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Whenever We Wanted II, John Mellencamp (c) 1992 |
The Demise and Birth of Whenever.
In January of 1993, George Bush, the father, was vacating the White House and Bill and Hillary were moving in. On the Billboard Top 100, despite the seismic success of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit from a year earlier, and the grunge mania that followed, Whitney Houston's version of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You was No. 1.
In the heartland here in Indiana, there is a farming mindset about the changing state of things. Farmers keep a close watch as the climate moves over and storms past them, like seasons everyday, or a year of summer in the course of one week. So ubiquitously fickle and unpredictable, and yet somehow, always the same. Heartlanders say 'don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes, it will change.' They think it's a local saying, but actually Mark Twain said it, and not about hereabouts, but New England. It may have been and old adage young Sam Clemens had picked up as a kid in Missouri. Who's to say, really?
John Cougar had a saying the year I graduated high school. 'Nothing matters and what if it did.' It's not a question. It's a statement, with fightin' words attached. For me, just a Hoosier kid, I thought he was cool. His first self-titled record on the Riva Records inspired me to buy my first pack of Winstons and go to college in Miami.
Throughout the 1980s, John Cougar cycled through the last of his name changes, and phased out Cougar for good. He picked up the classic paintbrushes and easel, and as a newfound visual artist made news in the city papers here in Indianapolis. A music video for a track from his album Whenever We Wanted, 1991, showed his performance surrounded by paintings. The same paintings filled the cover of the CD, as well. And like the Beatles inspired a wave, of not only fans, but musical followers and wannabes, John Mellencamp, at that time, with all that artist stuff, awakened in me, a feeling of both abandon and embrace, a want to go that wherever way he went.
A Leg Up Artist.
Whenever We Wanted was the first album released under the name John Mellencamp and Get a Leg Up was its first single released. On the record's cover and starring in the music video was a long-legged, blonde temptress and model, Elaine Irwin. She would become both artistic muse and wife to Mellencamp by January 1993.
The music video shows Mellencamp primped and performing his new song with Irwin cavorting about, before a backdrop of large framed paintings. One of those paintings, American Boy and Girl, 1991, is a dual head and shoulders portrait of a hippy/hipster pair, dark haired, dark eyed, flat affect mostly, a little more edge to the eyes of the girl. There is a snugly luxurious feel to Mellencamp's empty red background. It has no feeling of sterility or vacancy despite the lack of anything but painted color.
Mellencamp is quoted as saying the Whenever record was an attempt at Hurts So Good with better lyrics.
A fan had suggested he get back to his basic sex and rock and roll after a couple previous more socially aware records. Whatever.
Two other paintings behind the pop singer share their name with the album. Not sure which came first, the paintings or the album. Maybe all just a part of a theme he was exploring, whether visually or with music, at that time. Or were the paintings nicknamed with place keeper titles simply for their central inclusion in the record's cover and 1st video set piece? Probably a theme, not that it matters, but let's embrace the wonder.
The hurts so good of love and sex, but with better poetry. The paintings can't be explained by the phrase 'whenever we wanted,' but by some riddle of a question, to which Mellencamp replies in song and in paint, that answer.
Whenever We Wanted, 1991, shows another couple, maybe it hurts, maybe it's good, depends on a lot of things. The girl is probably American as she looks to be the same dark-haired girl in the painting already described. She is seated nude (at least topless behind a table) within a theatrically contrived space. She is extending one arm, bent awkwardly at the elbow, holding up an apple of temptation. She stares straight at the viewer. The standing, sandy-haired male at her side, dares not look over at her, rather he too, looks at the viewer. His elongated figure, accentuated by the twin curves of suspenders he wears, seems to slink toward the painting's edge. He may have asked her when she started seeing that other one on the side, and well, we know the answer.
Whenever We Wanted II, also 1991, a domestic bedroom scene of man and woman on a bed. The male is most certainly Mellencamp himself. And if the femme fatale is not Elaine Irwin, then Mellencamp had a premonition of being existentially intimate with a look-a-like blonde. The painting is the exact size of the other Whenever..., but that one is a vertical and this one is a horizontal. The wider view works with this image as Mellencamp has painted the gaze of both persons looking as far away from the other as possible. And the feeling is amplified by the format. But what question is that feeling?
