NM Day 5 - Conspiracies, Contemporary Art, and Creatures from Outer Space
Today started with some Dunkin' Donuts Coffee via a gas station, and then I was on my way to Roswell, home of aliens and one particularly great Futurama episode. On the way there, I think I may have discovered the loneliest road in America. i took photos in every direction, which I feel like I need to say because there aren't exactly many distinguishing features to speak of. It was sort of peaceful though in an eerie kind of way, and I feel like it's exactly what the road to Roswell should look like.
Naturally my first stop was the International UFO Museum and Research Center. I'll be honest the research part piqued my sense of skepticism, but I wanted to go in open minded and I figured if you're gonna get a decent museum about UFOs this is the place to do it. Whether it was going to be totally nut or genuinely interesting, I was immediately on board after meeting the two greeters out front. They gave me a good feeling about the place.
The museum is located in an old movie theatre which actually kinda creates a cool retro look and vibe that helps to get you in the mindset of the Roswellians on that fateful day in 1947. The layout of the museum reminded me of a convention center with different cubicles of displays, but the displays turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had anticipated. The first wall of cubicles was all about Roswell's own UFO claim to fame, chronologically painting the story of the incident, with a lot of preserved newspaper clippings, letters, official documents, dioramas, and period artifacts. If somehow you've never heard this story or missed one all of the roughly one billion conspiracy minded TV shows about aliens, the story goes that one night in the summer of 1947 near the Roswell Army Air Field, a test pilot reported seeing mysterious flying discs in the sky. Soon afterwards, a rancher by the name of William "Mack" Brazel reports finding some kind of crash site covered in strange debris on his land to the local sheriff, who then calls it into the military police. Mack hears the story about the "flying discs" and begins to suspect that may have been what he found, and he delivers one interview to the local newspaper with such claims. The military then makes a claim saying that in fact all he found was a weather balloon. Mack objects to this saying he found weather balloons on his property before and that this is something else all together, but eventually he corroborates this story and people are content to accept this for roughly thirty years before increased interest in UFOs and aliens start bringing the case back to light. Eventually in the 90s the Government does admit to some degree of coverup saying tha no it was not a weather balloon, it was another kind of balloon they were developing as an experimental surveillance system they didn't want the soviets or the American public to know about. Still many UFO and alien fans don't buy it. Cards on the table, I don't think there were any aliens crashing into Roswell. I do agree that there were a lot of suspicious things going on, but I think they're mostly explained by the government trying to keep their military technology under wraps. It was fun though seeing some of the impressive amateur sleuthing that uncovered even this degree of deception. For example in one story about the supposed weather balloon, people studiously pouring over the newspaper article eventually realized based off tiny clues in the background the photo was taken in Texas not New Mexico. Also there were legitimately several reports of intimidation by men in "plain clothes" around Roswell of people pushing the flying disc story, and one radio interview Mack did about was confiscated by military police before it could be aired. Plus when he eventually corroborated the weather balloon story, he mysteriously had a new truck all of sudden. Again though, this just strikes me as wanting people to not talk about it at all to avoid questions and investigations rather than specifically trying to silence talk about aliens. To me it's one leap to believe that aliens exist, which I am able to make, but it's a much bigger leap to believe that human beings at all let alone those in the US government are competent enough to keep something that big a secret for this long, and that I just can't make. The big question people still debate about is whether or not there were alien bodies found at the crash site. As far as I know, Mack didn't actually mention this, and the reports of these bodies were actually started by some school children he had recruited to help him move debris, which to me makes me think they're just an imaginative flight. The suspicious thing though is that the government claimed that the bodies found were flight test dummies, but those weren't in common use until 1950. Again though that is weird, I think it's likely someone just made a mistake in talking to the press, and at most the government just wasn't completely hones when they disclosed that it was a military surveillance device and maybe it was something more combat oriented. The jump to aliens still seems a little far-fetched but it was fun seeing how people got there and getting to play a little armchair detective.
Of course though a UFO museum wouldn't be complete without indulging in a little kitsch including a collection of art showcasing different depictions of aliens from popular culture, including the giant robot Gort from the Day the Earth Stood Still.
The most lovable piece from this display was the museum's centerpiece, a replica of what the supposed Roswell flying disc and aliens looked at complete with flashing lights and smoke machines. It was incredibly cheesy, but that made it a perfect fit.
