Nothing Like I Planned: The Art Of John Mellencampby Adam Poulisse
May 7, 2012
John Mellencamp’s art, 49 pieces of which are displayed through June 10 at the Tennessee State Museum exhibit
Nothing Like I Planned: The Art Of John Mellencamp, is in no way indicative of the good ole Indiana musician who’s produced a barrage of light rock tunes. He’s apparently got some choice words that are best spoken with paints and canvases rather than a good singing voice and guitar picks.
Those unfamiliar with Mellencamp’s art may be taken aback by the singer’s mostly surreal and dark point of view on everything from how bad smoking is to how unhappy Martin Luther King Jr. would be today. Mellencamp’s is a dark but ultimately worthwhile experience.
Nothing Like I Planned, indeed.
Once on the museum’s lower level, Mellencamp’s exhibit is pretty easy to spot (hint: if you stray into the slavery exhibit next door, you’re no longer looking at Mellencamp’s artwork). Lining the walls to the left are three portraits,
Dog Boy (2007),
Savannah GA (2012), and
Wanted (2005). Although it’s hard to tell if the subjects in the paintings are indeed Mellencamp (the subject in Dog Boy appeared to have one ear, and Mr. Mellencamp has two the last time we checked, so that one may not be him), they represent a distorted, dark, yet restrained view of his subjects. One flattering portrait is named
Victoria, after Victoria Granucci, ex-wife and mother of two of Mellencamp’s daughters. If their split left Mellencamp bitter, it isn’t reflected in the piece.
Though Mellencamp did well in restraining himself when painting portraits, his artistic juices—and evident frustration—flow best when he doesn’t restrain himself to just one subject on a smaller canvas. Sometimes the pieces say so many different things that it’s easier to contemplate what messages Mellencamp wasn’t trying to get convey.
Religion is gloriously honored (or dishonored, depending on the viewer) by Mellencamp on a couple of canvases that take up a good four or five feet of museum wall.
Redemption and
Justice (Justice is the name of one of his daughters with Granucci) are two fabulously haunting paintings, and the homoerotic
Temptation depicts the first son Adam tweaking his nipples with red-painted fingernails. But the best religion-centric work is 2012’s
Heaven And Hell, a beautiful piece of blasphemy. Actual pages of the Book Of Wisdom were ripped from the Bible’s spine and line the canvas, then spray-painted black around the outline of a pasty white—person? Demon? Ghost?—that lays on his back and fixates a dead stare directly into the museum patron. It’s an incredibly powerful piece that will force believers into saying a thousand Hail Marys and non-believers into drinking a thousand bloody ones.
Mellencamp reminds racists in 2012 how much they suck with 2005’s piece
Martin Luther King. A painting of a black man wearing a crown (the face resembles Obama’s pose from the “Yes We Can” campaign) is the dominant image as small red-enflamed crosses decorate most of the blue-painted campus. The words “Martin Luther King had a dream and this ain’t it” are scrawled on the right-hand side of the canvas… and the lower-case “t” in “it” is a burning cross, too.
Hay Cowboy (2005) allowed Mellencamp to release anger about being a smoker. The bottom right-hand corner reads “Smoking will kick your ass,” but “ass” is covered by a crumpled brown piece of paper that read “Censored”—a multi-media element to the piece hopefully planted by Mellencamp himself and not a prude museum docent. The piece looked ambitious. Here’s to hoping it didn’t stress Mellencamp out to the point of smoking even more.
To see what we thought to be the best piece, patrons simply have to travel
Coast To Coast. Just around the corner from
Wanted is the mixed media artwork
Coast To Coast, which allowed Mellencamp to distort several pop culture elements into somewhat of an anarchic collage. There were several WTF-worthy components: The
American Gothic couple bleeding from the eyes with the word “METH” painted on the building behind them; FEMA sprayed in at the bottom for no apparent reason; a possible Janet Jackson without any pants on, and so forth and so on. There’s enough to look at in the bizarre hodgepodge that makes it the most memorable piece.
As summer approaches and road trips from Indy to Florida are inevitable, make a stop in Nashville to enjoy the free exhibit. Go on. Your life is now.
http://www.avclub.com/indianapolis/articles/nothing-like-i-planned-the-art-of-john-mellencamp,73476/
