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THE PRE-VINYLITE SOCIETY JOURNAL
A PAUSE IN THE NOISE
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A PAUSE IN THE NOISE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST SCOTT LISTFIELD by Meredith Kasabian
Scott Listfield is a contemporary American artist whose paintings feature a lone astronaut often situated in dystopian or homogenous landscapes teeming with corporate logos and advertising billboards. In these monotonously abundant cityscapes, the helmeted and faceless astronaut evokes a sense of alienation from a world we often take for granted. I met with Listfield at his home in Somerville, Mass., to discuss how his work aligns with the ideals of the Pre-Vinylite Society— specifically, how he views the relationship between humans and their built environments as experienced through his anonymous protagonist.
“Death to Humans” by Scott Listfield, 2013.
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Listfield started working on his astronaut paintings in the late 1990s, soon after graduating college and returning to the U.S. from a year abroad in Europe and Australia. As he explains, the “initial impetus for the astronaut character” came when he realized that his self-awareness as a foreigner did not dissipate upon his homecoming. He explains, “those feelings were really percolating in my head when I started these astronaut paintings—the sense of alienation in my environment and feeling like a stranger in my own land.” The initial concepts for the astronaut paintings were born out of the idea that “the contemporary landscape that we’ve created for ourselves is this myriad or collage of logos.” The astronaut—a cultural icon that evokes both familiarity and alienation—acts as a window into our own relationships with pervasive mass marketing and the numbing effects of a homogenous landscape. Listfield imagines the astronaut as an extension of the viewer and often situates him in “mundane urban environments,” the kind of settings the average urban dweller accepts without consideration: city streets, highways, grocery stores. He explains, “I want you to be able to look at my paintings and think about that scene as if you had never seen
THE PRE-VINYLITE SOCIETY JOURNAL
“I like the idea that in some dystopian future world these signs are treasured objects.” something like that before. When you do that, you start realizing how weird everything is—just by virtue of having this astronaut there in the middle of it, you start thinking ‘this is a strange environment for me as a human to be walking around in.’” The number of signs that the astronaut encounters in his travels speaks to the prevalence of wayfinding, advertising, and even homemade signage that confront us in our daily lives. The astronaut, however, rarely appears to be reading or making sense of the signs that surround him in Listfield’s paintings. He is often positioned away from the signs with his gaze directed outward, toward the viewer. To me, it seems as though his inability or unwillingness to read the signs signals either ignorance or rebellion. How does Listfield account for the astronaut’s indifference to signs and what does it say about the viewer’s relationship to the barrage of signs in our own environments?
“The Cave: Signs” by Scott Listfield, 2015.
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“The Crap Store” by Scott Listfield, 2015.
“I treat signs in my painting—and text in general—like another character in my story, like the way I treat logos, symbols, old automobiles, or graffiti. It’s language that we use to communicate with each other that has a lot of meaning beyond whatever the text itself says. I think about text or signs in my paintings as a language that’s important to our culture but one that also becomes easily divorced from whatever meaning it has, and I like to play on that idea. By introducing the astronaut as an inherently alien or foreign character to these environments that are riddled with signs, it makes us question the signs and see how weird they can be when they’re taken out of context.” Listfield references his painting, The Cave: Signs, one in a set of five paintings in his Cave series, which features the lone astronaut exploring caves in which unusual objects or surreal experiences await. In this painting, the astronaut encounters a large cave in a lush, green landscape that is littered with giant 7-Eleven and Dunkin’ Donuts signs. The signs “seem like they’ve been pulled into the cave for some purpose but that purpose has nothing to do with their original intent and it might not even have anything to do with what the signs actually say on them.”
This idea of re-contextualizing the mundane is pervasive throughout Listfield’s works. Signs, specifically, play into this concept because, as he suggests,“signs become so quickly indicative of what they represent that we neglect what they say or what their artistic qualities are. I like the idea that in some dystopian future world these signs are treasured objects. Like you would find a 7-Eleven sign or a giant McDonald’s sign and you might find that worthy of worship in 500 years, if civilization goes down the shitter. There’s something to these things that we take for granted. Even divorced from whatever their meaning is, there’s some beauty and relevance to them.” Listfield emphasizes the significance of the sign-as-object in his works and the physicality and stature of the signs speak as much meaning as the words or symbols inscribed on them. But, for Listfield, signs are also representative of larger concepts and often act as a synecdoche for capitalism, consumerism, and even corporate manifest destiny. In The Iceberg, the solitary astronaut sits isolated on the edge of a glacier as giant pylon signs for Burger King, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell soar high into the air behind him. This painting is “about the idea that we think
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THE PRE-VINYLITE SOCIETY JOURNAL
“The Landscape” by Scott Listfield, 2013.
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of mankind reaching out to grasp the entire world and there’s no place on the earth where you wouldn’t be able to order a Taco Bell chalupa. That’s the manifest destiny of this age: to have no place where you can’t get a chalupa.” The Pre-Vinylite Society advocates for quality signage and public art as a way to reclaim a sense of place that has been lost, in part, to the onslaught of mass marketing and mass production. Does Listfield see the astronaut’s alienation as derivative of this sense of displacement, or is it the ubiquity of signage and advertising itself—regardless of its message or medium—that makes him remote from our world? Would the astronaut feel any more comfortable strolling down a main street populated by small, local businesses with unique, handcrafted signage?
“If the whole world were hand-painted signs, I would still paint the astronaut, but I think I would treat it in a very different manner. What I think [the current resurgence of sign painting] is trying to do, beyond just making signs, is in some ways not that different from what I’m trying to do with my astronaut, which is to insert a pause into our everyday life, where you stop at something and think about it as opposed to just letting it wash over you and seep into your subconscious. A hand-painted sign is a pause in that noise, ideally. ” Listfield’s astronaut, like the stylized world that he traverses, emphasizes the constructed nature of our homogenized corporate culture and reminds us that the meaning we make from the various signs that guide our way is one way to reclaim our humanity.
“That’s the manifest destiny of this age: to have no place [on Earth] where you can’t get a chalupa.”
“The Iceberg” by Scott Listfield, 2007.