The mad scientist

Robert ParkeHarrison's post-apocalyptic inventions

by Laura Addison

ROBERT PARKEHARRISON:
THE ARCHITECT'S BROTHER
Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000
Photographs by Robert ParkeHarrison
Text by W. S. Merwin
128 pages., 52 illustrations, $60

Robert ParkeHarrison is an inventor, both of primitive machines that would put Rube Goldberg to shame, and of fictive photographic tableaux that weave a tale of one man's poignant efforts to renew the natural world. The nameless protagonist in ParkeHarrison's photographs tries in vain to heal the wounds left on the landscape by the abuses of modern society. These photographs, which are poetic reveries on the perennial theme of man's relationship to nature, comprise the compelling book The Architect's Brother (Twin Palms, 2000), the artist's recently published first monograph.

A Worcester resident and art professor at the College of the Holy Cross, Robert ParkeHarrison brilliantly merges photography, sculpture, and performance in his artwork. Each mise en scène is carefully choreographed with the artist himself cast as the lead role, making use of fanciful props of his own invention. Drawing on the performative mode that has become prevalent in photography, ParkeHarrison collaborates with his wife, Shana, who is the presence behind the camera, as he acts out his tales before the lens. Refusing to be beholden to photography as a documentary practice, many contemporary artists utilize the medium to create a fictional reality. Some artists, from Cindy Sherman to Yasumasa Morimura, use performance before the camera to contest certain notions of identity. ParkeHarrison's fabricated world, in contrast, is centered around environmental issues. Set in the future, in a post-apocalyptic space that suffers the legacy of our destructive civilization, the scenes hearken back to an era when invention was the key to harnessing nature's power. Only this time, that scientific inquiry is used for the world's salvation rather than to its detriment.

Robert ParkeHarrison opts to play the main character because the performance constitutes his art as much as the photograph that is the end result. "I am the character in the images," he explains, "because the making of the images is an expressive and performative approach for me, where the art-making process is physical and theatrical. When I am the character in the images, I strive to be universal -- a stand-in for humanity." As the artist-as-protagonist wends his way through his journey of renewal, in his pinstripe suit and with ingenuity as his only companion, he employs makeshift contraptions to produce clouds, rain, and wind. He patches the sky with a hammer and nails and mends a rift in the earth with a larger-than-life needle and thread. He serenades the trees with horn or violin, and listens to the earth's laments with an ear trumpet. And, repeatedly, he attempts to build flying machines, perhaps as a metaphor for human aspiration, or perhaps as a last resort to escape the bleak existence offered by a maimed planet, like a pilgrim in search of an Edenic promised land.

Not surprisingly, given the narrative nature of his work, ParkeHarrison is influenced by literature, particularly existentialism and texts heavily laden with surrealist imagery and a sense of alienation. He also cites Native American myths and the art and philosophies of Joseph Beuys as inspirations. We can discern in ParkeHarrison's work an affinity with Beuys's desire to encourage social and environmental change through art, as well as this seminal German artist's emphasis on an interdisciplinary and often performance-based approach to art. At the same time, it would not be far-fetched to surmise that, as a relative newcomer to New England, ParkeHarrison's work will come to reflect the philosophies of American Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, in whose writings the relationship between man, nature, and "the machine" was being continually negotiated.

The Architect's Brother assembles seven chapters of ParkeHarrison's epic narrative. With series titles such as "Exhausted Globe," "Promisedland," and "Earth Elegies," the continuity of ParkeHarrison's subject matter over the years becomes evident. The sense of scale of ParkeHarrison's original works, many of which are quite large, is often lost in reproduction, but the narrative nature of this imagery lends itself beautifully to book form. The effective sequencing of the images in this elegantly produced tome reflects the crescendos and decrescendos of the drama played out before the viewer, who alternately feels hope and despair in the face of the protagonist's struggle.

Accompanying the images in the book is an excerpt from renowned poet W. S. Merwin's short story "Unchopping a Tree," in which the narrator struggles with the impossible task of reversing a lamentable fait accompli. The text, while not a direct influence on any of ParkeHarrison's scenes, presents an analogous circumstance in which the creators' respective characters confront this same impossible mission of "undoing." As ParkeHarrison explains, "I find great kinship with the character in this story, who futilely tries to rebuild a chopped-down tree." This choice of text -- one which complements the imagery rather than spelling out a particular interpretation or cooing effusive praise for the genius of an artist -- is a refreshing alternative to the usual academic essay that leaves you without the need or desire to search for your own meaning in the work. In fact, ParkeHarrison prefers leaving his work open to individual interpretation, underscoring the "poetic and metaphorical" over the literal. Ambiguity and open-endedness, after all, are qualities shared by all great narratives.