Clapbacks to Thomas Cole in twinned shows at Cole’s own home: Native Prospects and Alan Michelson for 4Columns

Clapbacks to Thomas Cole in twinned shows at Cole’s own home (turned historic site). Both “Native Prospects” and “Alan Michelson: Prophetstown” offer alternative views of the American landscape, and both seem ever more urgent with the country’s approaching 250th. Michelson’s Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) (2018) takes its title from what the Mohawk people call the “father of our country.” Projected onto a bust of George Washington are historic markers of all the places destroyed in his genocidal campaign, Sullivan’s Expedition. The result feels even truer to the concept of a landscape, a term that comes from the Dutch and means to shape the land but also hold power over it—surveying and subjugation, perspective and ideas of progress, as well as the violence that often accompanied the worldview of nineteenth-century landscape paintings. Read more at 4Columns, but it begins with the view and then a black mirror:

Stand on Thomas Cole’s porch in Catskill, New York, and you can still see the stirring views Cole painted. He was the founder of the Hudson River School, no school at all but men perpetuating a myth of America: grand vistas, cliff edges, waterfalls, and mountain majesties, etc., etc. In the mid-nineteenth century, they created the visual language for a new country and Manifest Destiny, persisting in so many car ads and van-life Instagrams that promise to deliver us to remote splendor.