Category: Rockland Cafe

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Art and advertising

An amendment to the Rockland building code brings us full circle back to Pop Art.

Robert Indiana’s art sign is on the left and the commercial Strand sign on the right. Which is art? Photo courtesy of Coastal Maine Realty.

 Heading into Rockland, ME from the south, you can’t help but notice Robert Indiana’smassive Electric Eat sign on the roof of the Farnsworth Art Museum. It’s been there since 2009 and has become a fixture of the local skyline.

The piece was initially commissioned for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Fair attendees immediately queued for the non-existent restaurant. After a day of frustration for all concerned, the sign went dark. It wasn’t relit again until it moved to Maine.
In its original setting, the piece blurred the line between art and life a little too effectively.
While the piece is unequivocally good for Rockland’s cityscape, it was also the bellwether for an issue recently facing Rockland’s town board: when is a sign a sign, and when is it art?
The question facing code enforcement officer John Root was whether a sign proposed for the front of Ada’s Kitchen constitutes art or advertising. It will read, simply, “East.”
Ada’s Kitchen is owned by Jen and Rick Rockwell. “There’s no such business as EAST,” Rick Rockwell told the Pen Bay Pilot. â€œEAST is a concept. It’s a general direction. The object of this piece is to celebrate the past of Rockland. It speaks about our proximity as being in the eastern part of our country, in the most eastern parts of our state.”
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928, Charles Demuth, Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is proto-pop.
The paper reported that Jen Rockwell told the City Council, “further north, toward her establishment, drivers start speeding up due to their perception that there’s nothing more to look at until the ferry terminal.” Well, now she’s talking about advertising. I’d have to disagree with her anyway, because one of my favorite signs in town is for the Rockland CafĂ©. That’s very close to their location.
But Ms. Rockwell was right that the visual concentration is weighted to the south end of town. She was, in essence, critiquing Main Street as a work of art in itself, and saying its balance is off. 
Rockland has successfully recreated itself as the northeast’s art mecca. With art sales, I suppose, comes public art. Not all of it is going to be by artists of the stature of Robert Indiana, but a Code Enforcement Officer isn’t qualified to judge aesthetics. Nor, I suppose, does he want to.
Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box, 1964, Andy Warhol. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood. Museum of Modern Art. This is full-blown Pop Art
He does need to assess whether the sign is properly sized, lighted and hung, and to be sure that it won’t swing loose in a Nor’easter or fall and crush visitors. To do that, he needs a specific code addressing art signs, and now he has one.
My own definition of art is that it’s something that’s useless for any practical purpose. The Rockland City Council came close to the same conclusion when it concluded that a sign is art if it doesn’t advertise the product being sold by the business. In other words, you can hang an art lobster up if your business is selling hand-knitted scarves, but you can’t hang a lobster up if you actually sell lobsters.
Then one looks at the sign for the Strand Theatre and realizes that it’s as much an art statement as anything on Main Street, even though it advertises their specific business. That brings us full circle to Robert Indiana’s work and the whole Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Their goal was to blur the line between mass culture and fine art. And now it is done.
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Roadside Route 1

How important are signs? Just say “Red’s Eats” or “Moody’s Diner” to a summer visitor and then sit back and listen.

Driving to Belfast yesterday, I mused, as I often do, on the many Mom-and-Pop businesses along the way. They’re as much a part of the Maine landscape as the rocks and the lobster boats. Their signs are idiosyncratic, old-fashioned and different than in most tourist destinations. Without them, Route 1 would be much less interesting.

Signage, in its most utilitarian form, instructs us. Beyond that, it is a social art form. It decorates, it identifies, and it communicates ideas to passers-by.
“Your house has a name!” my Scottish friend Martha exclaimed when she visited me last summer. Middle-class Americans don’t generally name their houses. Britons do. But our sign has been there since long before we bought this place. It is called Richards Hill after the first owner, from when the surrounding area was farmland. It wasn’t my place to take its nameplate down, even though I have a different business sign at the street.
In fact, many buildings along Route 1 have multiple signs from different periods. These are like layers in an archeological dig. There’s a motel in Lincolnville with a dull 1990s-era street sign. But its office sign is perfect mid-century neon.
In my town (Rockport) business signs must be small, not internally lighted, and conform to a setback. That isn’t true everywhere on Route 1, but it does contribute to the aesthetic of hand-painted, hand-carved signs that prevails here.
Neon, which was introduced in the 1920s and reached its peak in the 1940s, is used sparingly. It’s not permitted in Rockport, but in general it’s expensive, and the tubes break.
Part of the reason signage here is so charming is that Mainers are basically frugal. They don’t change what ain’t broke. Signs last a long time if maintained.
The other part is that big-box stores, by and large, have little presence here. There are some, but they’re not ubiquitous and despoiling, as they are in so many places. The absence of their large, lighted signs is refreshing.
Signs tell us a lot about the people within the businesses they advertise. There are antique shops on Route 1 that are barely more than a rotating flea market. Others are quite elegant, and their signage is more tasteful.
Signs also reflect personality and background. Here in Maine, they tend toward the ‘colonial’, which speaks both to their mid-century vintage and the predominant WASP culture.
How important are signs? Just say “Red’s Eats” or “Moody’s Diner” to a summer visitor and then listen as they start bubbling over. Signs are part of a place’s cultural heritage and its community memory. They are landmarks, sometimes more important than the buildings they mark. They’re individual, clever, and evocative. That’s art, folks.