Nineties mauve walls wage war with rust-colored seventies Naugahyde in the nameless local coffee shop and fire pit restaurant, two halves of the same large dropped-ceiling space. The restaurant is three steps below the coffee shop and the exclusive fire pit dining area one level below that.
In the dimly-lit formal dining area, the decor consists of dark rough-hewn paneled walls with vaguely early American wrought iron sconces and chunky distressed-wood furniture from the late seventies clustered around a sixties-style glossy red metal fire pit. Around it and the close-by circle of frayed Naugahyde-covered chairs and tables that forms the fire pit dining area is a structure that is a cross between a Victorian gazebo and a go-go dance booth lit by rows of acrylic tube lights hanging curtain-like from the octagonal roof line. One step out of the fire pit and outside the gazebo, more chunky tables and chairs spread out toward the dark paneled walls.
Up the stairs near the entrance from the motel lobby is the coffee shop with its twin rows of rust-colored booths and lone row of chunky chairs and tippy formica-topped cigarette-scarred pedestal tables running down the middle. At one end, a baby-blue door leads to the restrooms and fights with gold and avocado-tinged murals above, one depicting a deserted prairie farm, and the other silhouetting a lone farmer and a horse-drawn plow. The color of the door is obviously an attempt at matching the shop's carpet of hunter-green diamonds highlighted in mauve and steel blue, the solitary trace of the decorating styles of the current decade amid the shapes and hues of the seventies that invaded the prairie with a vengeance and have staunchly refused to leave.
Along the booth-lined wall between the main entrance and the restroom door is the piece de resistance of this decorator's nightmare, a giant aesthetic train wreck of a mural entitled The History of North Dakota. It is a riotous hodgepodge of badly-proportioned primitive figures juxtaposed out of time, space or relationship to anything save a vague sense of the mythic triumphal march of time and progress that starts at the left with Indians and ends with the state capitol.
Beginning at right in the most contemporary part of the mural, the state capitol stands against a blaze of back lighting that was most likely painted to represent a sunset or sunrise, but that is more akin to the blaze of a prairie fire poised to engulf the capitol much like the flames that destroyed the prairie skyscraper's predecessor in the late twenties. Did the artist know that he was symbolically burning down progress in that impossible burst of light set against a building that is oriented north-south, or was his craft that meager? Judging by the whole of the mural, the latter is the more likely.
Perhaps the flames are meant to evoke an impending Armageddon called down by the trio of Native Americans who crouch in the far left corner of the painting and look out upon the whole panorama of events as they unfold. They are a strange trio who have no apparent ties to any of the five indigenous peoples of North Dakota save for their brown skin, long hair and featureless breechcloths. Only one of them has feet, and they are not clad in moccasins as one might expect, but in dark footwear with straps reminiscent of the patent-leather tee-strap shoes worn by young girls at Easter. All three have a soft androgynous quality to them, a lightness of frame and a slimness of waist that precludes their being mistaken for strong adult men who could take charge of the mural. Instead, they are youths, young Indian boys whose future will most likely be grim in the new white world being introduced in the images between them and the burning capitol.
Across the entire mural, there is an unsettling lack of unity of form, design or color. The overall impression is that of a badly-played piece of poorly-written music or the painful, clumsy steps of a couple dancing out of rhythm to each other to music they cannot feel in a dance they do not know. Proportions are out of whack, figures appear out of nowhere like prophecies from magic eight balls and the colors jar and offend the senses.
Despite all this, the mural seems to have a centerpiece, a prairie couple prominently featured midway between the youths and the building, much larger than any other item in the painting. Though obviously intended as a couple, the man and woman lean away from each other, with the man proprietorially grasping the woman's shoulder much like he grasps his slack rifle with his other hand. His clothing is more contemporary than historical, which makes him look more prepared to go country line dancing at the local VFW club than to tame the West, and the bland expressionlessness of his face gives no hint of the kind of strength of character or resolve needed to be a pioneer farmer or western hero. He looks more like a self-conscious adolescent uncomfortably sitting for his eighth-grade photograph than a man who could ever hold onto the woman at his side.
