyond the city, like they're really inhabiting this.

t's a space truly, like since: 2016

Yes. And that's, that's a total meta narrative on my relationship to our farm too. It's just, there's so many different things on the scales, but man, there's a space there for those two different kinds of nostalgia and how an artist can create a piece that makes us think about them both simultaneously.

And the example that I would use that has felt just like really personally significant to my experience. There's a piece in the initial High Visibility show by a stain glass and seal sculptor, primarily named Carl Unnasch who is from Pilot Mound in southern central Minnesota. And a lot of his work deals really directly with just everyday life in the world, (T) places he knows well, which is everyday just vernacular culture, you know, raising food, hunting, recreation, the buildings that, that folks find in those regions. And the piece that he contributed to high visibility was a stained glass and steel sculpture, probably eight feet, eight feet by, about five feet. Its a sculpture of a crushed Busch Light can, and the sculpture, it wasn't realistic. The Bush Light logo, it shape in such way. You have to sit with it to understand what it is. You can see it's a crush thing, but what is it?

It's such a complex and troubling mixture of those two things. Because just to be honest, for myself too, I'm, Bush Light is a nostalgic object for me. My experiences of Busch Light are with people in rural regions like our farm and a lot of folks in the Midwes. Like I know that's the thing for folks, it occupies that space.

[: 00:05:35

[00:05:46] MF: You know you're in a rural place when you see the crushed Busch can on the side of the road and so like we hold it really near and dear as this is this. You know where you are. You know who you are when you're having it, but then folks just throw it away so easily. So it becomes this totally other kind of object. And this is just me and my brain. But I mean, when January 6th went down, like that was the work of art I thought about the most. For that reason that there's, there was just like within that piece, this really deep emotional interior sense of a bunch of unresolved emotions.

[: 00:06:18

[00:06:29] Karl Unnasch: I had self-quarantined for two weeks after I get back from California, so I got busy and cleaned and built and worked on my house and made more. But also, I had to move my ass and get away from the place.

So up the country, I go for a walk. As I'm walking, I may as well make myself useful. I get busy getting busy, so I pick up trash as I go. I got back and I noticed that. It was mostly Bush light kids. I was like, Okay, this means something. Let's think about it. Couple whiskeys later. I think, you know what? That's the preferred beverage of the people that I'm familiar with in my region. I'm like, Hmm.

And then I got to thinking about why. That's the thing we do as artists. So I start thinking about why. Well, it's cheap for the buzz, but at the same time it's, you know, pretty near water, so, you can drink quite a few and still say you're drinking, and not driving the ditch. You know, these people throwing these out are, are booze cruising, just like we all grew up doing. However, I can honestly say I've never thrown a can outta a window. You throw it into the back of the truck, and then they up in the back.

So I started taking pictures of them before I pick them up. So, they start becoming my little truffles, my own little morel mushrooms, my own little noms out in the woods. And everyone is different too. I've been posting one on Instagram per day since I started doing that, uh, as of today, I think I'm up to 308.

And then I started doing the piece. I started looking at the crushed caning, a fetishized object from my culture, if I could say that. But yet it's a chunk of litter that pisses me off. But yet, It's also a corporate item for someone to make more money off, us, you know, poor folk out in the country. And yet, it's also a beautiful object, and yet, it's a malleable object, and yet, it could provide inspiration, and yet, I can still turn that into this dynamic concept of what it is that I'm am-yetting about. So I bought a 30 pack of Bush light, got a friend to come over, and I started making maquettes in the studio, like you do.

And I got to thinking about one of my favorite human figure-based sculptures, The Dying Gaul. It's been thinking about a rebellious dying culture that just will not give up, which is a lot of what we see coming from the culture that I'm in. This white, misogynist, patriarchal culture is dying thing. Thank God! So my commentary on that is the people that I see around me that are digging in with their tooth and nail, to not let go of this nostalgia. They are the new Dying Gauls, and this is a perfect representation.

So, I considered the shape and form of this Viking biker type of a vandal figure, dying yet, still trying to push away from gravity in one last effort. How can I transfer that to the shape of a crushed beer can? And, I can definitively say it took a 30 pack of Busch Lite in order to make a really cool sculpture.

[: 00:09:58

That feels like spiritually, where I am,

[: 00:10:32

So, imagine that somebody's listening to this and really, like your uncle is looking for a concrete example of how this manifests and what happens when it does. Is there a story given your experience in various communities that, that you feel personifies the complex elements of your work and its impact.

[: 00:11:01

So, it has this really uncertain designation because it feels rural in the way that a rural town with a single factory or something would feel. But it's across the river from a major American city and has been a site for Monsanto's work. At various points, that factory had been really crucial in building the components for Agent Orange and any number of things. So you have this small community that has three Superfund sites in it has a reputation throughout the entire region as being a sewer.

