ARTIST STATEMENT

October 2000

I started photographing Route 66 about a year and a half ago. Why such sudden interest in Route 66 as subject matter? The re-opening of the Chain of Rocks bridge as a pedestrian walkway intrigued me. I started paying attention to anything I heard about Route 66 in the media and doing a little reading. I realized that I had been traveling on remnants of Route 66 for most of my life. I grew up in Florissant. A great many of the places I needed to go were accessed by way of Lindbergh, Dunn Road, or 270. Later I attended Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and used historic Route 66 to get to my classes, the library, and most importantly, the A&W.; They have Historic Route 66 signs there now, but back then I had no clue.

My brother Larry started getting into Route 66 around the same time as I and we talked for awhile about going on a drive on a part of the old road. After about a year we decided to finally do it and we traveled Route 66 from Albuquerque to LA in September 1999. After we returned home, I joined the Missouri Route 66 Association and have taken many fun trips with association members. Over the last year I've managed to drive the remainder of Route 66 in sections here and there, excepting 75 miles or so near Chicago.

I've always loved road trips and everything that goes with them - the cheesy tourist traps, the junk food, the souvenirs, the garish signs and gimmicks to get you to pull over, and the bizarre roadside art. I also love old buildings and ruins. While I was growing up our family always visited historic sites during vacations and on Sunday drives. Although at the time my brother and I complained and asked for more time at the pool or the amusement park instead, it did rub off eventually and we are both fascinated with history, architecture and anything retro. I particularly love the 1930s through the 1960s, which happen to coincide with most of the history of Route 66.

In a way it is strange that I did not get interested in Route 66 a lot earlier in life, because all the ingredients were there. Right now Route 66 is undergoing a major surge in interest and that makes it easier and more fun to explore in depth. There are many organizations, books, and magazines devoted to it and when you travel it you can expect to run into tourists from all over the world. Old Route 66 landmarks are disappearing at an alarming rate, but others are being lovingly preserved and new businesses in the tradition of the old are opening up all the time. The excitement is contagious.

Route 66 is to me a living museum which gives up clues about our country's past, clues which yield insights into why our country is the way it is today. Ruins of old gas stations, motels, and pieces of old pavement that I never noticed before are now fascinating to me because I have more of an idea of what it is I'm looking at. I imagine all places that have ever been inhabited by humans at any time in the past have their own fascinating stories to tell. I'm amazed at how easy it is to lose all of that history. I drive by places every day that I know look different than they did when I was younger, but often I can only remember the vaguest impressions of what a certain building or intersection used to look like. And when I compare my recollections with others, I find that they are often in conflict and I'm possibly completely wrong about what little I do remember.

When a building that is very significant, such as the St. Louis Arena, is destroyed, it's likely be remembered for a long time. Thousands of people watched it implode. There is a book about it. Many people have old snapshots of it in their family albums. That was the kind of building that you wouldn't forget if you ever went there. But what about little gas stations, cheesy motels, and humble eateries? When they were new, did people find them fascinating? Or did they look at them the same way we do a 7-11, a MacDonald's, or a K-Mart now? Do older versions of those kinds of businesses only become interesting when there are only a few left?

We Route 66 freaks are fascinated by places like this, whether they are still open for business or just a ruin overgrown with weeds. People who don't share this obsession might wonder what the big deal is. Often the craftsmanship in the building is a lot better than what we have now, but that isn't always the case. Some of these buildings were built cheaply and they look it. Like a lot of things in our culture, the structures were almost disposable.

Maybe the compelling factor is the knowledge that the building we are studying may not be there the next time we visit. Being architecturally or culturally significant as well as internationally famous wasn't enough to save the Coral Courts, was it? If the Coral Courts could go, so could a less attractive and substantial building or ruin.

Some Route 66 fans are interested in meeting the people who run the businesses that are still open. Others want to experience a little piece of a way of life that is gone, like buying soda in a glass bottle, looking at a roadside reptile exhibit, going to a drive-in movie, or eating old fashioned diner food served with a real malt. It's fun to look at a now ghostly town and imagine what it must have been like when the road that is almost back to gravel was teeming with traffic, and all the neon was still working. Some are mainly interested in the actual infrastructure itself, hoping to find old curbing, pavement, bridges, and markers.

I enjoy all of those things but particularly the architecture and design of the associated signage. Some of it is of a quality that the majority of people would agree is attractive. Some of it is garish and overdone, what I call in my mind "wonderfully hideous". Some of it is just strange. Yes, a lot of it looks really "dated" but that's what I like. I'm starved for the sight of anything that isn't a strip shopping mall or a generic fast-food franchise. My absolute favorite time period is the 50's and early 60's with the heavily space influenced designs. What in the world made people design such outrageous things?

"Shapes for styles are not inevitable; they symbolize something the designer is trying to express." - Alan Hess

We Americans have an ongoing love affair with technology. The idea that new technology means progress seems to be ingrained deeply into our minds, although there are backlashes and anxieties about technology as well. We had the bomb shelter craze of the 1950s and early 1960s and the Y2K bug anxiety of last year. Most people seem to find an all-modern environment too sterile for their comfort. We like objects that suggest a cozier and less technological lifestyle, although most of us wouldn't really want to go back in time and be without our modern conveniences. We put "Early American" furniture into a 1970s split-level house, or put a wooden duck made of artificially aged wood on top of the microwave.