His prairie bride stands to his right in a scarlet gown, a bored prom queen wearing an apron. Her eyes have a Stepford-wife vacancy to them and her hair is more suitable to an actress with a walk-on in a daytime soap opera than to a pioneer woman of the last century. Below her firm, generous breasts glowing in highlighted scarlet, she bears an amorphous white mass in her arms, most likely the form of a newborn child.
Many of the males in the scenes that make up the bulk of the painting gaze intently in the direction of the scarlet bride's luminous mammaries, though none of them are portrayed in a scale equal to hers. To the viewer's right looms Teddy Roosevelt astride his horse, looking in her direction, but held back from openly showing his lust by his self-control and thoughts of presidential aspirations. To the far left, a fur trapper holds a dead fox by its tail and raises it in salute to the woman, while closer in, a decidedly masculine figure with a mountain man's beard leans on his plow as he rests from breaking the sod of the virgin prairie and gazes affectionately toward her. He casually cradles his shotgun in his arms, its muzzle erect and aimed in the woman's direction, a symbol which gives rise to speculations about the true paternity of the infant.
The scarlet prairie bride is the only woman in the entire mural, owned by one man, desired by many and fulfilling her divinely-ordained destiny by bearing children. This is not an easy role for her to fill, as the deep violet-tinged red of her gown is engaged in a violent struggle with the rust orange inverted triangle that forms the background for the central figures. The figures stand upon a bit of well-manicured turf that seems more of a putting green than a stand of prairie grass that is dotted with five odd shapes most likely meant to be wild flowers, but colored in a bittersweet orange that is foreign to any native flora save some strains of fall berries. The obvious symbolism of these flowers is the promise of fecundity that the woman can bring forth in the future to help populate the newly-settled prairie but the incongruous color choice and amorphous anonymity of the flowers highlight the impossibility of her task.
The mural has its share of machines as well, all of them crude, but less crudely presented than the human forms. A train pulled by a steam-powered locomotive hurtles through space on a collision course with the woman's head and a tractor and private plane figure prominently in a modern farm scene at the viewer's right that shows a house, barn and steel outbuildings nestled in rolling wooded hills near a stream that would more likely be found in Pennsylvania than on the northern plains.
In its dissonant presentation and strange iconography, this mural depicts, either consciously or subconsciously, a deluded sense of history, a people divorced from nature and a chilling false paradise of machine-age progress. All that is part of the natural world is either misrepresented, domesticated or destroyed and scored with straight lines that show the desire to impose abstract geometry on the new world. In the midst of all this, one lone woman is charged with insuring the survival and growth of the entire race and three young Indian boys helplessly look on as their world is transformed.
Oddly enough, the atrocious mural fits well with the warring decor of the rest of the coffee house and fire pit and helps to define the aesthetic void of the place. One wonders if the artist is still painting such murals or has taken up better uses of his talents, such as painting quaint country scenes onto used saw blades and hawking them amid all the lace-clad bunnies at local craft fairs.
August 1998 Update: Unfortunately, word has it that he's still at large in the area, leaving bad murals wherever he can con people into hiring him. His most recent debacle was a mural honoring the new AVIKO plant in town, the Dutch-owned place that produces mind-boggling amounts of french fries around the clock. No one has seen the infamous AVIKO mural since the first Dutch director went back to the Netherlands. Could it have been his special going-away present? Could a secret cadre of style-conscious commandos have stolen into the plant and destroyed the work? Could it have accidentaly been turned into julienne strips after having been fed into the top-secret high tech AVIKO potato shredders? We may never know.
Welcome to Jamestown, the Priiiiiiiiide of the Prairie! Yeeeee-haw!
NoDak Mural/ stevenso@acc.jc.edu