Bart Gazzola

Niagara, Ontario, Canada

Meditations on the Rust Belt Wonderland 
[Rust Belt Ruminations] 

These fragments I have shored against my ruins – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 

It takes an Ocean of trust | In the Kingdom of Rust  – Doves, from Kingdom of Rust

This has become a mantra I chant and repeat, over the past decade in Niagara. I even have FOOL tattooed on my left hand, which I got when I turned 50, as a marker to my reluctant respect for Eliot’s words with their uncomfortable incisiveness about loss and acceptance and such, whether in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Wasteland.  

I don’t have an ocean of trust, not anymore (did I ever?), though I live in the Rust Belt Wonderland of Niagara, a ‘kingdom of rust’. I may be praying for rain—citing the wonderful song by Massive Attack—but to whom or what is unclear even to me, and I doubt that any of my mediocre prayers will be answered. There’s no one there to listen to them, anyway, I am sure. 

I grew up in St. Catharines—capital of the Niagara Rust Belt Wonderland—and nearly broke a leg to leave, as soon as I could : and now I’m back, breaking a promise to myself I made while young and serious, soon marking a decade back here. I chose an aspect of degraded exile : a friend recently asked about my ‘happiness’ and I am still dealing with that difficulty, to realize I had little, and it might be an alien concept, now. Appropriately that friend is also the artist who created the fine portrait of me that I’m employing as a biographical image, for this article, as it also offers an immediacy of interpretation…

My city is a place which imagines itself the epicentre of the Niagara Region : perhaps, in caustic and wry response to that, this is why I refer to STC as North Welland (as Welland is maligned—from several decades ago when I was a child to present day, encompassing my variant experiences here separated by several decades like an intermission—as the ‘armpit’ of the region). This casts the question—or the contrast—of what is real in the Rust Belt Wonderland, and what is simply assumption. 

But there’s love, here, too : not just ruin porn in industrial waste which has a romantic beauty, but a sense of place and origins, of memories and honesty and a final refining of self, perhaps defined by reluctance and a finality that couldn’t have happened any other way. The major love of my life has happened here, in stutters and arching problems, but that makes it no less real, for an old man like myself. Yes, like most acerbic cynics, I am at my core a soft, perhaps mushy romantic. 

How many times do I walk by spaces that I’m sure, in my bones, I walked by as a hopeful child, and they look the same, perhaps a bit worn, but then, I’m somewhat tattered and threadbare myself, returning here after decades away, and I’m sure I share the delusion of looking better than I am, or do, within the architecture of the Rust Belt Wonderland…. 

I am the wrong person to ask. This city is filled with bad memories. I can no longer see it for what it is….The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. 

— Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye 

To be honest, and all the external influences aside, there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else’s mind, and I fear that in my head I’ve likely conflated and compressed timelines and events. 

–- Paul Trembaly, A Head Full of Ghosts 

If I’m honest, the Rust Belt Wonderland is my own contested narrative (this is a term I’ve used so often, in writing and speaking about contemporary art and art history that I can’t use it without being prepared for a smirking response, from my readers or listeners. So I offer it with a self conscious if knowing wink, if you will).  

My addictions and despair have run riot here in the Rust Belt Wonderland, but so has my creativity and I feel more so my best potential self here, despite difficulties personal and public. Despite myself, I am one of the cultural players in this place. My impending death will foster a feeling of loss in the larger community, and I’m as shocked as any at that idea. 

But my life is defined by fracture and re-invention, less than intent gone awry : and perhaps that is why the artist whose work I’m employing to accompany this essay is Diane Beard, whose life also has those stress points and major moments of definition, both external and internal. 

So let us move away from my own personal—perhaps self indulgent, ahem—discourse to a more accessible realm. Despite working in words for so long, I often see the world through the lens of visual arts, and that brings us to Diane Beard’s artwork. 

It is sometimes difficult to reconcile Diane Beard’s images—I think of them as snapshots, since their creation is linked to her walks around the city—of Welland to the physical ‘reality’ of the city let alone the myriad of contested narratives of the site.

These narratives are both grounded in the physical being of the city but also exist—perhaps more firmly—in terms of the mythos and stories of the site, which act also as larger stories of the rust belt wonderland both in Niagara and beyond. Perhaps that is why, when considering this somewhat autobiographical discourse on the rust belt wonderland, Beard’s images—that are transformations and interpretations of the site of Welland, sometimes enhancing their inspiration, sometimes disguising it—are what came to mind immediately as visual components of my regionalist tangent. A part of a larger digital image will be mirrored, flipped, digitally collaged so the ‘original’ core scene becomes something more, sometimes still with a hint of its beginning, other times unrecognizable, though landmarks of the city have often been the starting point of her artworks, and would—before their transformation—be immediately known to many. These are Diane’s ‘fragments’—to reference back to the Eliot quote—that speak to ‘ruins’ in a different manner. 