Basically, that's the sort of popular cultural association of Sauget. So, if it was written about, it was written about in a very one-dimensional way, in a way of talking about a community destroyed by industry, as if there was not generational knowledge there, cultural practices there, as if people didn't get together at the diner in Sauget and have lunch every day. And the hamburgers at that diner are incredible.

There's all this stuff there, like human beings are living lives. Mm-hmm. . And the example that I would use to that question about the complexity is when we brought the newspaper to Sauget. We had a, an event that basically was just a cookout. The Diner grilled up a bunch of hamburgers and hot dogs, and we were in Sauget city Hall in the room where the city council would meet, which also is like the big event space for this town.

And we had the newspapers, and when folks gather in City Hall, behind them is a mural. And it's a mural of all of the various industrial practices that happened in Sauget for the last 80 years. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. And that mural, in and of itself, is really complicated because a lot of folks in that community have passed from cancer, all, it's such a challenging place to live environmentally.

And one of the, the town elders was in the space, and you know, we didn't ask this community elder to do this, but he just went up there and narrated those companies. And through the way that he just talked about the history of the place, it was really complex cuz it wasn't a rah rah story about how this town has always supported American industry. It didn't have a political angle to it, it, it just talked about what happened, and the experiences that folks had living through that. And that story ended then in a place of ambiguity, which I never would've expected.

And it didn't end with the declaration, but just like a question of what? What's gonna come next? What are we gonna do together? That was a really powerful moment. For me, it's a space I think a lot of folks in the region would not have even given folks the agency to articulate in Sauget. And if folks came to this cookout, they were interested in like, what the heck was happening with this newspaper.

uget is gonna be a hundred in: 2026

But I think that's prob, that is probably the example that jumps to my mind first, only because I think, I think to a lot of folks would seem really unlikely that something like that could occur in that kind of space. But that's really, that was for me, one of the most powerful moments in my work with Art of the World.

[: 00:15:07

And you don't draw the easy conclusion from that. The other one is just a reference: The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. And Wing Luke is devoted to the history of an Asian life in Seattle, which is to a large extent was buried, ignored, or distorted. And the guy who took over the creation of the Museum, he was a journalist, so he was not a museum professional, and his approach was, "Well, I just do what I do, you know, the research is to go ask, have you got anything going on that might be interesting for this museum?" And they had years and years and years of stuff that came out of people's attics that actually ended up as the major exhibitions that they have had over decades.

And it, it was basically a gigantic body of story just straining to be expressed. And, and as you have said, you start with the artifact. "I got this from my attic." And you can go back, at least in that case, you can go back 600 years to the stories of these families that started in, in Vietnam or China or Japan. And the same thing is there, you know those books are the portal into the dense complex, sometimes disturbing history of those communities. That's just what rose up for me.

[: 00:17:08

We have a lack of institutions. , we know we'll be there for more than one generation. Mm-hmm. , this is a way of thinking about that, that I definitely owe that perspective to Carlton Turner and Dudley Cocke for sure.

[: 00:18:01

[00:18:37] MF: Yeah, oh, absolutely.

[: 00:18:40

Now, to switch channels rather abruptly. I have a rather strange question for you. "Family Video?" Would you care to comment?

[: 00:18:57

[00:19:09] BC: So, anybody listening, Matthew has an Instagram account and there's an amazing group of photos and poetry, and, and most of the photos are one offs, but there is a group of photos of various angles on a big giant neon sign that says "Family Video." So, it just said to me, "Oh, there's something going on here."

[: 00:19:35

There's a couple other projects like that and I was really influenced by a book, it's called Everything Sings, by Dennis Wood. Dennis Wood calls himself a rebel cartographer, and it's an entire book about just his neighborhood in a town in North Carolina. And what really challenged me and really shook me was that his aesthetic was like:

"I can show you what the map of this community looks like. I can show you the aerial bird's eye with the roads and the property lines and all that, or I can show you all of these other ways of what life is like in that community. I can show it to you visually."

And so, Everything Sings is visual representations of the community based on where are the streetlights and how far does the light radiate? What did every Halloween jacko' lantern look like in a single year in this neighborhood? Like all of these different ways, like, I mean, it goes back to the everyday life, like these things that we can brush over a million times. But there are the keys to us understanding that deeper interior emotional resonance about where we are.

And so, I had moved to Winona having loved that book for a couple years. And really what kicked it off was like there was one day where I had to take my car in to the shop to get the tires changed or something like that, and I walked all the way down there and dropped it off. And got all the way back home and realized I had left the keys to my house in the car. And I walked back and, on the way, walking back the second time, I noticed the Family Video.

