Dennis Hollingsworth

A Visit to Forest Lawn

I asked Andrew Hahn (longtime friend, fellow Chinatown denizen) to give us a tour of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in nearby Glendale. I have managed to live here in Southern California for over twenty years without visiting the huge panorama painting by Jan Styka (I didn't want to make a pilgrimage for something that I thought was kitch on a monumental scale)... for shame, Dennis. So who else but Andrew* to give me a grand tour of the strangely huge painting and the entire theme park devoted to the afterlife in the hills overlooking Glendale?

ANDREW HAHN PAINTS UNSOLVABLE MYSTERIES. HE creates them with the same meticulous objectivity that detectives employ to solve a crime. In Hahn's case, the evidence isn't a dead body or discarded bullet casings but rather the images popular culture generates to represent the horrific. His astonishingly skillful paintings of visual tropes used by television and movies to elicit the frisson of actual crime scenes are strange double takes on the visceral and discomfiting. They suggest frightening occurrences that have been romanticized in the name of entertainment and then revised back into images of pure uncertainty. Hahn calls them paranoid paintings, meaning that their potency lies in their untrustworthiness. For while he goes to extraordinary lengths to mimic the video grabs from news shows and "reality"-based TV programs like Dateline NBC and The New Detectives that form his source material, his interest in evoking the psychological threat that his models were designed to sweeten and negate leaves the veraci ty of these canvases' intense moodiness highly suspect and their success more than a little unnerving.

PostScript:
The CounterStrike footage was taken at ChinaTown's legendary CyberLan in 2002/3, something I wrote about in DIE BITCH, one of the first postings in this weblog.

PostScript 2:
Andrew sent in his essay on the Styka painting:

