American Gothic on Steroids

After wandering around Chinatown last Sunday, we caught another Chicago River Taxi to a landing near Michigan Avenue. This river trip was an end to itself, but I also wanted to see American Gothic on Steroids.

Actually, the sculpture is called "God Bless America," by sculptor J. Seward Johnson, and stands on Pioneer Plaza just south of the Tribune Tower. Apparently it's been there for ten months or so, facing Michigan Avenue and attracting a fair number of onlookers.

At the foot of the familiar American Gothic pair, there's a large suitcase, proportionally sized to the giant figures. An assortment of destination stickers are plastered on the suitcase, which made me wonder -- how long has it been since travelers put such stickers on their suitcases, or more likely, their steamer trunks? Did anyone ever actually do that? If so, it's as passé now as a short snorter. If not, it must have been one of those illustrator conventions with scant basis in fact.

In any case, the convention survives as illustrator (or artist) shorthand for "we've been a lot of places." The stickers on the giant suitcase are specific, too: TH (Thailand), Shanghai, CHN (China), TW (Taiwan), IND (India) and Dhaka. What is the artist saying here? We've been to a lot of hot, crowded, mostly oppressive Asian nations, and boy is it great here in America by comparison? Or we've been all over Asia, and we're too dense to understand anything we've seen? Pick whichever interpretation offends you most, as Matt Groening once said about his Akbar & Jeff characters.

I don't know Johnson, but I've read he catches flak from critics for creating works that people actually like, or don't question prevailing cultural paradigms in academically recognized ways, or something. As a wealthy scion of the Johnson & Johnson fortune, however, he probably can afford, literally and figuratively, to ignore his critics.