AMERICAN GOTHIC:
The classic painting gets a modern
and macabre
update from photographer and filmmaker Carlos Batts.
By Greg Reifsteck
If you put Matthew Barney and
Helmut Newton’s masterpieces through
a meat grinder -
and seasoned it with the Byzantine elegance of Duccio - the
result would be the
disturbing Gothic
elegance of Carlos Batts’s work.
Los Angeles-based Batts could be
called the collision of a fetish photographer and a collagist.
His latest project is a book and CD compilation ($29.95;
Scapegoat Publishing)
and companion film
($24.95, Cult Epics) both titled American
Gothic. The simultaneous
June releases are all a rethinking
of Charles Wood’s classic 1930s painting on
its 75th anniversary. A
primary example of Regionalism,
the original painting was praised as a
glorification of the moral virtue of
rural America and for its
ambiguous mixture of praise and satire.
“I probably saw the painting for
the first time in high school, when I was 16 or 17,” says Batts.
“But, what happened is, very recently, my work kind of incorporates science
fiction, horror and sexual
themes, and it’s all sewn together. I also have a lot of politics, and culture
and race that I sneak in there.
So, I would say about two years ago, I was thinking about how as a photographer
you can reinterpret a
painting. You know, challenge the masters, or challenge a painting, like Andy
Warhol did.”
Batts chose to crash head on with
the legendary painting of an old bespectacled and balding
man grasping his pitchfork and staring right at us in vain. His trusty, or to
some curmudgeonly, wife,
stands stoically by his side, staring off into space.
“I thought what if I made a
film about the painting? But, I also researched the history of the
painting, which at the time was supposed to exemplify the state of America:
Manifest Destiny, wide-
open
farmland, vast, fertile,” says Batts. “America isn’t like that now. Even if
you look at 1930, when
the
painting came out, the number of lynchings, the crime and murder, these were
things that existed
in America
all the time. I mean it was never like white beautiful.”
Batts’s modern take on the
painting is a Gothic nightmare trying to make classic art accessible
to the Danzig and Bauhaus crowd. He does this by delving deeper into the
shocking underbelly of what
might have been going on behind the scenes of Wood’s brush strokes. After a
title screen blaring the
song “Day of the Dead” by the death metal maestros Dog Fashion Disco, Batts lays down
the story for
the
viewer in his introduction.
“It turns out the old man with
the pitchfork offed his wife the day before the painting was finished,
and the daughter was left with multiple personality disorder as a result.”
It all amounts to something
pretty trippy, and pretty grim; but extremely thought provoking.
Batts’s book and film are not only joined at the gyrating hip, but also at the
flicking tongue, and at many
moments, the groin. The printed volume is a true fetish photography piece with
Newton-esque legs and
lips. But the film takes the viewer on a much more confusing and confounding
journey.
“I purposely try to be thoughtful about what is
horrific. It’s not gore, or how much you show,
it’s about how you make people feel. That’s what makes a really good horror
movie. So I wanted to
go with a very subtle way of telling the story,” says Batts of his stylistic
approach. “My American Gothic
is told in the middle of the story. A lot of short films try to fit a complete
movie in five minutes or ten
minutes
or twenty-five minutes. The way I approached this, I wanted to tell the story of
the old man in
purgatory.
I never wanted to show him killing his wife, or any act of violence, just his
turmoil. It’s 25
minutes of him
sitting in purgatory trying to figure out if he’s in the painting, or how he’s
going to get
out of there."
But make no mistake:
however subtle, the politics of the day are in there peppered about. Gone
is the straightforward, satirical approach Wood used in the original. Enter the
Midwestern angst and
cynicism,
which is splattered about thusly, making for a very critical statement about the
nadir in our
national allegiance.
“I started thinking about the
political climate in America and the division that has happened. So
many
of my ideas have been so visceral and personal. But I wanted my work to exist
in a context that
all people
could understand,” says Batts.
And there is no better time, than
in the media circus aftermath of the Pope’s death, for Batts make
a stand on the religious state of our times.
“We are slowly dividing by
religion and conservatism, but an unrealistic religion and an unrealistic
conservatism. I’m not challenging anyone’s faith. I have faith and my wife has
faith. My work is not mean
to be blasphemous, but there is a better way for us to communicate in 2005. Our
country shouldn’t be so
polarized. So I wanted to take a painting and apply a horrific theme to it, in
a very artistic and evil way,”
insists Batts.
The result is a pulverizing clash of images that never let
up as they fly though the screen. The
smoothest are
the powerful animated collages that are akin to Julie Taymor on lithium. They
are an
imaginative colorful
smattering thrusting us head long into the old man and woman’s family histories.
Batts also seems to be dead set
on making the spectator a true fetishistic voyeur, exploring the
beast that bellows inside of the everyday flag-waving patriotic innocent with
live action tapestries. These
do seem a bit overlong at times, just like in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster
series. But where Batts comes
out ahead is in his imaginative use of repetition. This is prevalent
especially in the climactic scene where
the
old man paints his body over and over again in the color red. At first it seems
silly, but Batts makes
sure to
meander on the image long enough until it suddenly becomes both disturbing and
macabre.
The entire undertaking of the
American Gothic project is a fever dream of epic proportions that
acts as a true calling card for a promising young artist. He has that wonderful
brave balance of grimness
and playfulness that the early Tim Burton had with Frankenweenie and
Edward Scissorhands. The
DVD includes a few of Batts’s earlier short projects that aren’t as sharp
compared to this new spectacle.
But you can see where his early inspirations, while attending the Broadcasting
Institute of Maryland,
started
to gel.
