Pageant on the road to sublime

Bobbie Allen

“The Pageant of the Masters” has a unique relationship with art. Its

method of tableaux vivants production is all about bringing two

things to painting and sculpture that we don’t normally associate

with them: spectacle and story. This year’s pageant, titled “On the

Road: A Crash Course in Art and Popular Culture,” presents a mixed

bag of both, representing both what is wonderful, and mundane, about

its singular relationship to art itself.

The pageant is theater. It relies heavily on flirting with the

important theatrical concept of “the willing suspension of

disbelief.” The phrase was coined by a 19th century poet, Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, to describe the sensation when all the elements of

a play are in harmony -- the words, the staging, the performance. The

viewer gets lost in the production. The pageant can seduce like

nothing else.

This year’s jaw-droppers included the familiar figures of

“Transportation” over the Grand Central Station terminal. The

original is 50-feet high. But here it is, in the Irvine Bowl, regal

Mercury perched in graceful Beaux Arts curvilinear style. It’s no

longer just an icon. It’s a part of the story of transportation

(transport -- to be taken away) and is suddenly something more than

just Indiana limestone. The statue becomes flesh and stone.

There was a collection of hood ornaments -- automobile mascots.

The iconic Rolls Royce “Spirit of Ecstasy” was both witty and

spectacular, representing the huge swings in credibility the pageant

can take, going from shrinking a 50-foot statue down to blowing a

tiny figurine up. Both draw the audience in with surprise and joy.

It’s all the elements coming together that make this possible.

It’s the music, the lighting, the make-up, props, narration and

story. When the pageant stays on-task, following the trope of its

theme, there’s nothing else like it. This year’s theme of being “On

the Road” was a strong thematic idea (surprisingly citing Charles

Kuralt’s television series but not Jack Kerouac’s popular 1957 book

of the same name). It allowed the script to wander wide,

incorporating the railways, the circus, Route 66 and even the Silk

Road, the ancient trade route between China and the West.

The Silk Road tableaus were amazing, including an ornate and

perfectly colored representation of one of the Dunhuang Caves, an

ancient Buddhist place of worship and refuge for travelers. The

audience gasped in awe and seemed saddened when the lights went down.

The original frescoes were marvelously reproduced, aged to the patina

of ancient glory.

But the story of the Silk Road, presented in one of several short

slide shows, threatened to ruin this effect by imposing upon the

audience a crash course in history. Coleridge knew an audience

shouldn’t think; only experience.

This is why the story can drive or destroy the willing suspension

of disbelief. When the audience was expected to move from ancient

China to a quaint 1903 Carl Larsson painting, it was just too much.

We had to be quickly filled in on Larsson’s popular appeal in Sweden,

essentially an apology for the obscurity of the image. While still

blinking away the image of Buddha surrounded by bodhisattvas, we’re

watching a sentimental depiction of period pathos. The sentimental

can be effective, but it sometimes feels forced when the pageant

includes so many American cliches -- variations on Norman Rockwell.

“The Boy,” “The Old Stagecoach,” “Outside the House of Paquin,” “Gray

and Brass,” “Outdoors Blow the Summer Winds,” and “The Jolly

Flatboatmen” all go for this effect. The audience becomes overly

familiar with the sensation, and so becomes desensitized.

But what makes the pageant marvelous is its artful unity. The

series of three Hopper paintings was dead on. They all fit neatly

with the “story,” taking us first to a “Western Motel,” then to get

“Gas,” and finally to a reviving cup of coffee in the wee hours

(“Nighthawks,” of course). They were amazing because Hopper’s

canvases are so very flat and abstracted. Our eyes refuse to believe

this is three-dimensional. We have suspended our disbelief.

And we’re even more shocked and amazed when the stage lighting is

replaced by a flood of provocative red, the figures move, and we know

we’ve been fooled.

A Dorothea Lange Depression-era photograph, “Family on the Road,”

was actually moving, an amazing achievement. It is, after all, a

photograph, as “realist” as you can get. In an age of digital

perfection, of colors in photos more vivid than those in real life,

to see a grainy black-and-white image of a family taking a break on

the road to a better life was more spectacular than seeing a

Leonardo. This is a part of the larger story.

The next-to-last tableau (“The Last Supper” is, as always, the

finale) was, for me, the best example of strong pageant production.

John Register’s “Man on the Road” was poignantly expressed, with

narrator Skip Conover’s voice weaving Register’s biography in and out

of the image. Dan Duling’s script is soaring here, the story of the

painting -- a lone figure on a long stretch of road, heading toward

the vanishing point -- becomes the story of the artist working on the

original painting at the end of his life. It transports the tableau

into a larger metaphor, and we forget for a moment what we’re looking

at -- a man on a stage playing a man in a painting.

Coleridge rightly called this “poetic faith.” We want to believe.

To see the Pageant of the Masters is to understand what this means

more intimately than is possible anywhere else.

* BOBBIE ALLEN is a poet and writer who has taught art theory and

criticism. She currently teaches writing at the University of

California, Irvine.