Mahanoy on My Mind

by Barry Blinderman

The thing I remember most about visiting Richard Cramer’s Philadelphia studio in the late 1970’s is the artist’s verbal and visual references to color and landscape, and his concomitant desire to translate the light, architecture and terrain of specific places into painting. Tall, thin, with a high-pitched voice and an accent reflecting his Wisconsin upbringing, Cramer is one of those obsessive few among contemporary artists who, like Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, believe that through the systematic refinement of color and line, one can open gateways to a primal mode of consciousness predating the separation of sensory pathways. It is ironic, then, that an artist who spent over a decade creating and cataloging 15,000 variations of color according to light level should choose a coal region – an area of interminable black and white – as the source for his latest body of work.

The "Mahanoy Plane" series takes its name from a town located along Route 81, in the heart of the eastern Pennsylvanian anthracite coal region. This is the land of the notorious Molly Maguire trials, where perpetually smoldering slag heaps on the sides of highways are constant reminders of the dark, soot-infused histories of child labor and union uprisings, of workers trammeled by the unstoppable wheel of freight and commerce. The color that dominates both the canvases and photos is iron oxide, or rust. Cramer, whose palette in the 1970s was influenced by childhood memories of iridescent bird feathers and reflections on the waters of Lake Winnebago, now reflects on the ravages of age and oxidation. Picturing he ruins of obsolescent technologies that point ultimately to our own entropic nature, Cramer takes us on a fictional travelogue of industrial life and leisure in the tri-state area: steel mill smokestacks in Homestead, Pennsylvania, an x-ray equipment company in Buffalo, New York, an amusement park ride in Wildwood, New Jersey, and dilapidated row houses in Mahanoy Plane and Girardville, Pennsylvania.

Just as earlier art took its cues from nature, modern art is informed by the changing shapes and colors of technology. Beginning with the smoke-spewing locomotives in Monet’s Gare St-Lazare paintings, the industrial merged with the natural – a landscape could never again be just about earth, water and sky. These days, many of us are willing to acknowledge that there is really no such thing as pure abstraction. We can no longer believe in the rarefied expression of an inner truth that is not in some way manifest in an outer experience increasingly modified by technology. The geometricization of the urban landscape parallels the history of geometric painting. Anyone who’s been to Wilkes-Barre, Scranton o Hazelton, Pennsylvania realizes that Franz Kline’s dynamic black and white paintings were not in fact the angst-ridden existential landscapes of a New Yorker – they were directly inspired by, and often titled after, the Pennsylvania railroads, steel mills and coal mines he grew up around and frequently returned to visit long after moving to New York.

While Kline pared his color scheme and composition down to raw essentials, Cramer employs the diptych format, the classic modernist signifier of duality, to pair a painting and a photocollage of equal size. (They are actually double-diptychs, with two stacked photographic images per panel.) The paintings are consistent in style with much of the artist’s work in the 1990’s particularly the Lower East Side series from a few years back. The photographic components both old and new: although he has never before exhibited work incorporating photography, Cramer shot the photos over the past twenty ears while teaching a landscape class on architectural and industrial forms in Schuylkill County locales such as Shenandoah, Pottsville, and Girardville. In most cases the upper image depicts an industrial ruin, with the lower scene picturing commercial or residential facades. The dialogue and mutual mimicry between the paired photographs and paintings neatly unifies the woks.

The artist also sets up a dynamic between two aging but resilient technologies: painting and energy-producing industry. These are linked by the most basic of human needs – for psychic and physical shelter and warmth. Coal mining, which dates back to third century China, still provides the major source of fuel for modern nuclear power plants. The physicality of painting persists and thrives among far more sophisticated digital imaging processes, a reminder that no matter how ethereal our onscreen lives are becoming, we still haven’t left the body and its attendant fluids and plumbing. More than ever, we seek handcrafted artifacts that measure the moments and miles of our experience. Painting, after all, is a sign of the hand, a marker of where we’ve been, a pathway created through the registering of a trace. In a way, these two-paneled works are postmodern momento mori. We are meat at the mercy of nature and decay.

Like Ed Paschke’s stylized characters, Cramer’s striated comical figures bear the markers of technology. Whereas Paschke references electronic impulses, Cramer situates his profiled heads within intricate webs of line resembling city maps or aerial view of landscape. These grotesque closeup faces, with baseball bat noses, distended lips and pencil-thin necks, seem swayed, battered, distorted, and even strangled by their dense surrounds. The cartoon is the contemporary equivalent of a totemic form. From Roman coin portraits of emperors to MTV’s Beavis (who always appears in profile and coincidentally resembles the face in Cramer’s Steeltown), the face drawn in profile gives us a direct, primal view with no duplication of features.

Cramer has been developing his repertory of cartoony characters since he began "Buzz Series" in 1981. His foray into the figurative signaled less a break from his decade-long investigation of minute color permutations than a return to the Ab Ex-fueled gestural abstraction he first practiced under the mentorship of Jack Tworkov in the 1950s. Cy Twombly’s elegant graffiti and Mark Tobey’s intricate webs of line are highly evident in the Mahanoy plan work, not to mention the compressed, edge-bursting compositions of de Kooning and Kline. Furthermore, Cramer’s process of making hundreds of automatic drawings to arrive at a single image to transfer onto canvas revives the Action Painters’ surrealist exercise.

Although Cramer has reduced his palette from thousands of hues to a few dozen, his lifelong romance with color still drives the current body of work, especially as an orchestrator of mood and flow between the cibarchrome photographs and the paintings. He creates poetic correspondences between strident cadmium reds, oranges and yellows on the left-hand panels and brick, rusted iron machinery, and garish signpainting in the right-hand photographs. Similarly, in terms of composition he calls our attention to the correlation between the modernist grid and the signposts of industry: piping, power lines and towers, cast iron railings, and smokestacks. In Wigland, for example, a henna-haired, purple-complexioned female with a nose like a proboscis peers out from behind yellow bars that paraphrase the upper photo’s elbowed tubing and the lower photo’s banks of bay windows. In Mahanoy Plane, the painting’s elegant spectral progression of green, red, orange, and mauve diagonals – evoking sound, heat, and other waveform energies – echoes the perspectival view of power lines in the upper companion photograph. Inner neural passageways and body heat seem to merge with the exoskeleton of technological progress. Here, as with his juxtapositions of ruined factories and run-down homes, Cramer reveals the hidden plumbing that links worker to workplace, tenement to factory – the insular squirrel-in-the-cage cycle of labor, leisure and consumption.

Barry Blinderman is Director of university Galleries, Illinois State, Normal and a curator, writer and lecturer on contemporary art.

Used with the permission of the author