The Midwest ain’t mid

The Midwest is back in the American consciousness. But really, the fat, deep fried lump of land nestled between the Appalachians to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west, the Ohio River to the south and Canada to the north, has always been there – and so have 69 million folks who call this place home – even if the coastal elites forgot. Most of the Midwest is what the Americans call ‘flyover country’. The writer David Foster Wallace, himself a child of Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, memorably described the Midwestern state of Illinois as “Corn, corn, soybeans, corn, exit ramp, corn, and every few miles an outpost way off on a reach in the distance – house, tree with tire swing, barn, satellite dish. Grain silos are the only skyline.” The region is not renowned for its high culture.

The Midwest is the region that perfected the culinary delights of square-cut, deep dish pizza, Kraft Singles, and mayo & jello ‘salads’; that popularised Slipknot, Midwest emo, the American Football House, barn jackets and Realtree Camo caps; and raised outspoken people: the aforementioned David Foster Wallace, Eminem, Chappell Roan and Tim Walz the pig cuddling running mate of Kamala Harris. As the Midwest returns to consciousness, it has been run through the mill of nostalgia and poptimism. The stereotype that has emerged of Midwesterners as affable, honest, hardworking folk who love nothing more than kicking back with a beer and a deep fried foodstuff while watching the game and speaking their mind is the antithesis of west coast wellness culture and east coast edgelordism.

It’s back because of politics. Every four years, the presidential election hinges on a handful of electoral college votes. The Midwestern swing states of Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota have 58 votes between them; 10% of the total, more than enough to decide it. Because of the Midwest’s pivotal role in the election, the region has taken on an outsized role in the American mind. It represents the unremarkable yet essential baseline of political opinion. With the 2024 election just weeks away, and with Trump once again on the ballot and current vice president Kamala Harris looking to take the mantle, the future of the republic might be decided in the Midwest.

In the middle of all this is the Midwest Art Quarterly. In the words of its founder and editor Troy Sherman, the publication is “an experiment in serious art criticism in a place where and at a time when there is a dearth of it.” First published in December 2022, MAQ is sent out by mail and email four times a year to a loyal list of subscribers, mostly found in the area around the city of St. Louis, Missouri, but also further afield. In its pages, Sherman tries to account for what ‘Contemporary Art’ (always with a capital ‘C’, capital ‘A’) looks like from the edges. From this viewpoint, the art world is exhausted: the same artists, the same art, the same curators and the same collectors can be seen from St. Louis to Seoul. A recent issue of MAQ puts it simply: “Right now, there are no styles anywhere apart from the global non-style of Contemporary Art.” Once that bubble bursts, what will art look like and how will people think and write about it? Sherman believes the Midwest might have the answers.

Sherman isn’t actually a native Midwesterner. “I feel like if I had been born and bred in New York City or something, then there would be an element of dropping into this provincial place and just swinging my dick around,” he says, “but I’ve never lived in New York or any place with a vibrant or artistic community.” He grew up in coastal Massachusetts, studied for a bachelors in art history in rural upstate New York and a masters in rural western Massachusetts. He moved to St. Louis in 2021 to live with his partner who studies there and splits his time between the city and a town about two hours north in the middle of the cornfields of central Illinois, “a place that’s even more peripheral to the art world,” where he works as a curator at the small contemporary art gallery of Illinois State University.

The Midwest is not a destination on the art world’s global circuit – “the Midwest is just a normal-ass place. The town that I live in when I’m not living in St. Louis is called Normal, Illinois. I swear to God.” – yet it participates in it. There are artists and studios, small galleries and art prizes. There is local money, but as Sherman says, “those people don’t care about art, and in Saint Louis at least the money is typically more conservative … the priorities are just misaligned for cultivating a real serious art scene.” There are MFA programmes at the region’s universities and several major institutions in the region’s cities: Cleveland, Des Moines, Kansas, Minneapolis, Detroit and Chicago. But these institutions are dedicated to the kind of ‘Global Contemporary Art’ that can be seen in London, Paris, Basel, New York, Shanghai and are focused on exporting people from the Midwest to these cities. “I think that there are artists who might study here, or start off making art here at any of the schools, who will leave to pursue fame and riches elsewhere. But they don’t perceive that it’s a place to really start their careers.” The fundamental question he has is: “What relevance does this big global mush that is contemporary art have to the people who are participating in it on its absolute outskirts?”

Far from dulling his critical senses, Sherman found that living in an area that “doesn’t give a shit” about contemporary art, and working in an art world that doesn’t give a shit about the area, has sharpened them. Criticism, as he sees it, is stuck in a rut. “Criticism is a way to reflect upon our immediate experiences and to provide people a basis for reflecting upon theirs, and that isn’t the case with global contemporary art. I can’t have an experience with a work of art that you write a review about unless I fly there and see it.” It offers an overview, a kind of State of the Arts, rather than value judgements for artists on what’s working and what’s not. Sherman started MAQ with a “righteous indignation”. “I was coming at the problem from the perspective of, like, ‘well, why the fuck not?’” He wanted to create a venue for “straight-up good / bad evaluation criticism” for artists who are interested in “unglazed opinions about works of art.” The first issue was like “throwing a bomb out into the world. People were pissed. They hated it. And I think that was actually a good thing.”