The Loved One
by Andrew Hahn

When was the last time a painting made you gasp? Jan Styka's 'The Crucifixion' is a high-percentage guarantee. In fact, it's the largest canvas painting in the world and you can find it at Forest Lawn Cemetery (or 'Memorial Park') in Glendale, California. Behind the largest wrought-iron gates in the world, drive up the narrow winding streets, past the flat bronze grave makers (or 'Memorial Tablets') that litter the green hills, to the last stop on the left, the Hall of the Crucifixion.
In 1996, I first witnessed Styka's ridiculously ambitious masterpiece. This piece is an enormous panorama, standing 45 feet high and 195 feet wide. It must be seen to be believed.
Following the painting's commission by Polish statesman and pianist, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, in 1894, Styka traveled to Jerusalem to prepare sketches, and to Rome, where his palette was blessed by Pope Leo XIII.
In 1897, his finished painting was unveiled in Warsaw to much awe and acclaim. Installed in the half-round, with the audience standing on a platform, it was shown throughout Europe before making its way to America, in 1904, for the St. Louis Exposition. After this, the painting was seized by customs when Styka's American business partners failed to pay the taxes for its return to Poland. The huge canvas was rolled around a telephone pole and put into deep storage. Styka never saw it again.
Heard about, located and purchased by American businessman and founder of Forest Lawn, Dr. Hubert Eaton, in 1944, the painting was brought to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where it was mounted to a panel and given a gigantic gilded frame, before Styka's son Adam was summoned from Poland to restore his father's badly damaged work. The piece was originally entitled 'Golgotha', the Aramaic name of the site where the event took place, but Dr. Eaton changed it to fit his 'Sacred Trilogy' idea of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection (all three represented by artworks now within the confines of Forest Lawn, Glendale). The Hall of the Crucifixion was completed in 1951 as a permanent house for the painting and, later, the multimedia presentation that accompanies it. But just recently, 2005 til 2006, the hall was closed. In anticipation of Forest Lawn's centennial celebration, 'The Crucifixion' underwent maintenance restoration, during which time the theatrical display of the painting also underwent a change, to the detriment of the experience of the painting.
The painting itself depicts a moment just before Christ's crucifixion. His figure is situated in the center of the painting, his composed countenance directed to the sky, with a multiple tableau narrative that sprawls side to side, and a dramatic mood that is set by the foreboding cloudscape that alone takes up about half of the canvas, 22 x 195 feet of sky.
Historically, by the 1890s and for well over a hundred years before, Christian painting had become marginal and anachronistic by European standards. Styka was known for his portraits and historical paintings, but his four great panoramas are what made him world famous; two are Christian in theme, and two focus on Polish history; one of these is an epic battle scene that is, unbelievably, twice the width of the painting in question. The concepts that make up 'The Crucifixion' as an artwork are obviously influenced by Ideological Realism, a Slavic movement of the time, which touted art as for the people, not just the rich, with a moral attitude toward social education and a penchant for monumental compositions. Technically, Styka's painting displays the abilities of a master; but, for me, that is a given, and it's the size that counts most here, and the strange experience that's built around that size.
Upon entering the Renaissance-inspired Hall of the Crucifixion, through the small yet tall entrance of clerestory stained-glass, concrete buttresses and oak panels, and into the beautifully ambiguous theatre, which seats 800 but is usually empty, one is suggested to sit at the back in order to take in the enormity of the piece.
My initial experience was sitting alone in the middle of the back row as the auditorium fell into total darkness and the narration pushed through the sound system, an authorial voice telling the backstory of Styka's painting before beginning the represented story of that New Testament day. The audio played like the accompanying recording for a child's Sunday school comic book version of the story, with theatrical music providing emotional resonance. It was hokey in a way that was as eerily unsettling as the spotlights that pierced the darkness, sync-ed to hit the section of canvas that was being talked about and occasionally audibly acted-out (with centurion and crowd voices, horse noises, etc). The spotlights began on the far right and jumped around with the narration as my neck craned back and forth in order to follow the light hitting each tableau, and finally ended up in the center, on Christ standing alone. Then the entire painting was revealed in a full wash of light, astoundingly huge and detailed. But before long, the theatre fell into darkness again as the story continued beyond the painting's narrative, and I heard the sound of the spikes being driven into Jesus' hands and feet, centurions shouting, thunder rumbling my seat, Jesus' beleaguered voice questioning his Father, and his waning heartbeat that slowly subsided. Still in total darkness, I could vaguely discern the giant automated curtain moving as the second part of the story continued with the narrator's voice: the tomb, the angel, the moment before the ascension, the meaning of Christ's sacrifice. Again the full wash of light, but now, as if by magic, a new painting stood in the same place, 'The Crucifixion's companion piece, 'The Resurrection'.
Standing nearly the same height as the Styka painting but only one-third the width, 'The Resurrection', by Robert Clark, features the tomb, the angel, and Jesus with outstretched arms, looking skyward like before, but now the clouds are filled with the collective people of the world looking down at their savior. And at nearly two feet high, in the lower right corner of this painting is a copyright symbol followed by 'FOREST LAWN CO. 1965', the year Clark completed the painting and it became the possession of Forest Lawn. (Clark was the winner of a contest that Dr. Eaton established in 1963, and his painting is strikingly inferior to Styka's tour de force, which is conversely devoid of overt metaphor. Clark's could be found in a thrift store for giants.) Then the curtain closed over the final strains of an organ-accompanied choir hymn, and the theatre lights came on as the narration ended: "Thank you for visiting the Hall of the Crucifixion/Resurrection. Please exit through the doors at the right of the theatre. God bless you and come again.'
That was my experience over ten years ago, but it won't be yours if you go today to see the painting. As noted, in 2006, along with its restoration, the painting's presentation was also reworked and updated, replacing the old with a new narration and music score, new lighting cues, and adding two large flat-screen televisions, mounted to the stage just beneath the painting. Each change is a poorly executed devaluation of the previous installation. The tvs display close-ups of the tableaus as they're referenced in the narration, so now there is a sort of cross-referencing that is encouraged, the viewer looking back and forth between the tv image of the painting and the painting itself.
The theatricality of the experience, the potentially spiritual experience of being fixated on a painting, is now unnecessarily mediated by Radio Shack.
In the moments of former darkness between 'The Crucifixion' and 'The Resurrection', when the crucifixion sound-effects take place, now witness a series of close-ups from more explicit paintings as they're flashed on the televisions. This kills the more powerful images that one's mind creates in the darkness, especially the lost impact of sitting in the dark and listening to Jesus' heart stop beating. Also, the entire painting is now fully lighted from the beginning of the biblical tale. The circular and oval spotlights are replaced by shaky square and rectangular ones. The 1960s male voice is replaced by a more contemporary female voice, and Jesus' voice now sounds relaxed instead of over-the-top.
(As a viewer who is not invested in the subtext of the painting and the gratuitous surface-text of the environmental encounter, that is: not being a person of faith, camp is a prominent subtext for this experience. And the best camp is always unintentional, as well as defying the labels of high and low. The presentation of 'The Crucifixion' is undoubtedly campy. And, not until it was clumsily overhauled was I able to perceive the different shades of camp, the variance of success within a category that most likely could not be discerned by the architects of the experience.)
Since these changes have been made, I have, on several occasions, sat down to compose a letter to Forest Lawn about this disservice, but I couldn't control my emotions once I got started and my polite letter quickly degenerated into hostility. And then I would fear I was getting upset over nothing. I sniped about Radio Shack before, but isn't the entire place (Forest Lawn) a big theme park anyway. It's truly a one of a kind; and I think I've cooled down now considerably about the whole situation. This isn't an inflammatory essay exactly. I mean, I don't think you should torch the Hall of the Crucifixion or anything, but maybe you should join me and write a letter to Alison Bruesehoff, executive director of the adjoining museum, about changing the presentation back to how it was before. Her address is 1712 South Glendale Ave, Glendale, CA 91205.
That's also the address where you can find the painting. Admission is free, and it can be viewed daily from 10am to 4pm on the hour.