Finding a nameless source’s review of The Lizard online, I read about how I should interpret Gabriele Rossi’s outsized publication published by Deadbeat Club. In its summation, the author points out several pictures from the book from which they wax lyrical about the sublime qualities of the photographs from the position of a non-American, likely unfamiliar with how the American sublime, manifest destiny and how the history of America is represented in its varying traditions. To show the sublime of America, one must first be held hostage to it in its vastness, its terrain, however hospitable. In many ways, the sublime suggestion is a perfect antidote to what I see in Rossi’s book. It is not a book of sublime pictures. It is decidedly against these measures. The horizon lines in his images are often held looking downward, hardly a way to emphasize the artist’s small place, genuflecting before the throne of the God who builds mountains upwards, not downward as if to suggest the Bridal Falls as a drain and not a sonorous tidal source that it would be seen as from the point of sublime picture-making.
Instead of a sublime landscape that acts as a catalyst for how we shorthand artistic genre-fication and category building, I might opine that what we see in Rossi’s pictures is quite a bit of nothingness, an empty promise and the net result of the banality that most of the country offers to anyone who has lived outside of the confines of its cities. As a Midwesterner by birth, I can find some allegory in Rossi’s book. I see the artist navigating a desolate landscape that eschews the promise of Godliness for that of its mundane human scale. One does not dwell in grandeur, as is the promise of the sublime, but is somewhat lost in the nothingness that the country has been offering, hollowed out, captured by corporate greed, limited less by its tenuous association to making land navigable than it is to wallowing in its soul-less blunders and unsafe infrastructure, a continued discord between the natural world (created by God, allegedly) and the constant thirst for petrol, concrete, and other forms of short-sighted investment. Reclamation feels imminent in Rossi’s photos-almost as if at any point, and in quick succession, the land that supports America and the cheap cleaving of its natural land can be returned to the even greater green nothingness that it fought to claim and alter.
Invoking Robert Adams would be a misstep, but in defense of common association, one could look, as has been suggested in the same article at Mark Ruwedel, whose Westward the Course of Empire (Yale University Art Gallery, 2008, precisely, reacts to the nothingness and the hollowed out spiritual determination of America’s present in its unflattering, even faltering form. Whereas Ruwedel often traveled along Western Train rails, Rossi, in the spirit of the age, travels and examines the car and the infrastructure it must follow to make his images. Ashen, sullen, and beaten result illuminated less about the America of people than it does of America, an object of outsider expectational letdown. You can almost feel Rossi in the images. Previously, a profound vision of America was found on road trips; however, taciturn its image. The reality of its banal form has quietly shattered this. One could even suggest a Frankish pursuit in Rossi’s images. Still, even that, and the romantic part of Frank that allowed him to Keep Going, is hammer smashed into a type of oblivion, of doubt, and the result is a listless series of observations.
What keeps me going when looking at Rossi’s book is the potential critique of the land rather than the people of America, who are purposefully absent. It is fascinating that someone would take the time to articulate this vision of America with its leaden pulse and its dull gleam through dirty windows. The fact that it does not take easy subject matter for its content and does not simply imply the American road trip as a motif is worthy of note. Whereas I find the format unnecessarily large for what the book is trying to accomplish, particularly with the size of images not using most of the page, I can mingle with its aims to suggest scale or a scale failure in this design choice. It is, afterall, impossible (hence the retrench against the sublime) to photographically illustrate something so vast. Rossi’s observations show that there is more than the land at stake. Homes and dwellings feature but are somewhat overshadowed by the mass of America and its terrain, used smartly to describe its condition, less about God, but more about its physicality and heft. As a soft critique of the perception of America, The Lizard exceeds, in a discussion about its sublimity, it would be best to look elsewhere.
