Artscape

Urban developments

By Claudine Isé

Matthew Messmer

Offering parallel views of contemporary urban life, an exhibition of printed works by Matthew Messmer and Joe Wirtheim hangs in adjacent galleries at ROY G BIV like two sides of the same coin.

Messmer's prints and photographs depict Japan's alienating culture of urban transit, while Wirtheim's screen prints function as modern-day propaganda pieces that call on city dwellers to fight sprawl, pollution and waste by living a greener life.

Variability is the Enemy of Quality intones the title of several serigraph and collage prints by Messmer. Their surfaces are multiply imprinted with the image of an anonymous Japanese businessman, his eyes glued to his cell phone.

In the next room, Wirtheim's buoyant posters employ an old-school, cut-and-paste aesthetic to combine pictures of bicycles, jarred preserves and vegetable gardens with uplifting slogans like "Grow All You Can" and "Plan to Plant This Year."

Joe Wirtheim

Messmer's perspective is certainly the more dystopian of the two. While a student at Denison University, he arranged a year-long study program at Japan's Waseda University to learn the art of Ukiyo-e, or woodblock printing.

Because his host family lived on the far outskirts of Tokyo, Messmer found himself riding the subway for four long hours each day. Rather than zone out, he used the time to study and photograph the behavior of his fellow commuters.

In white-collar businessmen (the Japanese call them "salarymen") dressed identically in neatly pressed suits and ties, Messmer found a symbol for corporate culture's rigorous uniformity, while the train schedule's relentless efficiency echoed the manufacturing industry's truism that predictability and sameness are the keys to success.

"I think subway signage is a big part of how systems exert authority over people," Messmer explained by phone from Chicago, where he's currently studying at the Art Institute. "In Japan, people are told where to stand on the platform, and they'll line up at exactly that spot, leaving only a subway door's width of room for the people coming off the trains."

Several of Messmer's photographs show individual Japanese dozing on the train or reading a book in an effort to create "a mental bubble" in which to hide when elbow-room is at a premium.

While Messmer shows us how urban transit systems can be refined to a point where commuters become automatons, Wirtheim, a self-described "eco-activist," creates agitprop posters that encourage people to think outside the urban grid.

Printed in harvest tones of ochre, olive and tomato on recyclable paper, Wirtheim's Victory Garden of Tomorrow! posters ask us to join in the fight for a greener world by riding bicycles, recycling and creating energy-efficient rooftop gardens of the sort that are cropping up in cities throughout the world, including Tokyo.

Made in editions of less than 20, Wirtheim's prints draw on the rhetoric and compositional styles of WWII-era poster advertisements, in particular the "World of Tomorrow" campaign for the 1939 World's Fair and the "Victory Gardens" effort spearheaded by the USDA, which called on Americans to dramatically slow their consumption of gas, food and other scarce resources during the war.

Speaking by phone from Portland, Oregon, where he recently relocated from Columbus, Wirtheim noted that the two campaigns offered competing visions of American consumerism. "'The World of Tomorrow' told us to kick back and consume and let the corporate institution service us. But shortly after that the message changed and became, what can you do for America?"

Wirtheim thinks the latter message is just as important today. "Mass media propaganda surrounds us anyway," he said, "so why not create new messages that ask us to do things that are good for ourselves and for society?"

Why not indeed? Maybe Wirtheim should think about covertly installing some of his posters in subways and buses. What better audience than a captive group of bored and tired people who have plenty of time to imagine bicycling home from work, enjoying the fresh air and savoring in advance the taste of homegrown veggies for dinner?

November 15, 2007

Copyright ? 2007 Columbus Alive, Inc. All rights reserved.