Susan Goethel Campbell at Network - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

One of the most enduring esthetic positions in Detroit art over the past three decades has been what could be termed (in this period of equivocating modifiers) "postindustrial neoromanticism." Inspired by the abandoned factories and moldering neighborhoods of the erstwhile Motor City, works in this style often reveal a deep diffidence toward the effects of modernity on the environment and its inhabirants. Among the most accomplished artists working in this vein is the printmaker Susan Goethel Campbell, whose charcoal and oil landscape drawings (all 1997) were on view this past winter.

Her recent work is a meditation on Detroit's Department of Public Works incinerator plant, a wastetreatment facility whose billowing emissions can be seen for miles over the city's low-rise skyline. The grouping is titled "Thirty-six Views of the Incinerator" after Hokusai's similarly named series of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji. Dominated by depictions of cloud formations and other atmospheric conditions of the Midwestern sky, the work can be read as a grittier rendition of the reveries of the American Impressionists, such as John Twatchman and Willard Leroy Metcalf, who were collected by Detroit railroad mogul Charles Lang Freer and who are well represented in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

A dual allusion, perhaps not entirely conscious on Campbell's part, can be perceived in a work such as Mnemosyne, a small vertical drawing that presents the tip of the incinerator's smokestack jutting into the bottom left corner with smudgy puffs of exhaust filling up the remainder of the picture plane. Named for the mother of the Muses, the drawing pays tribute to the iconic power, however troubling, of the incinerator as the inspiration for Campbell's project. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory as well, and the drawing indeed evokes one of the Detroit Institute's more noted paintings, Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket (ca. 1874).

Campbell's chosen mediums, charcoal and oil, do double duty. Besides conveying the dreariness of urban desolation in tones of black, white and gray, the materials by their very nature register the dirt and grime of the city and its effluvia. An even more significant doubling is metonymic: as an emblem of a throw-away society, the incinerator looms in these works as a memento mori of modernity's ruination, played out so resolutely in Detroit, in which all that was once solid has now melted into air.

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