The Village as a Microcosm of the Wide World

Thornton Wilder gave us Grover’s Corners. Sherwood Anderson toured us through the hearts and minds of Winesburg, Ohio.

Now, Mel Edelman delivers us to his own engrossing sliver of the world where, as in the towns of Wilder and Anderson, the human condition plays itself out in microcosm. There are only three structures--a gallery, a shop and a home--in Edelman’s little village, but each has such physical and emotional credibility that, together, they create the convincing ambience of a real locale in real, lived time, a place novelistically infused with secrecy, obsession, creation, devotion and revelation.

Edelman’s marvelously evocative installation occupies the central, ground floor gallery at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography. The three furnished, free-standing buildings deftly fuse Edelman’s material skills as a professional carpenter (in Monterey) and his acute observational powers as a photographer. The interiors of the structures are sized to the body, but the exteriors are scaled down, like the facades on Disneyland’s Main Street, minus the saccharine and kitsch.

Doors to two of the three buildings stand open, and we’re invited not just to wander through but to truly explore each room, to poke around, open drawers, read papers that have been left out. The house and the shop feel recently vacated, as if their occupants just stepped out for lunch or to run an errand. An iron rests on the ironing board, near a neatly folded shirt. In the shop, the day’s schedule of appointments sits efficiently on the desk, near a pipe and coffee mug.

Edelman has titled the installation “Things Undone,” which neatly suggests life regarded both in process and in retrospect. The place feels like a ghost town, yet is permeated by the aura of life, principally because Edelman himself has left nothing undone. Like a carefully constructed film set, every detail feeds into the atmosphere of the whole. The house and shop boast a “time stood still” decor. Chairs, tables, cabinets and lighting fixtures date to the ‘50s or ‘60s. Whether scraped, yellowed or rusted, the surfaces bear the patina of age. The palette derives directly from memory. Immersed in the textures of another time, it’s like stepping into a Coen brothers film: “Barton Fink” or “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

But Edelman’s installation is not just a technical tour de force. Intriguing stories and characters emerge, defined by the objects and the spaces, and ultimately, Edelman has us musing on questions of psychic survival--our own and that of the fictional occupants of his town.

Of the three structures, the store is the most dense in detail, the most captivating. Its windows announce it as a dealership in confessions and diaries, curiosities and art. This is a business on the fringe of viability, one that trades on the twin impulses of secrecy and voyeurism. Enter through the door marked “private” and find cabinets packed with audiotapes, videotapes and film reels, printed confessions and diaries (from St. Augustine to Anne Frank), and an assortment of handwritten journals, old photographs and other relics. On the desk, a binder contains descriptions of monthly specials: surveillance tapes from the East German police, military instructional tapes on interrogation techniques, illicit recordings from a church confessional. A current of humor runs through this enterprise, but it’s dark, painful, uneasy. It leavens only slightly the space’s heavier notes of vulnerability and exploitation.

One of the cataloged specials is a 1950 journal kept by a Chicago dishwasher named John Malcolm Bates. It chronicles his efforts to time-travel by subjecting himself to intense jolts of electricity. The wreckage of his shock-emitting device is displayed in one of the shop windows, and a few transcribed pages from his journal hang framed on the wall. The sales listing in the binder concludes with a clincher that applies not just to that item, but to Edelman’s entire project: “Fact or fiction,” it says, “a riveting read.”

In this store, the drive of the obsessive dealer-collector intersects with a probing of the layered truths of experience and memory, particularly the desire to know a reality outside the boundaries of the self. The prurient appeal of another’s confessions and of Bates’ time travel experiments stems from that same fundamental desire. It’s also, not coincidentally, one of the primary allures of photography and film.

The gallery structure that Edelman has included, an archetypal white box clad in hip corrugated metal, houses an exhibition of collages, which we view through the locked plate glass doors. According to the wall text, readable through the doors, the artist Abraham Goulash, a wealthy land speculator, suffered two debilitating strokes and lived out his last years parked in front of the television set, obsessively crafting these primitivist urban landscapes.

One of the artist’s works also hangs in the installation’s clapboard house, which we discover belongs to a psychiatric nurse. A freshly typed letter (addressed to Edelman) rests on the kitchen table and describes the nurse’s connection to a patient at a New York mental institution where she worked in the ‘80s. The patient, one George Munro, suffered from paranoid delusions and was given myriad treatments. When deemed well enough to handle some responsibilities at the facility, he was assigned to engrave identification numbers on hospital property. The engraving tool became Munro’s medium for making his mark on the world, and he engraved his way through thousands of objects during his last five years of life at the hospital, applying tight, meandering maze patterns to metal objects like the iron, toaster and tea kettle here, as well as inscribing snippets of text--confessions, really--on ashtrays and water glasses. Finding Munro’s compulsive gestures in unlikely places served as an awakening of sorts for the nurse living in this simple, slightly dingy home. She looked at the world differently since then, she relates in her letter. She started carrying a magnifying glass around with her.

“You’d never figure a crazy man would bring you closer to God,” she writes. “But he did.”

Munro the engraver, Bates the time-traveler, Goulash the collagist--each navigates his illness or his delusion using the rudder of creativity. Art, Edelman so brilliantly reminds us through the stories of others as much as the work of his own hands, is born of obsession. It might bring some closer to God. It certainly can bring us closer to our own lives and awaken us to wonders beyond ourselves. Art gives us a metaphorical magnifying glass, the better to see things with. It gives us a town and shows us the world.

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UCR/California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside, (909) 784-FOTO, through May 19. Free. Closed Monday.