In this house I call home
BILL MILLER
Bill Miller: Vintage Linoleum Collage by GLENN ADAMSON
In the 1860s, the English inventor Frederick Walton noticed that a skin had formed on the top of an unattended paint pot, because of exposure to the air. He realized that this principle might be used to create a waterproof substance, and after lengthy experiments, hit upon a combination of oxidized linseed oil, backed with layers of cloth and cork. Waterproof, easy to clean, and capable of taking any printed design, it was a genuine wonder material, amazing all who saw it. He called it linoleum, after its principle ingredient. By the late 20th century linoleum’s original luster had long worn off. Like other materials that had initinally been astonishing, such as plywood and aluminum, linoleum had become inexpensive, pervasive, cheap and cheerful, at best.
This is precisely why Bill Miller was interested in it. He was fascinated and moved by linoleum’s status as a decorative art of the less well-off. Once, it had been the best way for a family to bring joy to a room, through color and pattern. There was something there worthy of respect, he thought; and he aimed to bring it out. When he first started working with salvaged linoleum, twenty years ago, he quickly realized its directness, the way it drew out of him different compositional instincts, while also adding several registers of technical and conceptual interest: “It was liberating to work in response to the material — I was liberated by the constraints.” He had a palette of existing colors and patterns which he could arrange at will. He could manipulate the linoleum in several different ways — cut, rip, or break it, producing a clean edge or a ragged one. If he chose to, he could expose its oily core, using this hidden black interior for a graphic outline or a visual rift, like something from a Vincent van Gogh or a Clyfford Still.
In addition to these effects, and its patterned, polychrome palette, linoleum also brought to Miller’s work a sense of place and time. He lives in Pittsburgh, a city that has undergone one of the most dramatic and tragic rise-and-fall narratives in America. Its heyday was in the early twentieth century when the city’s steel industry was in full swing; of course, that is no longer the case. In fact, it is the very collapse of the local economy that furnishes Miller with his material. There is a wealth of vintage linoleum from Pittsburgh’s golden age to be had in neighborhoods like South Side Slopes, where there are abandoned houses by the score. “You don’t have to break in,” he notes. “You just walk in.” What would otherwise go into a landfill becomes, in his hands, something precious. Miller does sometimes have whole rolls of linoleum to work with (if he makes a big score on eBay), but more often, he is in possession of only a limited amount of a given pattern. “Never seen it before, never will again,” as he puts it. So he must plan carefully, ensuring that he won’t run out of wall or sky too soon.
This practical consideration has important metaphorical implications. Miller’s alchemical transmutation of linoleum into a representational medium is a way to give neglected pasts their due. He is particularly interested in its imperfect surfaces, which carry their own narratives, intersecting with the ones he constructs in his pictures. The scuffs and scrapes — indentations where a desk sat for twenty years, the gouged tracks of dining chairs — aggregate into an archive of lived experience. At a time when postindustrial communities are in the national spotlight as commentators circle round them, speculating on economic malaise, the opioid crisis, and these places’ role in national politics, Miller’s portrayals have a particular political resonance. Where there is otherwise superficial caricature, he brings deep empathy. The resonance is personal for Miller, too. When he was only fifteen, he suffered a horrible loss: his own father was killed in an industrial accident. The event is memorialized in the sardonically titled Steal Mill, in which his father is shown being laid to rest. He is surrounded by a teeming landscape, peopled by workers amidst scenes of smoke and fire.
The composition strongly recalls a centuries-old allegorical painting or tapestry, an association enhanced by details like the cavorting skeletons at the lower right. We are invited to read the image as we would a Hieronymus Bosch or a Pieter Breughel, with both fascination and dismay, exploring the topsy-turvy world the artwork has brought into being, which is a visionary overlay upon our own. Far simpler but equally potent is another of Miller’s new works: The Immigrants. The composition is based on a photograph by AndrÊ KertÊsz, taken in Budapest in 1920, which shows a couple peering through a wooden fence at a circus. Presumably, they were too poor to buy tickets. Struck by the simple force of the image, Miller decided to recontextualize it. His figures also stand at a fence, but the object of their gaze, visible through a hole and off in the distance, is the Statue of Liberty. We are to understand the couple as stand-ins for everyone that longs to come to America, and is turned away. Everything Miller makes bears similarly powerful testimony.
This is the greatest importance of linoleum for his work; a paradigmatic material of the industrial revolution, he uses it to evoke the psychological realities of deindustrialization. That historical consciousness is present in the history that clings to each bit of linoleum, marked with the traces of its origins and its use. Its presence is in the storylines he gives us from his own family; his evocation of Pittsburgh in its prime; even in the cultural references that pop up in his work (John and Yoko are a particular favorite). Some of his most powerful images are his simplest — just a lone tree, or a chair, can summon a powerful tide of collective memory. Miller lavishes care on it all. Miller has noticed that people occasionally start crying when they see his pictures. It may remind them of their childhood home, or that of a parent or grandparent. Perhaps it makes them feel how the past recedes, to a point where it can just barely be glimpsed. Miller’s work lives in this recession. It is not nostalgic — he is not expressing something as simple as melancholy for bygone days — rather, his collages have an abiding curiosity about the past, and a conviction that its traces can be imbued with new life.
Part I
INSPIRATION
Part II
PROCESS
Part III
WORKS
This zine was created in conjunction with the exhibition, In this house I call home, on view at dieFirma East from August 19, 2020 – August 23, 2020 Produced by Gen Fournier Photography by Victor Sira Published by dieFirma Paper: Mohawk Superfine White Eggshell 28lb. Cover: Mohawk Superfine White 80lb. Created, printed, and assembled at dieFirma East in Shelter Island, NY First Edition of 150