Isolation and Serious Nonsense
Courtesy of edwardhopper.net
In my junior year AP Language and Composition class, my teacher had a print of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” There was something dire about the painting — something sunken and alarming. But it was also somber and captivating; it was the feeling of loneliness.
New York has a haunting ability: It's the pinnacle of feeling alone in what seems to be the place where feeling isolated is impossible. It is something that is quintessentially metropolitan.
Hopper’s mid-20th century art led him to be recognized as one of the most important painters of the realist movement.
While realists focused on existing things by analyzing the world pragmatically, a burgeoning movement of young minds emerged in the late 20th century to question an increasingly science fiction-like world: retrofuturism.
As retrofuturism speculated about the futures of transportation and cityscapes, artist and illustrator Bruce McCall faced the world with a kind of whimsical zaniness — one that was rooted in an increasingly technological and complex world.
McCall’s work was a sardonic and comical approach to the state of American affairs; he critiqued the American way of being by incorporating references to popular culture, playing with scale and utilizing different perspectives on typically novel topics.
During his 2008 Ted Talk, McCall speaks about how his work at The New Yorker is dictated by the desire for “Urban Absurdism.”
Although McCall and Hopper may not speak directly about the same experiences, the two depict intimate and borderline cinematic moments — whether extremely far-fetched or rooted in reality.
In a piece where cars are flying over a toll booth, the sign reads “E-ZR Pass,” a small joke about the E-Z Pass toll collection system that is present on highways. McCall says, “one letter makes an idea,” citing how small bits of inspiration can make a difference in the creative process.
“The Ascent of Man,” a three-page spread for The New Yorker, is a tongue-in cheek representation of human evolution. The piece was then used as inspiration for a short film of the same name. At the end of the piece, the evolved, modern human falls down an escalator as he pays attention to a phone call and not the steps in front of him.
Courtesy of The New Yorker
Courtesy of Conde Nast
The two artists represent a few ways in which people can handle transformation and evolution. In doing so, they laugh at human absurdity, nostalgia or the true debilitation memories can bring.
That alarming loneliness of sitting in AP Language and Composition opened my eyes beyond the tongue-in-cheek humor of an opinion on human’s that McCall brings. It forced me to dig deeper into a more introspective meditation of what urban life can look like.
Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art
“Can look like” – that's key in the work of McCall. Hopper sits on the plane of reality, mediates on it with thoughtful and transformative explorations of space and form. McCall hovers and flies over the plane of reality, disregarding what is and acknowledging what can be and what could’ve been. Here is where the two conjoin and share mutual thought: faux-nostalgia.
Faux-nostalgia is what McCall says retro-futurism presents; it is the concept of missing a past that never occurred. Is that part of the introspective nature of Hopper? Do we sit alone with shadowed foreheads due to a past that never happened, or can we laugh at the nonsense at hand?
Somehow, though, we do both.
Strike Out,
Writer: Michael Angee
Editor: Olivia Hansen
Michael Angee is an Editorial Writer for Strike Magazine GNV. If he’s not occupied with writing for Strike or editing stories for The Alligator, you can find him overanalyzing music and annoying his friends with whatever piece of media he's made his personality at the moment. You can reach him on instagram @michael_angee or via email @michaelangee@ufl.edu.
