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The American dream in the nuclear age
> Abilene artist Randy Regier brings his toys and dreams to Manhattan museum
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Randy Regier poses with his rocket tractor outside his installation exhibition at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan.
Photographs By Matt Stamey/The Capital-Journal
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MANHATTAN -- Somewhere along the path to adulthood, children discover "batteries not included" is a rule of life, not an exception.
"The wheels start to fall off the childhood cart at some point," says Randy Regier, an Abilene artist and recent graduate of Kansas State University whose art installation, "Everything Must Go: The Toys of Randy Regier," is on display through Jan. 4 at K-State's Beach Museum of Art.
For the exhibition, Regier not only created toys that look as if they were manufactured decades ago, he also fashioned for them their often deceptive but oh so enticing packaging. The boxes promise to contain so wondrous a toy as to make any kid plead that he would gleefully and without nagging wash the dishes, take out the trash and feed the dog until he left for college if only, only, only, just this once, please, oh please, Mom and Dad, buy this for me.
But, Regier warns, "As kids, we don't read our boxes. We just open them."
They often contain disappointment.
"The American Dream," one of Regier's installation pieces, bears on the box's cover an image of a sleek, red automobile. It is the kind that in the 1950s would attract google-eyed, slack-jawed crowds when unveiled at the local dealership.
The box's size suggests a scale model of such a size as to be easily spotted from across the street by other neighborhood kids who would instantly be overcome with toy envy.
Unnoticed on the trip to the cash register would be the "not actual size" disclaimer on "The American Dream" box. Only after, the eager buyer opens his treasure does he discover the model car is indeed shiny and red but no bigger than a matchbox.
Thus Regier lets his art make social commentary, not only on deceptive advertising of children's toys but also the broader observation that not everyone's "American dream" will live up to its billing.
Says Bill North, the Beach Museum's senior curator, "Randy Regier creates fictive toys that expose powerful, and often unpleasant, truths about our society and its culture."
Truth be told, however, it wasn't that long ago that Regier couldn't imagine himself as a college graduate and an artist, let alone one with a one-man show in an art museum.
It wasn't that long ago that Regier's mind and hands were focused on the task of making formerly dinged and dented cars look as though they had just rolled off the assembly line at the plant.
'Ornery orientation'
Looking back, Regier said his work as an auto body painter satisfied part of his artistic need, "but never to the extent where I found any sort of peace."
"It was like I was close to something, but I couldn't find it," he said.
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THE EXHIBIT
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"Everything Must Go: The Toys of Randy Regier" is on display through Jan. 4. at K-State's Beach Museum of Art.
The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. |
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Regier recalls he has always had a need to express himself as he grew up in Salem, Ore.
As a teen, Regier said he "did a lot of creative endeavors, mostly of a somewhat ornery orientation."
Regier and his running mates would buy secondhand clothes as costumes, make props, rig special effects, write scripts and videotape movies in the streets of Salem, much to the bewilderment of onlookers.
"In retrospect, I could see how they could be classified as performance art," he said, adding that the amount of work they required certainly put them beyond just passing time.
Regier didn't pursue a career in film. Instead, he turned to paint.
"My dad ran a small body shop when I was young," said Regier, who began learning the craft of auto painting at age 10. He learned well and graduated to larger auto restoration shops.
While painting cars proved lucrative financially for Regier, it wasn't rewarding artistically.
While still in Oregon, Regier did discover one creative outlet. While flipping through a community college paper, he read about a guy teaching a cartooning class. Although Regier lacked any innate drawing skills, he fell in love with cartooning, creating a strip, "The Gongfarmer," that would eventually be syndicated nationally, mostly to college newspapers.
Regier thought syndication could mean he would one day be able to support his family as a cartoonist instead of as a body man in an auto restoration shop. But Regier's humor never quite flowed into the mainstream, meaning most daily newspapers weren't going to buy "The Gongfarmer."
While he clung to his daily comic strip as an artistic life preserver, Regier said he grew depressed about his life and where decisions when he was younger had left him.
"The 30-year-old man being resentful because the 18-year-old boy in him decided what you were going to do for the rest of your life," Regier recalled his thoughts.
It was time for a change -- a big one.
Starting over
Although he has family ties to Kansas, it wasn't until Regier came there here to attend the wedding of his wife's brother that he took a fresh look at the state.
"Kansas just got a hold of me and wouldn't let go," he said.
A year after the wedding and with the encouragement of his wife, Vicki, Regier moved their family, son Jacob and daughter Rachel, to Abilene in the summer of 1997.
"Kansas seemed the place to go to start over," he said.
The first step in starting over was to get the auto paint out of his system, so Regier took a job at Shockey and Landis Furniture, an Abilene retail institution.
"I didn't intend to go to college when I came out to Kansas -- just to start over," he said.
But after a year working at the furniture store, Regier still was restless and searching for something. That is when his wife suggested Regier try college.
In Oregon, Regier never really thought of college as an option because he didn't know what it could offer him and because of "a fierce blue-collar pride that says I don't need college to be as good as anybody else."
But the move to Kansas was all about new beginnings, so Regier enrolled at K-State as a 33-year-old freshman.