Sherman has been using the pages of MAQ to make a case for regionalism. “The whole point of the publication has been sort of trying to figure out what it would mean for artists in a particular region, to develop a particular set of formal ideas or hang ups that are sort of not legible, not commensurable with art that happens everywhere else.” At the moment, he sees two tiers of art developing in St. Louis and the wider Midwest: those who exhibit as ‘Global Contemporary Artists’ and those he calls ‘Normal People’, who exhibit locally though might have MFAs and might have greater aspirations. The former includes Kahlil Irving (“a young-ish art star and also, I think, a literal genius with a Midwestern-postindustrial-ruination aspect to his work”) and Jess T. Dugan, Damon Davis, Basil Kincaid, Saj Issa (“none of whom has anything characteristically Midwestern about their work”). Sherman splits the latter into two stylistic camps: “One is like an unserious post-ironic provincial slacker aesthetic that pokes fun at but also relishes in the Midwest’s out-of-touch simplicity: Alex Evets, Brittany Mosier, Brian DePauli. The other is sort of rough-hewn, found-object assemblage that definitely takes its cues from the crumbly-ness of the city, a la Ron Young, Dail Chambers, Robert Green.”

The trend for a more localised, specific language can be seen in art criticism too. He namechecks Sean Tatol’s Manhattan Art Review in New York, the anonymous Diva Corp which is tearing up the LA art scene and the Midwest’s own Chicago Spleen (its tagline: ‘Chicago style criticism: All beef, everything on it.’) “They’re producing a mode of experiencing and attempting to come to some sort of consensus about experiences of works of art that is local and grounded and, at its best, would be illegible to somebody somewhere else.” He says, although he concedes that, “there are reasons to be sort of wistful for some of the promises of global art: the fact that everybody, everywhere can appreciate and experience these things equally. That’s beautiful, that’s democratic, but it’s not what we’ve got on the ground. So, the reaction now is getting down and dirty with experience, you know?”

In Sherman’s view, the defining experience of the Midwest is the “pervasive fear of missing out”. “More than anything, people in the Midwest are just the same global citizens as anyone else, but the thing that does differentiate is the real, palpable sense of lack that people have in this part of the world.” He puts this down to decades of industrial decline, widespread poverty and depopulation: St. Louis has been losing, not gaining people for the past 70 years. The city was built for around one million people, it peaked in 1950 at 875,000, now it’s home to fewer than 300,000. “There’s a lot of emptiness: empty buildings on developed lots and that breed a lack of will. Sometimes it’s also a big source of hope: there’s nothing sexier for an artist than an empty building to do something with cheaply. But there’s a certain point of inflection past which that is no longer hopeful and it’s just like ‘wow there’s a lot of decay’.”

Sherman thinks they’ve got this sense of FOMO backwards. It’s not that the Midwest is missing out on a global conversation, it’s that Global Contemporary Art speaks to no one. Everywhere is the same, everywhere is boring. What relevance does this global mush have in the Midwest? The real question is what relevance does it have in any individual city?  This is part of his wider argument that contemporary art is largely meaningless and at a dead end. “Certainly, among the people that I spend time with and the talking heads that I read and listen to, there’s a pervasive sense that culture is pretty dead ended and people are going through the motions and that there’s not all that much that’s new or exciting.  There’s a sense that we’ve sort of moved past newness, and there’s not much capacity that we have anymore for doing anything other than reshuffling.”

He’s particularly scathing about art supposedly engaged in politics that fails to take into account the actual cities it’s being shown in. In St. Louis, that’s the “really, deeply historically racist and segregated and class-driven social dynamics.” “It’s fucked up that anybody in the city of St. Louis or places that are are similar to it can, with a straight face, curate and produce exhibitions like this, and tell anybody in the world that the fucking art that they’re producing is gonna change the material conditions of any of the completely immiserated Black people on the North side of town, or like subject them to less racism.”

“Really, culture is a hollow thing pretty much throughout the world. And what provincialism offers to people here is an opportunity to drop out and remove oneself from that cyclical slog that everyone else is going through.” His answer to stagnant local arts and stagnant global culture is to pull back and out of the art system. Don’t try and compete with international peers, turn to networks closer to you. He’s calling for an avant garde, “in the really old bohemian, unrewarding sense of the term” – artists who work for art and not for comfort. That might be dropping out of art and delivering pizzas for five hours a day and working on sculptures the rest of the day. “That sucks for people’s material comfort,” he admits, “but we don’t live in a world that provides for people’s material comfort. It could be good for art itself? I don’t know.”

The problem is, you can’t will or write new artforms into existence. They have to come from necessity. The art market collapsing and taking with it the prospects of a solid career, people getting progressively more fed up with the sameness that they see on Instagram and dropping offline, “that’s kind of a romantic notion, but those sorts of things,” he says. “Our world is becoming less ecumenically connected and more cloistered and regional and sort of inward looking than it has been for the last 30 years. And I think a new art is going to need to come out of that. And MAQ has been an opportunity to think through what that new approach to making art, not just for people here but everywhere, might have to be.”

“At best, I’ve been able to use my position as a critic in a provincial place where the possibility of doing this other, new kind of approach to making art are really palpable. I’ve used that position to think about in advance, a new type of art that the world is just going to be bringing to us, and not just to people in the provinces, but to people everywhere.”