Remembrance of Things Present: Greg Lindquist’s Postindustrial Landscapes
by Cary S. Levine

Landscape has always been entwined with memory. To frame a particular vista is to tame not only the topographic and geological, but the temporal—to suspend time in the hope of making sense of one’s surroundings. Like memories, landscapes are reconstructed moments by which we process and order
a chaotic world. They can divulge as much about the society in which they were made as about the scenery they depict. In the modern era, landscape artists deliberately tapped this potential by focusing on places in transition. Constable’s landscapes captured the early nineteenth-century shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy. A half-century later, Monet’s evoked the resulting tensions between countryside and city, sunset and smokestack. Both artists used landscape to at once memorialize a receding past and forecast an inevitable future.

Greg Lindquist’s Brooklyn landscapes similarly freeze time at a moment of imminent change. Yet, the factories and machinery that heralded a new epoch in the nineteenth century are, in the 21st, the rotting relics of a bygone age. The transition from industrialism to post-industrialism is Lindquist’s grand theme. Working in series, each focused on a different site of urban reclamation, he documents desolate tableaux of dilapidated warehouses, crumbling piers and rusted-out equipment—structures that, in their heyday, supported a thriving commercial waterfront, but which are now making way for luxury riverside condominiums and big-box retail stores. Lindquist passes these scenes through multiple filters: he begins with a photograph, photoshops it, projects it onto canvas, and then paints it. Colors are both drained and polluted, contrasts intensified, moods heightened. In Red Hook Revere Sugar Refinery (Flattening the Remains, The Age of Steam) (2007), the skeletal frame of a decrepit trestle juts out across the water. Set against a flat gray sky, the silhouetted intricacies and quivering reflection are hauntingly beautiful. Combining the tradition of the industrial landscape with the romanticist veneration of the ruin, Lindquist has transformed the decrepit old factory into an elegy.

Todd Shipyard Graving Dock (Sailing into Historic Parking) (2008) documents the conversion of a defunct shipyard into an Ikea parking lot. Massive archaic shipping cranes tower over a scattering of orange traffic barrels, a cluster of construction crew trailers, temporary electricity poles and a patchwork of unidentifiable monolithic remnants. On the right, a row of new foundation walls with steel-cable tendrils sprouts up among overgrown weeds. Fresh construction, nature and ruin encroach upon one other—a perfect metaphor for the complexities of a society in transition. Yet, if Lindquist’s landscapes raise questions about redevelopment, gentrification and globalization, they refuse to offer easy answers. Politically charged, they are also politically ambiguous. His works resist the knee-jerk conservatism of preservationists as much as they memorialize a fading past. We may not need another Ikea, but do we really long for the days of the fourteen-hour shift in factories that made the East River synonymous with over-pollution? Unlike his eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors, for whom toppled classical columns and gothic cathedral fragments connoted a mythological past, Lindquist does not idealize his ruins in the name of some fabled “golden age.” Rather, he memorializes that which is being hastily wiped out as the new stands poised to erase the old. His works construct memory, but they also document its effacement. And make us think twice about doing so. His is the politics of awareness rather than polemics, of contemplating the seemingly inexorable in an age of uncertainty.

Of course, the great irony here is that these issues are raised at all, for the industrial revolution was founded on an ideology of eternal growth, on a notion of unrestrained progress now resisted by those who romanticize the revolution’s rotted-out forms. Such forms were meant to defy time, not represent its passing. Lindquist encapsulates a profound realization: the end of an age that was supposed to have no end. In his landscapes, industry is relegated to the conventional cycle of life, degeneration, death and memory. In the recent Rossville Marine Scrapyard (Maritime Ruins) (2008), this message is more overt. Rowboat bodies lie beached on a heap of shattered houseboat hulls and rusted steamboat gears. Nothing but decay can be found in this Staten Island repository for old ships, yet sure enough it too will be reclaimed and redeveloped some day. By halting the march of history at a moment of seemingly instantaneous change, and by so lovingly rendering his subjects in all their rusty, crumbly detail, Lindquist transforms his sites into loci of conflicting forces—economic, social and aesthetic. With renewal comes loss. Time moves on. Such reminders are what make his paintings so arresting, so moving, and so disconcerting. Though devoid of people, they are in the end about human existence more than anything: mortality is their essential subject. To record the passing of time is to record our own demise. These deteriorating structures are reflections of us—our surroundings, our culture, our lives.

Cary Levine is a professor of contemporary art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written for several magazines and exhibition
catalogues and worked in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is currently writing a book on
contemporary art in Southern California.

Above image: Rossville Marine Scrapyards (Maritime Ruins), oil and metallic on linen, 20.5 by 41.5 inches, 2008