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January/February 2004
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Are We There Yet?Courtney Mallen
|  Mecca, 2001, cibachrome � Mark Mann Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
| In
2000’s best-selling expose, Fast Food Nation,
style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Eric Schlosser documented and
analyzed the rise and cultural integration of the All-American fast food
restaurant experience. At the same time that Americans were being sold on the
cheap, easy way to take your family “out to dinner,” they were also being sold
on the idea of the “family vacation.” In the same mode as Schlosser, who starts
by telling American Dream-like stories of fast food giants and their suppliers
and in the same tone describes the negative human costs, Mark Mann’s
large-scale digitally altered photographs expose a world of family travel that
is attractive in concept but ultimately leaves the travelers unfulfilled and
spiritually lost.
Are
We There Yet?,
the second exhibit of photographs of appropriated travel postcards from the
1960’s and 1970’s, expands the themes of Mann’s exhibit a year ago. In an
artist’s statement on this earlier series, Mann writes: “It has been my three
year pursuit to visually express the ironic, irrational and sometimes pathetic
elements of the human condition….” One of the more irrational and pathetic
American hopes has long been the weeklong “family vacation” as a panacea for
the deeper spiritual failings of the family unit. The futility of these hopes
is summed up in Mecca (2001), arguably the hardest-hitting image of the series. The image
is sadly humorous, showing a husband and wife dwarfed by a giant two-story
motel gazing up at the signs proclaiming it to be the Mecca Motel. The huge
bags the travelers carry implies a long journey since the journey to the
Islamic Mecca is supposed to take place only after an intense spiritual
preparation., As in most of the work, the scale of the attraction in relation
to the travelers is disproportional.
The dangerous nature of the quick-fix vacation is
abstractly explored in such works as Long Highway
style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> (2002), in which sheeplike
families take a tour on a two-lane highway through a foreboding forest. Dark,
muddy-colored trees loom over the brightly colored families while the
pixelation prevalent in all of the works lends a documentary feel to the piece.
One can almost hear disdainful commentators explaining the follow-the-leader
mentality of the group being led into a harsh Nature. Log Jam
style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> (2001) depicts a solitary family
marooned in a sea of immense floating logs, at a pseudo-rustic tourist
attraction. The family, a classic nuclear setup of Mom, Pop, Sis, and Junior,
slumps haplessly on their own log. A silo and processing house loom in the
background as the only other (unattractive) attractions.
Mann chooses to show the isolation of individuals within
the family unit quite literally such as in Lifesaver
style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>(2001). A young girl in bathing
suit sits expectantly on one double bed in a sickeningly orange-hued room with
no other family member in sight. The matching-toned carpet and bedspreads give
the room a feel more of a hospital than a family bonding space. Similarly, a
lone boy stands on a stepstool in Screen (2001), dressed for swimming but mesmerized by a
picture of the same beach outside his window on TV in a spacious, sparse hotel
room. Perhaps the set has more reality to him than the impersonal room.
While the arrangement of the large photos on the walls was not true to a
narrative thread one could glean from the selected pieces, Mann’s dissection
and analysis of the quick-fix American family vacation was thorough and
thoughtful. The use of vintage imagery is a reminder of how little the
prepackaged vacation as fix-it has come. The viewer recognizes these images as
differing only in clothing style from similar brochures one can pick up at any
rest stop on an interstate highway. In the same way that the Fast Food Nation
continues to looks for cheap physical nourishment at a high human cost, Mann’s
Vacation Nation ends up constantly searching for something other than the Mecca
Hotel.
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