Some of Beard’s images are dark and rusty, and look like they’ve been digitally assembled from aspects of the rust belt wonderland that are recognizable, whether the bridge or the concrete or the blighted asphalt of the landscape. Others are bright, striking and—dare I say it—almost hopeful, like how there might be a world behind the world we see, or that we immediately and superficially experience. I’ve known Diane for most of the time that she’s been making this series, and we’ve spoken of intersections with her works and mine—the works I’ve made in Niagara, since my return (or ‘exile’, to quote a friend) to the rust belt wonderland—specifically that they come from a dark place (metaphorically, ahem, though often literally, as well) and are a byproduct of how both of us walk these city streets, whether in St. Catharines or Welland or elsewhere, and repurpose these scenes we capture so that they make more ‘sense’ to us, both aesthetically and conceptually. 

Her late husband was—in my opinion and I believe it to be an informed one—the finest painter that Welland has produced, and the quality of light he captured in his scenes, as well as a sense of social history—both nostalgic and more edged—has surely informed Diane’s images, perhaps initially by artistic osmosis but later by a rigorous practice and consideration that involved the larger Niagara arts community. In this sense, she offers not just an external picture of Welland—and the rust belt wonderland—but one also deeply informed by a personal narrative. This is similar to my own work with abandoned shopping carts, and concepts of the discarded : both of us have found it difficult to speak about our artworks, which in many ways attests to the authenticity of it. Words seem superfluous, just as even attempting to codify my decade long return to the rust belt wonderland seems less about words than impressions and experiences that have often seemed so clear to me, yet elusive and absent to others. 

I am suddenly reminded of another non fiction piece I wrote, years ago, about the city of Saskatoon (in full disclosure, this was after I left the city after nearly two dimes there, waking up one day to understand that the city and cultural community were like someone you date, always hopeful that they will one day be worthy of your love and devotion, will never change, and you have no choice but to get out) that focused upon crossing the river in that ‘city of bridges’ in the midst of winter and my left side icing up in the near Siberian cold. My mind, I’ve been told and can’t argue, goes to dark places. 

Is this becoming untenable and tangential? My apologies. Meditations on places often become self indulgent. Mary Karr has warned us that Many memories are dead ends. 

Diane and I are both residents of Cataract City, if I can take this further into literary spaces : this is a fine book by Craig Davidson, that has also—like Eliot, like the photographs of Sandy Fairbairn—been a touchstone for how I navigate the rust belt wonderland. To consider—to internalize—that I’ve returned to spend a decade in the rust belt wonderland of my errant childhood, which is a simple fact that is both difficult and traumatizing. I had thought I’d be dead by now (I initially felt trepidation at using Diane Beard’s images for such a ‘dark’ piece, but Diane and I have spoken often about how to negotiate loss and how sometimes you do, with a full heart, hope for an end), and then I see places I ‘know’, or think I know, and I see moments that resonate, that I capture and reconfigure, and it is almost a moment of grace in small things, briefly. 

It is necessary to steal some of Bob Bickford’s words from Dear Ghost :Sometimes I wonder if phantoms wander the place, laughing and crying. Our memories, the echoes of us little, more vivid than we were in life. 

I was told several years ago by a friend—a fine artist I respect greatly whose works often deal with memory and surrealism—that sometimes the stories I experience or construct around me are more real to me than the reality I experience. I have held that statement to me and think about it often, both in positive and negative ways…. 

I will die, I am sure, in the place I never wanted to spend any more time in than I was already forced to endure, and that I surely didn’t want to write my last chapter within : it is more amusing that I’ve had a hand—a major hand—in re configuring the cultural landscape here, before my end, as I wanted nothing to do with this site and if you even asked me about the cultural landscape of St.Catharines before I left here, I would honestly proffer ignorance. 

And yet here we are. Until the end, which, to paraphrase some writer, comes after all the important shit. And I might add that the moribund tone of this is also informed by Michael Murray’s passing, and that he and I seemed to both think we’d have forever to work together, so I am a bit harsher now, than I was. 

Diane Beard’s images offer a contrast here, of hope to my darkness. The vivacity—both of the colours and that ‘her’ rust belt wonderland seems alive—of her artworks—which surely have an element of self portraiture and memory and reflection, as well, are a more hopeful place to stand and see, perhaps, than where I am right now. 

In a formal as well as conceptual metaphor echoing my escape and return to the Rust Belt Wonderland, and how I began this meditation on the same with his words, I will end with more T.S. Eliot : and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

All images by Diane Beard