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Before the decades long Crandon cooper mine debate between Native American tribes, environmentalists, Exxon, and the State of Wisconsin DNR; Crandon was a vacation retreat. Like this postcard message reads: "We ran away from everything to have a rest." Playing cards and catching panfish seems a peaceful land use far away from the proposals to build a massive mine with potential to contaminate land and water.

Less than 40 years after this proud postcard hit the streets, the General Motors plant in Janesville closed. Employing thousands of people over the decades, production at the plant ceased on December 23, 2008. The last Chevy Tahoe that rolled off the production line that day was raffled to raise funds for the United Way. Janesville wasn't the only Wisconsin town to make cars, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Oshkosh, Racine and more did too. From the Kissel Kar, made in Hartford, to the Excalibur designed by Brooks Stevens to the Little Nash Rambler, Wisconsin is known to be home of about three dozen motor vehicle makers. As the 20th century wore on, workers making cars gave way to artists using them as subject matter, medium, and process. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg asked composer John Cage to drive his Model A Ford over 20 sheets of paper to make Automobile Tire Print. Starting in 1959,  John Chamberlain made automobile "collage" sculptures. The Ant Farm buried 10 Cadillac fins-up along Route 66 in 1974 to make Cadillac Ranch, oft referred to as the most famous public art work in America. Artists and entrepreneurs have found that cars transport both the body and the mind making for eerie associations. That same year, performance artist Chris Burden had himself crucified to a VW Beetle for his Trans-Fixed piece. We remember seeing Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's bullet-riddled 1934 Ford V8 getaway car displayed in a semi-trailer in a shopping mall parking lot in the 1970s. These days it's on display for free at a casino/hotel near Las Vegas. An upcoming gallery exhibition in Miami called Piston Head: Artists Engage the Automobile examines the use of the car in art since 1970. The organizers argue that cars are the symbol of American consumerism and the "quintessential machine of modern life." The show features work by trendy contemporary artists like Richard Prince whose Hood series uses 1960s muscle car hoods to conjure dreams fueled by a desire to escape and the Bruce High Quality Foundation, an enigmatic art collective that deployed an entangled Volkswagon in a recent work.  Displayed in the context of a parking ramp at one of the biggest international art events of the year, the car becomes sacred icon and cathedral (Barthes). Meanwhile in Kenosha, Janesville, and Milwaukee, the car plants have been abandoned or have disappeared altogether. 

Nash Motors Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was so dedicated to the idea of aerodynamics that it charged $9 extra for the George Petty-designed flying lady hood ornament on its 1949 Ambassador sedan. The plush, post-war "Airflyte" Ambassador featured technological innovations such a single welded "unibody" (frame and body are one), enclosed front wheels, (hydramatic) automatic transmission, and reclining seats that formed a twin bed. Known as the "make-out" auto of choice by the teens of the 1950s, the Ambassador had a streamlined tear-drop shaped back, cockpit-like instrument panel with uniscope instrument grouping, and a spaceous trunk. Referred to as "Miss Upside-Down Bathtub of 1949" by Tom McCahill in Mechanix Illustrated, it sold for about $2,200 and was alternately called the "Kenosha Cadillac" or "Kenosha Duesenberg." Just a little over a half-century later, the former Nash Motors factory on 110 acres near Lake Michigan was considered a blight. After morphing into Nash-Kelvinator then American Motors (AMC) then Chyrsler, the plant closed in 2010 and demolition began in December 2012. Surviving Ambassadors remain as a monument to the idealism of an American ingenuity that believed in the possibility of a faster and sleeker vessel to transport the human body through space and time. We purchased a 1949 Ambassador from a guy named Kurt in Idaho Falls, Idaho in November of 2012 for about the original selling price including shipping. The last time he started the car before sending it on its way to our farm in Wisconsin, Kurt said "she purred like a kitten." And she did. On Thursday, September 26, 2013 John Shimon, accompanied by artist Matt Chung, drove the auto through the Wisconsin countryside passing corn fields, verdant forests, and an aqua Lake Michigan to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. On the trip, it got 25-30 miles per gallon due to its economical 6-cylinder engine, overdrive transmission, and aerodynamic body design. As part of our WE GO FROM WHERE WE KNOW exhibition at the JMKAC, it will be filled with over 1,000 cast concrete corn cobs memorializing a childhood memory of a Nash repurposed as a corn crib while contemplating the contemporary role of corn as food and fuel in the US.  Matt Chung made this video documenting the journey:

John A. Trumble tapped into the fashion sensibilities of the swinging 1960s to depict "Native Winnebago Indians" in Wisconsin Dells. Kicky mini-skirted "Indian Maidens" and groovy long-haired bell-bottom wearing Indian boys predated Cher's glittery-feathered cover of a ballad of Cherokee-strife called "Half-Breed" in 1973 (written by Al Capps and Mary Dean). Trumble's images fueled the Wisconsin "tourism craze" for hiring native Americans as Wisconsin River Guides in the 1960s and 1970s. Selling autopgraphed postcard portraits of the guides for profit was integral and working for the tourism industry provided a livlihood for displaced Ho-Chunk (then known as Winnebago) whose other alternative was working the cranberry bogs. Though there is little evidence of Trumble's work accessible to us today, we note he self-published a 31 page book of his photographs titled The Dells of the Wisconsin River in 1965 and left a legacy of these kitschy Native American chic postcards to ponder.

Little blonde girl wearing red coat and saddle shoes points to rock formations on this postcard promoting Cave of the Mounds. A performative photographic ploy to direct viewer attention in a vast dark space. Cave of the Mounds is often referred to as the "jewel box of America's major caves because of the variety, color and delicacy of its formations,"in tourist materials. The Cave was discovered on August 4, 1939 on a Wisconsin farm during a blasting session to mine limestone... eventually becoming a tourist attraction with spaces with names like Painted Waterfall, Gem Room, and Dream River Room. Hosting millions of visitors with a gift shop, hiking trails, and Prairie and Savanna Restoration Gardens, the land formation acts as spectacle like nearby Wisconsin Dells.

Minocqua's website boasts of November being the opening of deer hunting season, which is "practically an official holiday and an important part of our Northwoods heritage." Ike Eisenhower was a "regular Minocqua visitor" due to its wilderness beauty and the town is the birthplace of the Association of Wisconsin Snowmobile clubs. This postcard of young "Deers" grazing shows the creatures inhabiting a landscape of birch and cedar where they became a spectacle for the Minocqua tourist of yore.

The bears of Milwaukee once existed in a simulated natural landscape while spectators,
empowered by a 15 foot moat, ogled them from afar at the Washington Park Zoo. After seeing Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, this scene takes on sinister overtones though the sender of this card saw the barless bear den as visual proof of Milwaukee's dynamism:
"Having a wonderful time here. A big and growing city.
Weather nice and warm. Edith Allard"
Post marked August 24, 1953