The next wall of cubicles was all displays about UFO sightings outside of Roswell. To the museum's credit, one of the displays was all about debunking claims that were either total hoaxes or had clear explanations. That still leaves unexplained reports of flying objects from over 31 states (including one from Great Barrington in my home state) not to mention those from other countries all over the world. My money's still on military experiments, but even if the quality of these reports is often dubious the sheer quantity of them was pretty impressive. The reports of alien abductions and probings of all sorts, however, struck me as much sillier though the paintings based on abductee stories were kind of fun.
My favorite display from this wall though was the recreation of supposed ancient depicting aliens and spaceships interacting with prehistoric people. I found this to be perhaps the least convincing of any display, but I did genuinely love the artwork.
One incredible item on display with seemingly little but thematic relation to UFOs was an alarm clock decorated with radioactive Trinitite, the green glass-like material found near the atomic bomb site in Hiroshima.
All that being skeptical led to me working up quite an appetite, so I decided to get some lunch at a good old fashioned diner called Big D's Dowtown Dive. I got the Holy Guacamole burger which came with green chile, melted cheddar, and a big dollop of house made guac. It was a mess to try to hold together but boy was it tasty and at those unbeatable diner prices to boot. It also didn't hurt that I got to sit across from The Duke himself while I ate my lunch.
After lunch, I stopped at the world's only UFO shaped McDonald's. I normally try to avoid big chain places, but I figured this was so unusual for all restaurants let alone for the ol' Golden Arches that it was worth taking a look and getting a good cheap cup of coffee to keep me going. It brought back childhood memories seeing a McDonald's that still had a playpen area, but something about seeing in a clown in an astronaut suit was deeply unnerving and I can't believe that marketing ploy ever paid off.
I really enjoyed just walking around downtown Roswell while I drank my coffee. It's not particularly big, but while a lot of towns might resent becoming sort of urban legend-y they really lean into the whole alien thing and there's all kinds of great silly art all over the place. Just look at this loving couple:
My next stop up re-caffeinating was the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. I didn't really know anything about the place before getting there, but, despite it's rather unassuming exterior, it turned out to be one of the best contemporary art museums I've seen in the country. This is largely because the museum comprises almost entirely of works created by artists from the Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program. Founded in 1967 by local businessman Donald Anderson as an attempt to give Roswell and Southern New Mexico greater cultural standing in the world at large, the RAIR program was one of the first artist residency programs ever to offer artists complete seclusion and creative freedom by providing studios and living quarters and what Anderson referred to as the "the gift of time" to just create without any restrictions or expectations in the beautiful wide open high plains. Over the next 50 years, over 200 artists, some of pretty significant note such as Luis Jiminez and Allison Saar, have passed through the residency and as such the museum really has an astounding collection that serves to highlight not just current contemporary art but also trends in styles since its inception. I was really blown away.
The museum opens rather whimsically with a cutout painting of a mischievous little girl seemingly scribbling on the walls what turns out to be a brief description of the collection you're about to wander through. If you turn around you'll see that above the door you walked in is a giant hellish bronze coin sculpted and painted by Brian Myers to criticize US funding of military dictatorships in Indonesia. It makes for a heck of a first impression showcasing the lighter and the darker sides of what contemporary art seeks to express.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the residency program, an artist named Elaine W. Howe created the Mini Museum of Modern Art, a dollhouse like structure with 5 galleries in which Howe painstakingly replicates the works of over 30 RAIR artist in miniature. A mini Donald Anderson watches over everything from a rooftop deck. It's not every museum that has a smaller museum inside it so I was mighty impressed.
From there I couldn't believe how expansive the museum was with each new room seeimingly containing more art than the last. There was no unifying theme among each room (they may have been arranged chronologically but if so I didn't notice), and it just seemed like they were trying to fill every available space with as much interesting art as they could. The effect was dizzying in the best possible way with each new piece bringing a totally different style and voice. Some were highly abstract, some photorealistic, some traditional paintings, while others were eccentric multimedia pieces. If something wasn't to your particular taste, there was just so much that there had to be something for everyone in there.
