Georgia on My Mind/Southern Culture USA

Red Grooms/Installation

So this is the thought that began to formed in my mind as we were driving through Georgia...installation...Southern culture installation...

( Now if you are not familiar with the United States and the roads and regions then it needs a little explaining. First of all Georgia is a very long state and it takes a very long time to drive through on your way to somewhere else, so one's mind is bound to wander and take odd turns.) I began to think of the Southern culture and its images as an installation worthy of an art exhibition.

If you speak Southern the main nouns in your language are fried chicken, cornbread, greens, BBQ, boiled peanuts, and coke. That is just a start for there is also fat back, strap back molasses, and cracklings. Guns and baseball caps are important also if we are creating a scene...rocking chairs help, stuffed heads of deer and fowl...hence the importance of guns. Think old ford and chevy pickup trucks with gun racks on the back window...the installation is worthy of Red Grooms who does recreations of city scenes and people doing things with a sense of humor. I think the extremes of Southern culture would allow for a wonderful Grooms piece. See what you think?

Now it may just be me, but I don't think it is normal to see a stuffed fox displayed with an ad for hot pizza nor a stuffed mounted deer head with cookie dough mix. But that is just the oddity of some parts of county Southern culture.

One of the things that amazed me is how many kinds of BBQ sauce one can find in Southern stores..not two or three, but a whole isle of bottle after bottle of sauce...tomato based, vinegar based, mustard based, and on and on.

Family Farms

As we drove up highway 441 in Georgia we saw a bedraggled sign that had seen its better days, advertising turnip and collard greens. Now if you grow up in the South like I did, there is little better than a good mess of greens and hot cornbread!

We also found some fresh rutabaga, which I had never seen before. I have only seen the roots in the grocery store sealed with wax. These were beautiful and the farmer told us to cook the greens as well. There is something quaint about these old family farms, that remind me of childhood and times past. With large conglomerates taking over, it is getting rarer and rarer to see farms like these. They are being driven out of the market. There is hope though as a movement is growing in the USA to use local products and support local growers. As we continued on route and I got lost in the meditation of a long drive my mind wandered to the thought that these scenes are like art installations. I think in the next series of post you will see even better what I mean. If you are familiar with Red Grooms and is New York City re-creations you might see what I am thinking. At this point it is just a thought, a seed of a thought, that is forming in my mind.