Some 80 years before the advent of technicolor revealed a man behind the curtain in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, what lay behind the curtain for many Americans starved for entertainment was a painting. In the mid 19th Century, spectators would pay 25 cents for entry to a darkened room, where a curtain would fly open to reveal a monumental landscape painting hanging alone, dramatically lit and elaborately framed. Benches would be placed at a fixed distance and opera glasses given out to encourage immersive looking, and lucky viewers felt they were transported to the subject of the painting – Niagara Falls, the Berkshires, Sierra Nevada. Painted in stunning detail by the members of the artistic fraternity known as the Hudson River School, the event paintings were the precursor to cinema, painting as spectacle. As spectacles, they were often sent on tour. The great American railroad would take work by the likes of Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Edwin Church around the country, mesmerizing viewers from New York to Los Angeles. 

It is the year 2026, and the railroad has been superseded by the freeway, so it is only fitting that a modern-day event painting go on tour for exhibition in the back of a truck. On view from February 26 – March 1 in Los Angeles, U-Haul Gallery will present The La Brea Tar Pits, a new painting by Alexis Rockman. For 25 cent entry, the work will be on view at various locations throughout LA, with curtains, benches, and opera glasses included. 

Since his emergence in the mid 1980’s, Rockman has focused unwaveringly on man’s effect on the environment. The La Brea Tar Pits is a stunning example of his vision, a meticulously painted picture of the historic inhabitants of the tar pits. Saber-toothed tigers huddle atop a dead mammoth, teratorns flee from a volcanic eruption which provides light for the entire scene. As is typical for Rockman, the animals are rendered with care and extreme detail, while nature’s violence – in this case, the eruption – is painted with violence to match, in frenetic brushstrokes and with cold wax that feels almost smeared over the surface. Underneath the tar pits lie carcasses, perhaps a relic of the past, or perhaps a sign from the future. 

Rockman is the son of an archeologist, raised to see the world in geologic time. The La Brea Tar Pits is a historic image of another Los Angeles, tens of thousands of years before U-Hauls or the advent of an “art world.” The exhibition marks the return of these species to their home, species which went extinct from disasters not unlike the eruption shown in the picture. All of the species shown in the work, in fact, went extinct from human transformation of the environment. Visually, it recalls “The Deathtrap of the Ages,” a fitting title for the 1921 mural of the Tar Pits by the great American Paleo-Artist Charles R. Knight, a personal hero of Rockman’s. The pose of the saber-toothed tiger towards the middle of the panel, under the outstretched tusk of the mammoth, is lifted directly from Knight’s painting. The tar is rendered with actual tar from the pits at La Brea. 

In this way, Rockman follows in the footsteps of Knight, and of the Hudson River School painters before him. But while their event paintings dazzled viewers with elaborate visions of nature as paradise, Rockman’s does not. Instead, The La Brea Tar Pits inspires fear – nature is precious, but it is under attack. It is a fitting event painting for the 21st Century.

- Dylan Siegel