My not-so-narrow list of highlights include: three marble sculptures that each capture different sketches of the same woman next to a doorframe spookily cloaked in an amorphous abstract pattern (both unfortunately by artists whose names were too blurry for me make out in my photo); a collage by Celia Chetham of two fat naked cartoon characters looking very out of place at a fancy dinner party; an extra long painting tracing the history of transportation from horses to jet planes (you'll have to really click on that one); an incredibly titled lithograph by Mary Ahern called Lady Lamb Sending a Message to Cock Man which captures a sort internal mythology all its own; a multi-media piece by Jerry Williams called Learning to Fly that combines traditional painting with clay models for a dreamlike 3-Dimensional quality; a painting of bus stop by Robert Jessup that imbues a mundane scene with a haunting energy thanks to a slightly non-linear canvas and dog that leaps out of the campus altogether; a mesmerizing collage by Carlos Quinto Kemm called Prayers of the Dead that appears to swirl out from every direction shattering the viewer's sense of depth; a minimalist display by Rachel Grobstein, the 2017-2018 Artist in Residence, that turns the traditional artistic impulse to fill up white space on its head by taking tiny detailed sculptures of everyday objects made out of paper and pinning them directly on the wall creating an unusual array of shadows all over the negative space for a particularly neat effect; paintings by another 2017-2018 artist-in-residence, Conor Fagan, that go in a slightly different direction than Grobstein's pieces filling up not just the walls but the floors too with large canvases alternately featuring lifelike portraits and surrealist dreamscapes; a painting of a poker game among different nightmare representations of tenets of capitalism gambling with the masses by Enrique Mayer; a beautiful colored woodcut by Heather O'Hara called Gloria Richards Conducts an Experiment, that shows a woman weighing a man's head; an impressively layered sprawl of ink on paper by Michael Ferris Jr called Sex Party that seems to encompass so many different representational styles in one drawing I don't know how one guy did it; a series of pieces by Richard Thompson that use a cartoony style to tell the stories of a pioneer family's perilous quest to Oregon; a raunchy cartoony painting by Karen Aqua that uses imagery of petroglyphs to create a sense of impending menace undercut by a dick joke; an obsessive compulsive's nightmare created by Al Souza that looks like a work of abstract expressionism but instead of being a painting it's actually several different puzzles in various states of completion smashed together and held to one another with glue never to be put into order; a series of nine paintings by Rosemarie Flore which might seem unimpressive until you learn that she drew them using fireworks; a spookily photorealistic painting by David Hines of a lone tract house in a pitch black night sky; a brazenly bizarre triptych of paintings by James McGarrell called The Biggest Pantry that captures a world where everything looks like it's made out of meat; a painting by Stephen Fleming of naked people endlessly falling off a step ladder (it's probably about capitalism); a gallery of creepy distorted photos by Ted Kuykendall; a very relatable painting by Ann Piper of a woman fiercely defending a cake; a painting by William Midgette, that maybe just shows people using a revolving door but I'm convinced the one dude is walking right into it; a web of interrelated drawings by Corwin Levi called 22 Years (With Annotations at 32 Years) that features a blend of abstract imagery, cartoon people, and totally realistic sketches that come together to capture different scenes from the artist's life; and painting by Brian Mayer of a bunch of 1950s Southwest suburbanites sitting in a hot tub with the mesas in the back drop and a weird forced perspective that makes it more David Lynch than Leave It to Beaver (sorry I had a lot of favorites in this one).
Perhaps my favorite painting of all though was this monumental oil painting by Scott Greene called Exhaust. It was inspired by a painting in the Louvre called The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault, and the artist wanted to take a historical shipwreck painting into the modern day by having it instead be a floundering oil rig with a crew whose pants are around their ankles to highlight environmental issues and satirize consumer culture. The size and detail of the work is truly astonishing.
If you that the was a lot, that was just what was hanging on the walls! The galleries also tons of amazing sculptures sprinkled throughout. My favorites of these were: a cake by Beverly Magennis with pleasant pastoral scenes on the inside of the slices; some cubes by William Goodman that stretch surrealist landscapes every which way; a sculpture of key moments in the Civil Rights movement placed on three stacked dictionaries to stress the importance of education in fighting injustice called Guardian of Liberty by Peter Bilan; a whimsical wooden ship manned by strange gnome-like men called Panther on the Witson Bend by Jason Knapp; a bar fully stocked with sculptures of drinks to trick the thirsty museum visitor; a buzz saw like contraception made entirely out of carefully layered and colored pieces of paper by Jane South; a small bathtub connected to a V8 engine by Wes Heiss to create the ultimate impractical hot tub experience; an impossibly large mass of one great sewn tube piled all up on itself like a big intestine called Matter of Fact by Edie Tsong; an incredibly surreal wooden sculpture by Michael Ferris Jr. of a playful god-like creature called Lucky the Imortal; and a wonderfully redundant sculpture of an eggplant on a table right under an identical painting of an eggplant on a table by Susan Cooper.
Beyond this massive main collection there were two smaller galleries highlighting some important figures in the museum's history. The first was the artwork of the museum's founder himself Donald Anderson, who it turned out was an incredible landscape painter beyond just being a generous patron of other artists. He used an abstract sort of jagged style to really capture the grandeur of the giant scenes he painted as well as some playful touches such as including the frame of the window or doorframe he was looking through in the painting.