Both paintings share the same color scheme as well. It's almost a Rembrandt palette of golden brown, deep maroons, wood tone and flesh. In this picture, the Mellencamp character, nude, leg crossed over his privates, picks at his toenails. The Irwin character is a head floating on pillow, blonde hair cascading, lump of body entirely cocooned in the thick bedspread of curtain that drapes the scene oppressively. The only two objects other that those described, are a cross round the man's neck, and something on the night stand towards the outward gaze of the woman. What it is though, hard to tell.
Ewing Street Incident.
It's strange now, I cannot remember how we traveled in those days. But on a winter afternoon, in early 1993, I found myself at the Southern Indiana Center for the Arts just north of Seymour, Indiana in a town called Rockport. I'm sure I read about the show in the Indianapolis papers, but it was before GPS and before the internet and I wasn't familiar with the town. But I found the old mansion, easy enough, set back from Highway 11. An exhibition called simply John Mellencamp was showing from January 8 through 28.
John with Puppet, 1992, was the painting teased in the newspaper, and was presented as a large show stopper near the entrance. Mellencamp paints himself in the light and posture of a Mannerist saint, a grim puppeteer dangling his marionette from one hand and teetering a cigarette from his lips. The hollow eyes of his tiny plaything, and his own jaded view cast to opposite sides. The ambitious scale of the painting, the tone of its feel, seem to aspire to the summative quality and mysterious pathos of a piece like Picasso's La Vie at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Two pictures to discuss together are Stella and Kristi Blindfolded, both 1991, both the same size, and both a head and shoulders nude portrait of a redhead woman with short cut hair. One an immense success and the other a heavy handed metaphor.
The blindfold occurs more than once in Mellencamp's paintings, not always used in the same way. In Kristi, the blindfold is the type we see on hostages. Hers is not masquerade. She's no coquette with a playful veil. Kristi seems a brutal caricature of victimhood. Like the title of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, the painting is heavy on the scary, and lyric-lite.
Articles around the time of this Mellencamp exhibit cite German Expressionist Max Beckman and American painter Walt Kuhn as key influences. If Kristi is more Kuhn, then Stella is more Beckmann.
Or maybe more Ernest Ludwig Kirchner than Beckmann. Stella has the jarring and angular line of Kirchner. Mellencamp does it, though, without the camp cabaret of Kirchner's era. Stella, although enervated and jaggy, is a woman of real flesh and blood. You never doubt this lady was seated before Mellencamp, his paints and brushes, just being rather than pretending to be.
With this line of thinking in mind, Untitled, 1991, whose attractive blonde subject with long hair and red dress, standing partially behind a filigree architecture of some sort, stands expressionless as if sleeping with no dreams. Your Mother, 1991, is back to the prop department, for something Tarantino again, like a gimp. Mellencamp paints his memories or our collective unconscious, a leather belt to go with this archetypal 'mean mom.'
Somewhere in between fact and fiction, Jocko, 1990, succeeds. Again, I go back to an aspiration of intent. Some of Kuhn's clowns have it. And Mellencamp's whatever he is, this Jocko – a horse-drawn carriage driver – Napoleonic cannon fodder – drum major – elevator boy – not really sure. Something about him is beyond stereotype and toward the universal, even if he ain't there yet. I'm reminded of this intent in Picasso again. His Boy with A Pipe from the rose period. A whole art history really of youthful portraits that capture some of the beauty and magic of life before time has had time to take its toll.
The minimal facepaint on Jocko points toward a clown or circus of some kind, regardless of whatever the hell else he is. And aren't we all, a clown or circus sometime, regardless of who we are?
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| Jocko, John Mellencamp (c) 1992 |
See Also - Mellencamp - Selected Paintings, 36 page catalogue (c) 1992 John Mellencamp
