Industry in art: Mitch Epstein

Previously: Impressionism, Sheeler.

In the fifty years it takes us to get from Sheeler to Mitch Epstein (which is about the same amount of time it took us to get from impressionism to Sheeler and the precisionists), we changed: Love Canal. Cleveland’s river caught fire. Superfund sites. The Soviet degradation of eastern Europe. Chernobyl. Climate change.

Epstein has lived through all this, and its impact on him shows in his work, most notably his American Power series, which started in 2003. [This is Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, 2004. It's in SFMOMA's collection.] Gone is the impressionist co-existence with industry, and gone is Sheeler’s awe. After being banished by Sheeler, people are back — but they’re hidden from our view. (There are people in a number of other ‘American Power’ pictures.)  The pollution that is so romanticized in impressionism — smoke from smokestacks melding into clouds — permeates everything in Amos. It’s Turner’s mist, only worse. The shadow of the tree in the foreground of the picture is sickly.

Epstein’s picture is foreboding, even scary. I’m tempted to yell into those houses, ‘Do you people realize…’ And I know that they do, and it’s a little bit heartbreaking.

I’m not sure exactly when in the 20th-century artists went from lionizing industry (think of all those heroic WPA-era pictures, or Margaret Bourke-White’s love of shiny, machined things) to being wary of it. In her book on earthworks Suzaan Boettger argues that earthworks are deeply influenced by the environmental movement, but that’s different. Time-wise though, it’s probably right around 1970 or so…