In a very sweet touch, a bunch of former artists-in-residence made a patchwork of small paintings and sculptures as a gift for Don on his 90th birthday and as a thank you for their time spent in Roswell.
The other artist with his own gallery was Luis Jiminez, a former resident and one of the most influential modern painters and sculptors from the Southwest. He had a bold style that combined surreal Freudian sexual undertones with pure unrestrained Americana in the style of the great Western painters if they were a lot more cynical. He was also hugely influential as one of the earlier Mexican-American artists to break into the mainstream modern art world and proudly represent Mexican culture on a larger stage. I loved the vividness of his paintings and drawings, but the pop art sheen of his fiberglass sculptures really blew me away. I was most impressed technically by the sculpture Progress II that renders the dynamic scene of a bronco rider roping a bull into a still sculpture that features so much energy that you feel like the tension on that imaginary rope is going to snap it at any moment. I also just loved the audacity of naming a sculpture of a car having sex with a woman "American Dream". Sadly Jiminez's impressive sculptural works were literally the death of him as one piece he was working on fell and some fiber glass cut an artery in his leg. A tragic end to a great talent.
At the intersection of the two galleries was an Anderson Landscape right next to a Jiminez sculpture to give you the best of both worlds.
Lastly, the thing that probably made me the happiest was that throughout the museums there were sculptures of sharks by Robbie Barber made out golf bags and vacuum cleaners hanging from the ceiling. I just love the combination of impressive resourcefulness and pure goofiness.
After all that art, I needed to spend some time outside, and I saw a sign for something called Bottomless Lakes State Park, so you know I can't resist anything that defies all laws of physics. The state park features a loop of a road that takes you past several lakes which may or may not have bottoms. The first of these lakes is called Cottonwood Lake which a 30 ft. deep crater filled with blue/green water and surrounded by an 80 ft. cliff of red and white rocks. Due to some bacteria in the water, all swimming was restricted but it was still really pretty to just walk around and look at it.
Up next was probably most interesting lake to me. It was called Mirror Lake, because it features two seemingly identical sinkholes separated by a small sandbar like a giant figure 8. I say seemingly because thanks to some odd quirk one half of the lake has a lower salt content than other and that one can support sealife while the other can't which is just wild. I can't imagine a much better illustration of the arbitrariness of the universe, than life and death literally being separated by a line of sand.
The next lake was the amazingly named Devil's Inkwell. It was named this way partly because of the shaping of the red rock walls but mainly because of the much darker water color caused by algae. I enjoyed taking a small hike up to look down the center of the inkwell, but not quite as much as I enjoyed thinking that the devil still uses a quill and inkwell. It kinda takes any menace out of him, doesn't it?
After that I decided to head back even though there were still more Bottomless Lakes to see, because I was fading fast and wanted to make it back before coffee shops closed down. I ended up going to Stellar Coffee (a remarkably restrained space pun for Roswell), whose coffee lived up to the name. I got the special which was a coconut chocolate cold brew because it sounded tasty and I was feeling decadent. The place had a really great friendly atmosphere, with cozy seating and great service. I stayed there to write for a bit, and I literally witnessed a family reunion happening on the couch across me which added another layer of warmth to the already very sweet environment. The art on the window of Martian cups of coffee was a nice added bonus.
After coffee, I had a hankering for some Chinese food, so I went to what TripAdvisor said was the best of the five Chinese restaurants nearby, Zen Asian Diner. The place seeks to provide good authentic Chinese cuisine in a classic American diner setting which I thought made for a cool and different sort of dining. I ordered some chicken fried rice and it perfectly hit my sweet spot for fried savory goodness.
After dinner, I checked into my air bnb and ended up shooting the breeze with my host for a bit drinking some very Roswell Alien Amber Ales. Then I retired to my room and spent the night writing and watching the hilariously bad 80s horror movie Chopping Mall which features almost exactly no chopping.
Favorite Random Sightings: RV Park Full Hook Up (I get what it actually means, but the phrase "full hook up" is just funny to me); A-Ok Tattoos (I'd hope they'd be better than that); Keep Calm and Probe On (not exactly calming)
Regional Observations: I love that the commitment to all things alien in Roswell even extends to the streetlights.
Albums Listened To: Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds (just the title track); Rogue's Gallery by Various artist (two discs of pirate songs and sea shanties by musicians ranging from Lou Reed to Richard Thompson to Nick Cave and even the actor John C. Reilly)
People's Favorite Jokes:
What do you call a cow who has just given birth? De-calf-inated
Songs of the Day:
the keytar and Cats the Musical tee is a look
the one and only Baby Gramps