RECIPROCAL COMMERCE

“As I sat myself down by the side of my mother, I began to tell her of the pains and miseries, the hard usages and ill treatments to which I had passed through, until the clock struck the hour of ten, and I retired to rest and fell in the arms of sleep and began to dream of the tortures and torments to which I had passed…..”  -Austin Reed The Life and Confessions of a Haunted Convict

      In the late 1840’s a tailor and aspiring showman from Genoa, New York, by the name of George J. Mastin would pick up an old Daily Cayuga Tocsin and be reminded of a crime so horrific it defied comprehension. A perfect family in a tidy house along the lake behind a picket fence in the moonlight, was senselessly butchered by a “insane, negro madman.” Mastin remembered the case well. Suddenly he saw it very clearly—fear could be monetized—murder as entertainment. Where others saw unspeakable tragedy, better left forgotten, Mastin saw profit in reliving the tragedy. Where others saw pain and sorrow, George saw art and commerce. Mastin couldn’t paint, but he knew a couple of out of work carriage painters who he could hire on the cheap. The panorama of the Van Nest murders, (that still hangs in storage in the Cooperstown Farmer’s Museum) was to be a hot ticket item in upstate New York in the middle of the 19th century. 

      Battle scenes, torture and crucifixions had choked the high and low brow art world for centuries. Mastin’s skull of Golgotha would not be a crucifixion, but a local crime noir tableau, set in Fleming, out by the lake; featuring a crudely painted disemboweled two year old boy sitting on his terrified sister’s lap. The final canvas of a chronological set, portrayed the “guilty” hooded “negro maniac,” in burial shroud, hanging by his neck. Crowds lined up around the block to see Mastin’s painted spectacle of horror.

     George Mastin’s candle-lit performance of the Van Nest killing foreshadowed Ann Osterhout’s father-in-law, Thomas Edison’s, moving image on film, and predicted Hollywood’s reliance on violence, and it’s aftermath, as a tried and true source of entertainment. Using my starting point as the brutal slaying of a distant relative and ending up here, I play right into the conspiracy.

     The unimaginable terror that the Van Nest family must have endured on that March night is diluted, safely masticated and contextualized within Mastin’s gruesome painting/performance art show; advertised (and the family name misspelled as “Van Ness”) on the poster, bracketed by “the Erin Twin Clog Dancers, sentimental comic singing [and] a lecture on scriptural and historical facts.” George J. Mastin would adopt Bill’s same savage “Indian crouch” candlestick in hand (like in actual testimony), lurking in a Cayuga County barn, creeping slowly across the straw covered floor, illuminating four over sized canvases, depicting the massacre of the Van Nest family by the “negro mono-maniac” William Freeman; leading his congregation into safe, subdued—fear.

     

    Let us linger here in the candle light before the first canvas. It looms over us in dark hues, surrounding a giant white house in the background. We can smell the fresh paint mixed with the melting candle wax dripping onto the cold old barn, as the wind blows dust, bending cobwebs through the battens. You have to crane your neck up to take in the large house.  Follow the crisply painted steps and grand foundation represented as if it were supporting a stone courthouse. The perspective is all wrong, but we forgive this minor detail, absorbed in Mastin’s narrative. In a low somber tone George Mastin begins: “This is the representation of the murder of the Van Nest family by a negro by the name of William Freeman of Auburn……” George needed better writers. 

    In the foreground of the first canvas, the beginning…. there’s William Freeman fighting with Mrs. Wyckoff. He’s rat like, a small vicious creature on a rampage. Mrs. Wyckoff’s white bedclothes are soaked in bright red paint as she stabs at Freeman’s right wrist with her kitchen knife. He’s black. Only Bill’s wild white eyes pop out against the vernal green of the summer lawn. The season is wrong. Where’s the snow? The bars of the picket fence confine the dwarfed figures in their caged, mortal struggle, both reflecting Freeman’s past and predicting his anterior future. Over the pair’s heads, walking zombie-like, is a priestly male in dark robes, closer to the house, oblivious to the struggle by the fence, an eviscerated scarlet sash of entrails hanging from his belt. This is Mr. Van Arsdale, dazed from his wounds, going to check on the others.

    Visual art continues the conspiratorial conversation, along side the state, the judiciary, religion, the medical community and the press. In these mid-19th century times, accelerated by the modernity of steam, steel, the telegraph, and the rush westward into the void, the filter of art was needed to process it all. It is the artist who is called upon to titillate our increasingly desensitized guts, assimilate and record events. Mastin’s fiddle players helped it go down easy. It was more “Making of a Murder” than Richard III, but culture enough for the hinterland. Take it all in. The clog dancers are up next.