Regier said he never felt odd studying alongside classmates who a year or two before had been in high school.
"I'm comfortable around 18- to 20-year-olds because I still remember very, very strongly what it's like to be that age, and I can be dumb and impulsive in an 18-year-old way. I'm real comfortable being that person still," Regier said.
Besides that, Regier loved the classroom.
"It was just so invigorating to be in this academic world for the first time," he said.
And it was at K-State that Regier discovered his artistic calling.
As part of a three-dimensional design class, Regier made his first toy.
Regier discovered he could use many of the technical skills he had learned as a body man and those he picked up restoring antique metal objects, including toys.
When Regier found himself getting up "at 4 o'clock in the morning working on it for a grade I could have achieved doing far less work, I knew something was going on."
Permission to create
What was going on was art and Regier's need to make it.
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Randy Regier prepares his installation piece, filled with toys he made.
Photographs By Matt Stamey/The Capital-Journal
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With the support of his wife, Regier changed his major to art and set about to earn his bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpting.
Becoming an art major gave him something he had lacked in his life.
"The hardest thing for me as an adult and a husband and a father was to give myself permission to make things that really had no tangible immediate value or would immediately contribute to the well-being of my family," he said.
But as an art major he was required to create.
"I didn't have to justify it," he said.
Art gave Regier focus.
"Every class I've had here was an art class," said Regier, saying he has incorporated into his art things he has learned in classes as far ranging as Spanish and conceptual physics.
Regier also learned how much he already knew.
"It never ceases to amaze me how much I learned before I ever went to school -- most of it actually," he said. "I didn't learn so much about craft here as I did about the world of art."
Regier learned to express himself through toys, conveying in them and their containers messages he wanted to share. Then the time required to make toys, keep up with his classes and fulfill his family obligations became a burden.
"I couldn't draw a daily syndicated comic strip, create this body of work, be a decent husband and a decent father," said Regier, recalling his decision to quit drawing "The Gongfarmer."
"It was better to drop one than to compromise them all," he added.
As some sort of cosmic recognition that he had made the right move, Regier learned a couple of weeks later that the Beach Museum of Art had not only purchased one of his toys but had proposed he do a show.
Dime store art
What Regier developed with the museum staff, including exhibitions designer Lindsay Smith, was a plan to transform the Beach's one-room Wefald Gallery into a faux dime store built in the late 1940s and going out of business in the early '70s.
The facade of "Everything Must Go" does resemble the front of five-and-dimes once found in many Kansas towns down to the sheet metal screws Regier aged by soaking in vinegar and salt.
The tile floor is stained and distressed, a soundtrack of '70s pop music plays over an AM radio and Regier's toys sit on the shelves, where they must be liquidated.
"The store is going out of business," Regier said. "The toys are what are left on the shelves, so 'Everything Must Go' has a double meaning: The toys must be sold and they must also physically 'go' or work -- perform or fail as promised."
The success or failure of one of Regier's toys depends a lot on intent and perception.
On one shelf sits a shiny model of an antique coupe with an extended hood. Although it has the appearance of being decades old, it looks as though it came right out of the box.
And for artistic reason, Regier explains. The toy car weighs about 150 pounds.
"That's why it's still new in the box. The kid could never get it out," he said.
Regier said it is his commentary on the phenomenon that when a child is told he can't eat all the candy and watch all the television he wants, he vows that when he gets old enough he will do just that.
The problem is when you are old enough to satisfy those childish impulses they are replaced by new ones.
"The things you promised yourself as a child, somewhere the appeal disappears, dissipates," he said.
Now will people seeing his toy get that meaning?
"Whether people get that or not, that's not really so important," said Regier, who said art invites many perspectives.
North, the Beach's senior curator, agrees.
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Regier shot up this Bonnie and Clyde model car for his museum exhibit.
Photographs By Matt Stamey/The Capital-Journal
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"Characterized by an extraordinarily high degree of craftsmanship and design, Regier's constructions are so convincing that their status as works of art begs challenge," North said. "At first glance it appears that Regier is simply appropriating actual old toys and inserting them into a new and critical context.
"However, careful scrutiny and consideration of the work's content and details reveal that things are not quite right."
What Regier said he hopes visitors to "Everything Must Go" do is enter his world with an open mind.
"People are going to have to be critical thinkers because nothing is as it seems," he said.
Happy ending?
One would think a museum show would be the launching point for a successful art career by Regier, who earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in December.
However, he said, a museum is not a gallery, which means the show doesn't translate into sales of art.
Regier knows there is much truth in the lore of the starving artist.
"Yeah, I would love to make a living at this some day -- a meager living -- because it means I could make more art," he said.
Meanwhile, he has a family to help support, so while making some contacts with galleries about the show and sell of his works, Regier returned Monday, Aug. 26 to work at the Abilene furniture store.
"I can make art around a job," he said.
And the difference this time, he added, "I'll be working in a furniture store with a museum exhibition 45 miles away."
Maybe it wasn't exactly what this box in Regier's life showed on the cover, but a pretty fun toy after all.
Bill Blankenship is the arts & entertainment editor of The Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at (785) 295-1284 or bill.blankenship@cjonline.com.
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