Family Video is formally a chain of, it's like a Blockbuster, largely in the mid Midwest. I think a lot of Family Videos have closed and maybe aren't many left at this point. But anyway, I just took a photo of it. It looked kind of beautiful in the snow, and the parking lot was interesting. It leads to questions around, what was that land used for before?

Then you can trace that all the way back to settler colonialism and. Suddenly a rental video parking lot takes on a whole resonance it didn't before. And what that's space opened up for me was, it was really intense for about a year where I basically, I would go at least once a week and photograph that building or the parking lot from a different angle to keep refreshing that feeling of just de familiarizing myself to, to that place.

And it's wild, like we're talking about those diner conversations, like what that opens up. And Winona is a small enough town that people began to see that I was the person photographing Family Video. You hear from folks who worked in that building when it was a Burger King who worked in there. Like behind there was an arm Army ROTC building. It was pipe bombed once -- like all of these connective stories come into view. It was even a rogue Burger King after the owners of the building lost their Burger King franchise. And they were selling like unmarked, Burger King whoppers in white bags.

These are the things, it's just beautiful, like how these stories all come together, but it really taught me something. It got a lot more interesting, and it got way deeper the longer I did it. That's really what that work taught me, and so I've applied that in, in the creative work. It's mostly private. I just like, I literally do have this archive of the snow piles in my community. You know, I, at some point I will make an impassioned argument for the snow pile as a work of art, as a sculpture.

It'll ... Some comedic form that'll take shape, but just like these things that are all around us that if I'm just really focused on getting to the grocery store, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna see it. But then, somebody comes along, and it's seen, and I'm so grateful you brought up, because when the Family Video closed, I made some connections with the folks who worked there. And, I have have some of the material from inside the store. Like I have the training DVD feel,

[: 00:23:26

[00:23:34] MF: I have those, I have the faux director’s chair the employees would sit in and it's definitely a thing I wanna work on as a slow burn.

But what Family Video can lead me back to, in this larger kind of cultural conversation that we have, was that lesson around the duration. And an artist that I really love, his name is On Kawara. He was a conceptual artist working primarily outta New York City. He would send a postcard to someone every single morning that simply would say, "I woke up at...", or I" went to sleep at", you know, in my own sort of... the analogous sort of practice I have in um, Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

d what it led me to, in early: 2016

Cause a large part of my work is traveling and I always would, of course, you get the newspaper, you get the newspaper in the community, and you get it at the Casey's or the Quick Trip or the Interstate gas station. It's just, there's great pleasure and great knowledge inside of it. But Family Video really is a project that is a micro version of this way more ex in depth, an insightful and/or, absolutely ridiculous project, I believe. I believe it has a lot of value, but it could also be ridiculous where I've archived at this point, thousands of photographs from rural newspapers. They're in archival boxes, and another part of this room. I feel like this is within the Sauget story, but also just in so much of your work. Part of the reason that we're asking questions and listening to stories and sharing those stories in various forms is because we believe that they have the power to change community and to change our sense of self, but also because they will be lost unless we do.

And what my, my grandma, who I mentioned, also wrote for the newspaper, my grandpa wrote for a newspaper, he was a sportswriter, and rural journalism right now is in a state of absolute crisis. And there's a certain part of like conversation about visual culture that talks about the black and white photo postcard of the early 20th century that really existed from the teens through the thirties.

nt that's gone. And, in early: 2016

And it became clear to me that newspaper photography, which is in some respects, the most discredited form of photography in the academy, that, that’s gonna be the place where we go to ask what happened, where, what was the visual record of the change that we were encountering and that's how I started. It's an archive of physical prints and they're from the newspaper. And in some cases, I believe may be the only existing examples of some of these photographs. So, it's a thing that maybe started as an art project, but is an archive.

And Bill you'll appreciate this. Like I started archiving those images against images that, of rural, non-urban places that were appearing in the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. And the difference between those two image sets is, like it, to me it tells the story of the last five years with so much complexity in depth. So much complexity, in depth that I think is missing, still missing in how we're talking about this problem,

[: 00:27:28

So, there you've just built a bridge to one, one of my most persistent questions of the last probably ten years, and with increasing intensity in the five years --- is our ability to to be different and be okay with it. We're built on difference. And so where's the okay part come from? It's interesting, I was really attracted to archeology when I was a kid.

[: 00:27:57

[00:27:57] BC: And it was, the part that I was most interested in was the guys and the women in the trenches with the brushes and the layers, right? And how they had to pay attention to that and be delicate with it all. Mm. And then every once in a while, find a thing and then figure out what the heck that's all about.

