McDonald's "Golden Arches" Leads to Heaven? Marcella Lassen's "Hamburger Art" by James Scarborough german close Although the country's cultural heritage was not built on a tradition of icon worship, that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t have it’s own legion of secular icons. They fall into two groups and both imbue and illuminate things that we venerate, extol, and praise. There are those that are created and fueled by the propaganda known as advertising and those that are not. A notable example of the latter is the omnipresence of the American flag that proliferated like butterflies after 9/11. Like their bejeweled counterparts, the Stars and Stripes refracted love, hope, and pride on levels that ranged from the historical to the emotional to the metaphysical. A notable example of the former is the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonalds with a homily of "Billions and billions sold." The starting point of this essay is not to decry the malaise of consumerism and its effect on bleaching icons, secular or otherwise, of their once vaunted transcendent status. Rather it’s to take exception to R. Cronk who wrote in Consumerism and the New Capitalism that "there are no iconic symbols to evoke transcendent truths." Clearly Cronk has never seen the Hamburger Art of Marcella Lassen. Whether the media be oil pastel, encaustic, gouache, collage (mirror fragments, gold leaf, rusted metal, sculptured paper), or Styrofoam, she offers many looks of this unlikely secular icon. Lassen serves up her hamburgers with all the trimmings. Her work is tongue in cheek, yummy, and profound. At various times it resembles UFO’s or Mae West’s lips in a Salvador Dali painting or Odilon Redon’s proto-Surrealist paintings. Because each image varies in its conception and execution this body of work comprises more of a Monetesque enterprise (think haystacks, think Rouen Cathedral) than one of Warholian proportion. She also conducts us through the menu of art history via the hamburger. Sometimes the reference is evident, as in The Albrecht Durer Burger, gouache on paper. The Blue Mountain Hamburger, oil pastel on paper, suggests Milton Avery painting a landscape of a Swiss canton nestled in the Alps. Luminous blue buns suggests both a lake and the vault of heaven while the green, red, yellow, and orange of the patty and the condiments remind one of flowers, trees, and richly-hued houses. Sometimes the burger is comprised entirely of white letters against a black background, as in The White Lettered Burger and its insinuation of a Conceptual project. The American Hamburger, encaustic and newsprint on paper, recalls collage elements of vintage Rauschenberg. And the This is not a hamburger Burger alludes to Magritte’s painting that separated language from its function of representation. It’s a versatile image, familiar, almost second nature and thus easily overlooked in our iconic, i.e., advertising-riddled landscape. To consider the hamburger as an icon on the conceptual level is to mock the transcendent status of traditional icons. Hamburgers are convenient symbols of consumerism, a negative condition that can be defined as the substitution of consumer ideals for those once offered by art and religion. In this light, it is easy enough to suggest that the values once granted the Holy Trinity have been replaced by the values of triumvirate McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s. We are what we eat. On a structural level, however, these hamburger icons tell an entirely different story. We find that, instead of heralding the difficulty if not the impossibility of spiritual renewal, these pieces reinstitute at least in part the role traditional icons played in the society of the imagination and the spirit: a roadmap of a state of grace to which we can aspire. The structural significance of the work manifests itself at two levels. 1) the level of material, and 2) the level of architecture. On a material level, with her quartet of Global Burgers (I-IV), Lassen creates dead-on simulacrums of traditional icons. After all, what is an icon if not a collage with higher aspirations? She builds up each Global Burger from sculptured paper and encaustic and adds such elements as dollar bills, colored newsprint, plastic pudding tubs, and other disposable food containers. The sesame seeds resemble jewels. What assures these four pieces of their iconic aura is their placement upon a background of gold leaf. The result is a mock heroic celebration of the side effects of consumerism: the paradox of recycling things which don’t break down in nature, the mesmerizing effect of newsprint advertising ads, and the omnipotence of the almighty U.S. dollar. The point? To remind us that our faculty of veneration still functions although it’s just a sconce misguided. As for part 2), can anything be more simple than the architecture of a hamburger? A bun upon which rests a meat patty over which lays another bun. Such is the hamburger in its most irreducible iteration. Condiments are subjective, optional; they provide local color. Remove one bun and all that remains is an open-faced sandwich. Remove both buns, as some Dr. Atkins-friendly restaurants do, and you have nothing but a patty. It is the three-part structure of the hamburger that makes the best case that the cosmological references present in Lassen’s Hamburger Art are more traditional than might appear at first sight. This can best be seen in Blue Mountain Hamburger. Though it resembles a Swiss mountain lake scene, its structure parallels that of medieval paintings that configured with more imagination than accuracy the universe of Hell-Earth-Heaven. A traditional even Orthodox message embodied, as it were, in a non-traditional form, Lassen’s Hamburger Art is approachable, easy to read, universally recognized; it is ubiquitous and affordable. They are precious in ways traditional icons are precious: they allude to an Other, to a moral high (and low) ground, to celebration. And they taste good. As secular icons they prescribe a course of action, constitute both source (Hell) and redemption (Heaven) of various mortal malaises. Most important, they stress that life is meant to be savored. Lassen does not suggest that the hamburger scourges rectitude. No, she offers us Eucharistic fast food that nourishes us with humor, with insight, and with hope. James Scarborough, M.A. Art Historian with 375 publications in the domestic and international art press Los Angeles May, 2004 www.hamburger-art.com MarcellaLassen@aol.com close |