“May I help you with anything, sir?”
I’m sure I looked somewhat confused to the freshly-scrubbed volunteer as I stood there in the middle of a booth-riddled upper Main Street this past Arts Festival Saturday. She had caught me gazing into the distant past, attempting to channel a quaint mining-era block that once was.
That block had, for the most part, burned to the ground back in the early Seventies while a bunch of us newcomers joined forces, manning hoses with the locals and the then all-volunteer Park City Fire Department.
I had quickly picked out where the Poison Creek Drug Store once stood but was having trouble locating the former site of an iconic watering hole.
“I’m trying to locate the Oak Saloon,” I replied before realizing her youth would more than likely preclude her from being privy to such an arcane bit of trivia. Pointing at one of the altars to retro-trendiness that had blossomed on the block following the fire, I muttered wistfully, “It could have been right there.”
Sensing that thirst was at the root of my predicament, the ever-so-accommodating young lady gestured down the street toward what she, more than likely, considered my possible salvation. “Well, sir,” (again the sir, whatever happened to the inherent rudeness of youth?) “there is another saloon just a short distance down the street.”
Returning her smile, I implied that I’d been there and done that already that day. It being the Arts Festival and all, I’d found myself stoppin’ by to sample the liquid abstraction of one of my favorite local “mixologists” during my first lap of Main Street. And, being the connoisseur of art that I am, I would hit yet another before the day was done.
As my strolls up and down the street continued, ghosts of Main Street past and Art Festivals past kept me company. The early days of living in Park City came back quite vividly. Arriving a month or so after the first Festival, I couldn’t believe what a cultured community I had dropped into.
The Ink, Paint, and Clay Shop became sort of a hangout. Of, course, the fact that it was located across the street from the Post Office and next door to the fabled Alamo Saloon kept it in the crosshairs of most all of us who had come to town to ride the somewhat recently installed chairlifts out at what was then the edge of town.
And then there were the bars all galleries and museums in their own right. In a sense, their collective qualities were not unlike those of movie sets. Some, of course, had walls and ceilings splattered with random flotsam and jetsam like so much spaghetti. Others, however, some stark and noir-ish, some dark and mysterious, some a hybrid of musical comedy and high drama, were, like all good art, seldom found intellectually wanting.
Over the years, the festival has morphed from one in which such fare as “roach clips,” “God’s eyes” and tie-dyed shirts were featured at the lower end of the food chain to the current edition with its stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks examples of extraordinary conception and execution.
Not that the early festivals didn’t feature works from the top shelf or that the counterculture vibe is no longer evident during the first weekend of August on Main Street. In fact, I suppose what knocks me out most when I reflect back on the evolution of this particular aesthetic exhibition is the axiom that the more things change the more they remain the same.
Indeed, there are dots that can be connected between the roach clips on which McGee probably invested a good ten to fifteen minutes each with metal clothes hangers, diagonal pliers, vise grips, a hammer and a file and the art of canoe building employing traditional wood-strip bending techniques that Tim Mahoney utilizes when handcrafting his nautical masterpieces.
The respective art and artists converge at the point where each recognizes a cultural void to be filled and where it becomes obvious that neither needs be bound by convention. As one who has always expected art to be confrontational, at least on some level, much of what was on display at both my first and latest Arts Festivals proved worthy.
It’s not that I “understand” art, as it were, but more often than not I find myself quite comfortable in its company especially the way Main Street transforms itself without losing its natural slouch when inundated by the upper crust. Art, as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and it need not overawe. Although it certainly is cool when it does.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for more than 40 years.