John Cooper: Beyond West Kootenay Landscapes
Late 20th-Century Artist Transcends Time & Place in Paintings
Nov 9, 2008
When the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s were at their peak, sweeping away rigid artistic modalities and pedagogy, John Cooper was in the front lines. In 1965, he was hired as an art professor in order “to lighten things up” at the University of Indiana, where formal classical tradition dictated style. With his minimalist Frank Stella-like abstractions on the army column geometry of Chicago’s tract housing and his recycled metal sculptures of grain hoppers, a play on the cubist geometrical arrangements of Cézanne – modernist styles which strike present-day observers as archetypal almost to the point of normality – he did just that.
Those whose vision was informed by entrenched tradition could not see the subtle play of elements in Cooper's work, how Cooper's cookie-cutter houses were subsumed by the overarching power of nature, or how his "beautiful hoppers," constructed from cubes and pyramids of soft steel and iron, swept off the flat midwestern plains like mountains and steeples.
“It is always the same problem when the aspirations of an institution are set by academics who have sold out. The school falls into the hands of people who are only there to make money. They would take me aside and say, “Look, John, we’ve got this good little thing going here. Why rock the boat?”
““Rock the boat?” I would cry out. “Let’s shake this damned thing. Let’s sink the S.O.B.!”
After 5 years, the artist whose works had graced the walls of the Whitney, Chicago Institute, and Denver Center, was forced out of tenure and moved to Canada, eventually settling in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia's south-central interior.
“What I found about the Kootenays is that it was a cultural success,” Cooper states. “There were natives, hippies, and enough of the new and unusual that the community was stimulating and inspiring. It could also scare the shit out of you.”
Cooper's style underwent another radical transformation. As he ameliorated the harshness of survival in the Canadian wilderness by working at very times as a car mechanic, a fruit picker and even a salesman of organic apple cider and tofu, his art reflected the world around him:
- Cool, neutral hues and hard-edged geometry gave way to lush, expressionistic brushwork and riotous colours.
- More natural elements appeared in his work in execution and content: mountains, trees, lakes, skies, like with the hundreds of Toad Rock and Mount Loki paintings, often in combination with human elements like roads and telephone poles.
- Satire softened from overt political cartooning into a self-deprecating view, such as with his many views of Walter Williams, the styrofoam hat-stand which represented Cooper's alter-ego. The satire remains, but Cooper nods to his own complicity in the difficulties and challenges which face humanity today.
“Well, there are all kinds of undelivered responsibility for it [environmental degradation, political corruption, CO2 emissions]. I’m part of it. If you want to think about karma, you have to understand, like Darwin said, that we’ve built our demise into our existence unless we evolve. The only way I can evolve is use my self-judgment and a lot of ingenuity and self-sacrifice. I try to turn it all into good energy. I try not to take more out of this beautiful planet of ours than I put back in.”
The exuberance of Cooper's art, assemblages of found elements and abstract impressionist-expressionistic painting techniques, reflect these values. They also emerge in spontaneous lectures on art history, and at his own artist’s retrospective talk at Nelson's Touchstones Gallery, a fullscale impromptu colour-theory class---proof that John Cooper has never lost touch with the essential purpose behind his avant-garde roots.
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