Mark
Mann
Are We There Yet? Mark Van De Walle
October, 2003
Mark Mann takes beautiful photos of boring places. In this, he
is part of a tradition extending back to the earliest days of modernity,
to the time when the poet Baudelaire first began to explore the
notion of spleen. For Baudelaire, this most modern of emotions
was characterized by an overwhelming, melancholy sense of the passage
of time: an endless Sunday at home, spent lying on a couch, listening
to the seconds ticking by with a hollow thud. He describes the
peculiar romanticism of boredom like this: And minute by minute,
Time engulfs me/ As the snow’s measureless fall covers a
motionless body.
Mann’s sensibility is American, however, and particular to
the highways of the American West. Instead of urban malaise, he
finds another kind of romance in another kind of dead time, in the
stream of miles on the highway, white lines vanishing under the
car wheels, extending forever in front of them. Along the way, there’s
not much to see at all, apart from the kind thing they now call
Americana: roadside dinos; sculptures, vaguely threatening, waving
rolling pins or knives in front of restaurants; cars embedded nose
down in median strips. They’re attractions which are defined
by the fact that they cannot possibly be attractive to anyone;
nobody would travel to go see these things. They are, instead,
meant to be seen dwindling in the rearview mirror, monuments to
nothing.
The journey that Mann records, which is apparently endless, is
also apparently to nowhere in particular. It just keeps going on
and on, interrupted only by motel rooms, places which are, of course,
anything but destinations. They are, instead, bland and forgettable
on purpose, empty stages from which the actors have always just
departed or on which they have not yet appeared. Sam Shepard, in
the directions to Fool for Love, could be writing about the rooms
in Mann’s photos: "Stark, low-rent motel room on the
edge of the Mojave Desert. Faded green plaster walls. Dark brown
linoleum floor. No rugs. Cast iron four poster single bed...covered
with faded blue chenille bedspread."The room Shepard describes
is the quintessential motel room, the one you imagine when you think
of motels, devoid of practically everything except for the ghosts
of everyone who’s stayed there before. And this is what Mann’s
photos are really about: they’re pictures of half-remembered
dramas, objects caught out of the corner of the eye. They’re
pictures of the spirits that haunt the vast empty places along
the American road, linger in the American soul.