We also can get excited about objects that give the appearance of being technologically advanced. In the 1930s and 1940s that might have been accomplished by designing an item with rounded corners to "streamline" it. Or the designer might have added "speed lines" to suggest the power of the locomotives, planes, and other vehicles of the day. It didn't matter if the item was supposed to move or not.

In the 1950s and early 1960s there was heavy use of images associated with jet planes, space travel, and science. There were real technological advances such as the transistor and modern plastics. Items that weren't really advanced could be made to suggest that quality by sporting starbursts, boomerangs, arrows, spiky Sputniks, atoms, rockets, tailfins, pushbuttons, chrome, previously unheard of color combinations - it got crazy. It isn't considered good design to stick things on stuff just to "jazz it up", particularly if the motif doesn't have anything to do with the object being decorated. What do satellites have to with vacuum cleaners, or jet afterburners have to do with jukeboxes, or atoms with clocks? Nothing. But the results are a lot of fun to look at anyway.

For me the most enjoyable examples of all are the garish roadside business signs that went way beyond the boundaries of good taste and good sense in an effort to get attention from potential customers speeding by in their cars. Along Route 66 you can see all kinds. Some are in working order and there are towns that still put on a pretty good neon display at night. I also love the signs that are abandoned with the paint flaking off and the neon tubing shattered by vandals. I'm not old enough to remember when such things were new, yet I get a powerful emotional reaction when I see these old signs. I don't know if it's because the shapes bring back vague memories of old textbooks and filmstrips and TV shows I saw in childhood, or of buildings seen out of the car window that hadn't yet been imploded when I was very young. Maybe I saw such shapes on some old fabric or wallpaper at someone's house. Or maybe the reaction is to the sight of something that once made a bold, optimistic, futuristic statement now rotting and crumbling and decaying right in front of us.

Economic, social and environmental changes caused us to reconsider technology in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to make everything artificial, pave every piece of land possible, and consume every resource in sight. There was still space imagery around but I am old enough to remember some of the "natural" affectations of the time. Macramé, candles (in fact, an unfortunate combination of candle and macramé almost incinerated our TV, but that's another story), wall decorations made of seeds, pictures of mushrooms, dough art, and Avocado Green were all very popular. At home we even made our own yogurt, and I was subjected to ridicule at school for being the first one to bring stuff like whole wheat bread and granola bars in my lunch.

I remember general interest in Space Travel really waning by the end of the 1980s. Then in the 1990s we underwent a revolution in another kind of space - cyberspace.

Again we are obsessed with obtaining speed and the latest technology. In many industries, such as the software industry that employs me, it is crucial that you present yourself as thoroughly up-to-date and also able to change swiftly to keep up with the rapid introduction of new technologies. Designers now have another set of visual clues that are used to suggest these qualities. Recently I browsed through a stack of Internet related magazines and made note of the repeated use of the following: dots and words connected by lines, circuit board patterns, rounded rectangles, cross hairs, @ signs, concentric circles, greater or less than signs, and "buttons". Not surprisingly, this imagery seems to derive from computers, web sites, and the idea of being "connected". The Internet might be as glamorous now as jet planes and space were back in the 1950s. If you would like to see how these ideas might show up in my “day job” work, see my portfolio.

I found it interesting to also see motifs in those magazines that would have been right at home in earlier times: there were suns, atoms, planetary imagery, orbits, stars, and even boomerangs. I guess our ideas about which visual symbols mean "progress" haven't entirely changed. What will future generations say about our trip down the Information Superhighway? So far I'd say the Internet has made my life better. I think it's one of the reasons our economy has been strong lately because it can make workers more productive and it has stimulated a demand for hardware, software, and computer talent, as well as all the trainers and training materials needed to teach us all of this new technology. It's still debated whether or not the automobile has made our lives better if you look at it objectively, but for now I'm going to keep mine. I need it to get to all those rusty old signs with atoms and starbursts on them that I haven't photographed yet!

Photo Credits

Top photo by Allen, bottom photo by Rik, the rest by me.

Cited

Hess, Alan. Googie: 1950s Coffee Shop Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985.

Recommended Reading

Curtis, C.H. (Skip). The Missouri US 66 Tour Book. Lake St. Louis, Missouri: Curtis Enterprises, 1994.

Grauwels, Patrick and Bob Moore. Route 66. The Illustrated Guidebook to the Mother Road. Williams, Arizona: Roadbook International, 1998.

Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. New York, MJF Books, 1986 and 1999.

Jackson, Patti Smith. The St. Louis Arena Memories. St. Louis, Missouri: GHB Publishers, 2000.

Jenkins, Peter. A Walk Across America. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.

Repp, Thomas Arthur. Route 66: the Empires of Amusement. Lynwood, Washington: Mock Turtle Press, 1999.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939.

Steinbeck, John. Travels With Charley. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Teague, Tom. Searching for 66. Sprinfield, Illinois: Samizdat House, 1991 and 1996.

Wallis Michael. Route 66: The Mother Road. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Weiss, John. Traveling the New, Historic Route 66 of Illinois. Frankfort, Illinois: A.O. Motivation Programs, 1997.

Witzel, Michael Karl with Kent Bash. Hit the Road: American Car Culture on the Move. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Lowe and B. Hould, 1999.

Woodham, Jonathan M. Twentieth Century Ornament. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.

Take a look at my price list from the show, it includes many of the photos I displayed. And don't forget my large collection of Route 66 links!