So I've been thinking about modern life as if it's archeology. The layers are getting covered over much more quickly. So, if we're digging, we're gonna find fifteen chapters where once there was three, you know, in the layers. And the whole story about the newspaper photographs and the Wall Street Journal photographs, those are two different diggings in two different places, and archeologists come up with this all the time.

"Oh my God. We got contradictory stories here that the land is telling us.", right? Here's a catastrophe. Here's this long period of multilayered complexity, one on top of another. And how do you read these together? That's a skillset, and to my mind, we're more and more in a world where the data is, oh, available, but who's translating?

And one of the groups of people that need to start rolling up their sleeves are artists who are often seeing the dots that others aren't. Or just have a skillset that says, “Oh, here are the metaphors that are emerging here, and let's go down that road. Let's find how those things connect and let's make it so that other people can look at it and go, I recognize it, but, but I've never lived in that place before.” And , “I don't even know this story, but I recognize this pattern in the world. I recognize that yearning to be with that brush and uncover the thing. And I don't like not knowing where I've been cuz I'm, It makes me feel lost.”

And I think one of the things we're experiencing is more and more people who either, indirectly, or directly, are looking at a map and they can't read it, or they've lost their map, or they can't see the horizon and they're scared. And humans don't do real well when a lot of us get scared together. We're really funky with our with each other that way. And so keep taking this photographs and put them together. I could see them already juxtaposed and with a thing above. It says, "What does this say to you?"

[: 00:30:34

So, like I, I've been monitoring the Wall Street Journal since the market collapsed in late March of last year, just to see what is the representation here? And in many respects, the Wall Street Journal's representation of rural places, I feel is like profoundly honest. These are sites of extraction for businesses. They are sites that relate to car carbon sequestration. Like the layers. You're talking about, these metaphors. But then there is the New York Times. I subscribe to it. I am grateful it comes every day. But it's much more complicated for the New York Times, because the New York Times also seeks to articulate a wide cultural mandate.

And there was, there's a really in-depth story about a community 30 minutes east of Salt Lake City in yesterday's paper that is running out of water. You have stories like that. You have stories that like the perennial story about like: "How are rural people voting? -- like every five weeks approach, or there stories about Trump country and, the roots of the insurrection on January 6th.

Mm-hmm. in and of themselves. Those are fine. To be honest, out of the five years I've been doing this project only a few times has the arts and cultural section covered a project working outside of the city. So the preeminent arts and culture section in our most important newspaper simply does not cover any arts and cultural material. Save very few pieces occasionally that are coming out about Indian country. But it's a vacuum and we ask ourselves why we have this geographic political chasm right now. It is one of the really clear indicators of it to me, but not out of malice. I think this is what I love about the archeological image is that like it is at one level, deeply psychological and it's learned.

[: 00:32:53

I'm kind of reminded of my friend, Judy Baca, the muralist and activist who came to this small rural town in the Central Valley of California and got all the kids in the community to interview their parents and grandparents and have them share the hard and often really contradictory stories that have defined grower/farm worker life and history there in the heart of America's breadbasket over the last century.

And you know, the mural they produced was not about the story, but was about a lot of stories juxtaposed next to, on top of, nearby each other on the wall. So, that there was, you know, no single-voice, authoritative version of that contested history, but in fact a recognition, and hopefully, a learning from both the harmony and the dissonance of all those layers appearing together.

[: 00:34:24

[00:34:43] BC: Absolutely. You just boiled it down. You know, it's hard to learn if your expectations clog your ears and fog your visions. You can't learn if you think you already know the answer, which is why, uh, curiosity and respect and humility that are at the center of what you do matters so much. Thanks. Thanks for that distilled wisdom. And Matthew, thank you so much for spending this time. I really appreciate it. Oh,

[: 00:35:14

[00:35:17] BC: Take it easy.

[: 00:35:18

[00:35:20] BC: Well, thank you listeners for spending time with us here in this virtual pod universe, which we are very aware is a crowded space competing for your time.

If you do like what we've been up to for the past two years, we would love for you to join us in the growing Change the Story Community by subscribing to the show via your podcast provider, sharing the show with your friends and colleagues, and if you wanna learn more about arts and community change around the world, avail yourself free of charge of our Change the Story Collection of episodes on specific subjects like: public safety, education, organizing, art and medicine, and racial justice, which you can find at the Center for the Study of Art and community's website, www.Artandcommunity.com, under the podcast tab or via the link in our show notes.

Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art & Community. It's written and hosted by me, Bill Cleveland. Our theme and soundscape are by the stupendously talented Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our sound effects come from freesound.com and our inspiration rises up from the spectral and lurking presence of Uke235. If you have any comments to share or suggestions for guests, drop us a line at CSAC@ artandcommunity.com. Until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.