Off-Track Art The Tacky, Gaudy And Outrageous Curiosities Along Our Roadsides Represent A Fascinating Subculture For Ken Indermark

Chicago artist Ken Indermark gravitates toward roadside attractions, but he’s not quite sure why.

It might have something to do with his growing up in St. Louis, deep into the territory of Route 66, the legendary “mother road” of Burma Shave signs, religious shrines, freaky billboards, barns advertising curiosities like Missouri’s Meramec Caverns (“Jesse James hideout”), lone gas pumps, dusty trading posts and all manner of tourist traps.

“I love the gaudiness and tackiness,” Indermark says. “You can be driving the desert in Arizona and all of a sudden you’ll see these 30-foot tall arrows stuck in the ground. And you wonder, ‘What the heck are these?’

“All they are are advertisements for Injun Joe’s trading post up the road. But the fun of it is that they lead you. It’s like a carnival. The signs can be more exciting than the actual attraction.

“You see a sign advertising, ‘See the world’s largest snake,’ and for 50 miles you’re wondering what this is, (thinking) ‘I’m not going to stop, they’ll just take my money.’ And then you get there and it’s, ‘What the hell. I’ll stop.’ And you go through a gate or you might go through this huge billboard of a giant snake, and in reality the snake is in a little aquarium there and it’s kind of a joke.”

Indermark, who has done large billboard sculptures made from found objects, a sort of twisted take on tourist billboards, recently began working with photographs.

He unearthed a box of black-and-white photographs he had taken 20 years ago while traveling throughout America and started drawing on them to add both a humorous commentary and a new or different meaning.

The result is a barrage of images that have been scratched with sandpaper or partially obscured with correcting fluid and enhanced with drawings and commentary in ballpoint pen. They’re disconcerting, blurring the line between reality and fiction, and, because the writing seems a bit lunatic, between sanity and insanity.

For example, a photo of a ghostly, abandoned carnival toss-game tent is turned into a “meditation booth” sponsored by an “All American Amusement Company.”

Similarly, a photo of plywood tepees that advertised a trading post out West is transformed by Indermark into a village that supplied incense to clergy and morticians until it was shut down by the Teamsters Union in an effort to unionize employees.

This series, which Indermark describes as “a road travel observation journal” that has to do with “spiritual subculture in the U.S,” just went on exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center and runs through March 8.

The artwork is accompanied by a video in which people unrelated to the original photographs tell stories about some of the altered photos, adding another layer of reconstructed reality.

“With the video, I made up this idea of me forgetting I even had these photographs,” Indermark says. “Why not pretend I found them in my closet and dusted them off the way you would with a family album? When you do that, some things you remember and some things you won’t remember.

“The things that you won’t remember are the most fun (like), ‘Who’s that standing next to Uncle George?’ Maybe your sister or somebody says that it’s Aunt Mary, and you say that it’s not. And you start making up a story. Did Uncle George have a mistress?”

The photographs in Indermark’s series create the same effect in the viewer.

“It’s basically telling yarns,” he says. “When you look at the photograph, it might trigger something in you, the way all photographs do. When you read the stuff written around the photograph, I’ve altered your perception of it. I’m trying to tell you it’s something else.

“I’ve always liked great storytellers. I don’t care if they’re telling me the truth or not.”

In going over the photographs, Indermark says he now wonders why he took some of them.

“Why did I take this big cloud?” he says of one image. “This was out in California, and I’ve made it into something the government is involved with. That’s part of Americana. Free thinking. We can always blame the government and get away with it, whether you’re a conspiracy theorist or whether you believe in Roswell.

“These stories are part of our modern American mythology, because everything else is so factual. It’s hard to believe in magic potions anymore because we’ve got them. They’re proven.”

Judith Lloyd, education coordinator and occasional curator at the State of Illinois Art Gallery, says Indermark is “creating a sort of contemporary mythology, but it’s a very non-classical kind of approach and certainly a little anti-establishment.

“When I first knew his work, (he was doing) classical photography, and I find it fascinating that now his work is almost like a time warp. Many of these photographs were taken 20 years ago, and with the interests he has developed in the intervening years, he has taken them to another dimension.”

Indermark, who lives with his wife in West Rogers Park, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He says he originally wanted to be an architect but wasn’t up to the math courses involved.

He moved to Chicago in 1968 and, except for a year spent in California, has lived here since, working for about 12 years as a designer of office and store interiors.

His formal art training notwithstanding, he is intrigued by the work of so-called outsider artists, unschooled artists whose whimsical creations often are made from everyday objects or junk, such as bottlecaps.

Lanny Silverman, associate curator of the visual arts department of the Chicago Cultural Center, says Indermark’s “eye for off-the-beaten-track sights and events is definitely that of an outsider, but it’s also informed by perhaps a Beat sensibility, that ‘On the Road’ sense of the serendipitous pleasures of traveling.”

Says Indermark: “I haven’t traveled the world, but I’ve been to Europe, and I don’t ever really remember seeing this kind of stuff that grabs you off the road and pulls you in by your collar and takes your money out of your pocket, saying, ‘Didn’t I tell you this is a two-headed calf?’

“They might have that over there, but they’re not as blatant about things. I think that blatant thing, whatever that is, visually especially, is truly an American phenomenon.”

On a trip out West two years ago, Indermark says he noticed that there weren’t as many quirky attractions as there were a few decades ago, but he thinks America has yet to become thoroughly generic.

“You still see these guys out there wanting to get you off the road and doing anything they can to make a sale. If that means dressing up and making a fool of themselves, they’re going to do it to make a buck.

“There’s something about it that I like. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m saying it’s American and there’s an edge to it.

“I’m totally oppposed to Disneyland stuff. It’s so whitewashed and sanctified that there’s something scary about it.”

At times, Indermark has made his own mark on landscapes by plopping down weird billboard installations along highways. One of the more infamous was erected in 1992 on farmland 15 miles west of Bloomington in central Illinois.

It was a pastiche of junk with the message, “See! Sacred Land On Rt. 122 at Curve.”

The property owners were supportive of Indermark’s installation because a tanker truck had crashed and spilled toxic materials on part of their land, and they had erected signs themselves to protest what they considered the company’s irresponsibility. Only a few people complained about Indermark’s sculpture, but when the farm owners went out of town, someone torched it.

Indermark says such roadside sculptures are “symbols of attractions” aimed at making motorists “slow down, blink or maybe wake up during a boring interstate drive and say, ‘What the hell is that; is that ugly or what?’ “

Illustration by Ken Indermark