Finding the Soul of Coney Island
By Eric Ernst

Review from The Southampton Press
April 15, 2004

If Santayana was right in suggesting that “to the art of working well, a civilized race would add the art of playing well,” then it’s reasonable to conclude that Americans have been able to take this concept of what it means to be “civilized” to rather dramatic extremes.

We do this with an intensity of purpose that leads us to build not simple amusement parks, but shrines and temples that serve as monuments to our own nostalgia and sanctuaries from contemporary reality.

Here in Florida, as I write this, the siren calls of these deities to escapism constantly beckon, spouting corporate propaganda and reminding us that, as C. Wright Mills noted, the “mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.”

In establishing this kind of mass-produced distraction, the amusement behemoths lurking in Orlando use, as their common template, the most famous of their predecessors, the fabled Coney Island. Perhaps the first of the great amusement parks, dating back to the mid-1880s, it is still a name that conjures images of a simpler, more innocent, era, although today it’s probably considered rather passé by most.

Now the focus of an exhibition of photographs by Gary Beeber at the Lyceum Gallery at the eastern campus of Suffolk Community College in Riverhead, Coney Island confronts the viewers of this exhibition with images that are singularly powerful in their evocation of this mother of all amusement parks as more than just another historical landmark in our
sociological evolution.

Striving to convey its soul, rather than mere structure, Mr. Beeber is able to convey a sense of solitude that is redolent of nostalgia but in a way still remarkably bereft of mawkish sentimentality, even as he pays homage to Coney Island’s ultimate artificiality and plasticity.

He accomplishes this by framing his images in such a way as to create certain unasked questions and spinning mysteries that remain unanswered and unsolved even after repeated viewings. Completely absent any figuration, the photographs nevertheless reflect a definite human presence, perhaps more spectral than corporeal.

Strangely enough, however, as much as the work is physically all about structures on a literal level, it is the absent element of humanity that is still the primary focus of the works. As Marek Bartelik wrote of Mr. Beeber, his photographs “often depict the shadows of things rather than the things themselves.”

This is particularly true in “Entrance” and “Eldorado Arcade,” both of which are images that seem rather sad and shopworn but still perpetually offer possibilities of a past, and future, more promising than the present. The latter is particularly powerful in its installation, as the left panel in an unrelated triptych of pictures that also includes “Sausage” and “Souvenir.”

On another level entirely, Mr. Beeber’s work shows a fascinating cognizance of how aesthetic elements of Coney Island have crept into other realms and areas of art history and pop culture. Creating immediate connections, and occasionally juxtapositions, between bright coloration and negative space, he uses the central imagery to make references to pop culture metaphors that can trace their roots back to iconographic Coney Island motifs.

It would be difficult, for example, to look at “Happy Ride” and not think of the weird creatures populating the work of Kenny Scharf. Nor is it a stretch to see how images such as those found in “Signage, Coney Island” profoundly influenced artists such as Robert Indiana. Further, anyone who has listened to or read the lyric sheets to Bruce Springsteen’s “Sandy” would have a difficult time pondering Mr. Beeber’s “Tilt-A-Whirl” without experiencing a stab of recognition.

For those familiar with the 20th century avant-garde, Mr. Beeber acknowledges a reverence for constructivist principles in his obvious paean to a contemporary adulation of the positive possibilities of technology itself: In “The Famous Cyclone” he harkens back to the absolute joy that amusement parks represented in manifesting the possibilities of relaxation for the working class, even as he calls to mind the powerful image of Russian revolutionary art in its evocation of Tatlin’s seminal (yet never constructed) tower monument to the Third International.

The exhibition of photographs by Gary Beeber, “Happy Ride, Pictures from Coney Island,” continues at the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk Community College’s Eastern Campus in Riverhead through April 30.

© The Southampton Press, 2004