Anthony Alston, Orphic Excavations. St. Mary's Art Center, Virgnia City, Nevada. Spring 2008. Installation detail. Photography courtesty of the artist. [Click on image to enlarge.]

ORPHIC EXCAVATIONS

The Capital City Arts Initiative is honored to present Anthony Alston's "Orphic Excavations" as the inaugural exhibition of its artist in residence program at St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City.

New York-based arts writer, poet, and Nevada Neighbors presenter Gregory Crosby met with Anthony during a visit to the area, and contributes the essay below. Our thanks to Gregory for his vital participation in the project.

GHOST TOWN BLUES: ANTHONY ALSTON'S ORPHIC EXCAVATIONS
Gregory Crosby

         THE Ghost Town is one of the West’s treasured tropes, monuments to the boom and bust, little cities that lay in dust at the end of many a dusty trail. But it occurs to me that even those Western towns that didn’t fall to ruin, whose populations hung on long enough to transmute that boom and bust history of the frontier into museums or tourist traps, are still, essentially, ghost towns: places where the claims of history and legend outweigh the claims of the present moment. Places, too, where the more canny residents have tamed those claims, dressed them up in funny hats and crinoline, presenting their past as a vast metaphysical photo op for the present to twirl harmlessly around its finger like a six-gun loaded with blanks.

         Virginia City, once Nevada’s largest city, — where the astonishing mineral wealth of the Comstock flowed into a handful of pockets; where in the decades after the bust the Bucket of Blood gave way to the Bucket of Quarters; where the myths of the West were placed in aspic for the entertainment and occasional edification of both the sons of the pioneers and the suburban tenderfoots who came in their wake — is the modern western Ghost Town par excellence. You might call it a working ghost town, in much the same way contemporary westerners describe a “working ranch” to distinguish it from spreads of the dude variety. But unlike, say, Tombstone, Arizona, Virginia City, its routine tales of gunplay aside, is a working ghost town based on the very concept of work. The ghosts that made it a reality and who make its present day incarnation sustainable are the ghosts of workers: not just barkeeps and deputies and young Samuel Clemens, bent over a compositing table in the office of the Territorial Enterprise, but the backbreaking labor of miners and, in a different way, of the prostitutes—the original working girls—who brought them some measure of comfort at the expense, often, of their own health and dignity.

         What are we to make of all these ghosts, anonymous, forgotten, part of the mass of humanity whose tendency is always to oblivion, whose name is not Hearst or Sutro or Twain? Historians in recent decades have made efforts to recover their narratives, whether they were Chinese immigrants for whom the lode was Yin Shan, the Silver Mountain, or poor Irish who saw this dangerous and dirty work as slightly less dirty and dangerous than mining for the black diamond, coal. Historians have made efforts to recover the experiences of the women and men who entered Virginia City as half of the nation’s silver bullion passed out the other end. These historical investigations have often been excavations in their own right, giving voice to silence (for most ghosts, even in the most haunted of houses, appear but never speak).

         But history, bound by document and artifact, by the raw, uninterpreted mountain of primary and secondary sources, can only identify the movement, the migration of these ghosts, their likely thoughts and likely aspirations. To understand something of the real, lived lives of the miners who toiled by day and whooped by night, heading always toward a bone-weary rest that never seemed restful enough; to even approximate their inner thoughts and emotions, an act of imagination is necessary.

         Anthony Alston has struggled to hear their voices in his art. “Voices” is perhaps too strong a word—it is more precise to say that his installation struggles to catch the briefest impressions, the ephemeral texture of their days and nights: to catch the light in their eyes as they might have looked out from a third story window as the church steeple up the hill caught the draining twilight. The objects that make up Orphic Excavations, and the bare rooms of St. Mary’s in which they reside, combine to create less an elegy of those countless ghosts than the echo of an elegy. With a bit of imagination and knowledge of the likeliness of those miners and prostitutes—that part of history and biography that qualifies each thought or statement that cannot be attributed, “he might have thought,” “it’s possible she would have,” etc.—anyone can enter, in a the manner of an intellectual or empathetic tourist, the probable mindset of “the past.” We hear their lives were hard, and we nod, yes, hard; we hear their lives were often nasty, brutish and short, and we claim understanding; we hear about their aspirations for wealth and security, and correlate them to our own wishes. But we find it difficult, if not impossible, to access the very sights, sounds, and textures that informed their woes and joys—the context of their labors and their striving, the music of their fight for prosperity or (most often) survival.

         Alston’s installation, like all successful artworks, simply says, in its unassuming and subtle way, pay attention. It focuses the viewer’s mind not on didactic facts or quaint anecdotes, but on the quotidian traces of the Virginia City at rest and reflection, its quiet times (few and precious to be sure) for reflection. The tinkling of a player piano from another street, through an open window in stifling heat; the sight, literally through a “glass darkly,” of an evening’s debauch and a working day’s erasure found in the shards of a shattered bottle; the textiles and fabrics, rich brocades, that brought color to relentless shades of brown; the blown safe with a hole in its bottom, where no wages or wealth can stay long, always slipping out of reach in the sieve of commerce; the bird cages bereft of the canaries that rough characters gave as tokens to rougher girls, with their promise of beauty and flight contained and circumscribed: each of these elements in Alston’s exhibition is properly suggestive and entirely evocative of things these ghosts couldn’t put into words, even if the society in which they moved would have bothered to record.

         Ultimately, Alston’s work sings a ghost town blues that fills the immeasurable gap between history and tourism. In its empty rooms, the sweat and sweetness, the daydream and despair of Virginia City’s everyday souls are given, fleetingly, its moment on the present’s stage.

Gregory Crosby
New York, New York
June 2008

Gregory Crosby spent his formative years in Las Vegas, where for more than a decade he was an art critic, columnist and cultural commentator. Mr. Crosby holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, where in 2006 he won the Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Court Green, Jacket, Pearl, [sic], and The South Carolina Review. He wrote "The Attentive Art of Merrilee Hortt," an essay for Ms. Hortt's spring 2005 CCAI Courthuse Gallery exhibition.