Toward an Artistic Anatomy of the Midwest

The Midwestern landscape has been frequently analogized to the human figure—so much so that the transposition of the two forms is almost automatic. Yet, how and to what degree has this Midwestern analogy of human figure to landform (and vis a versa) constituted the region, and more importantly to what ends? Working across the region’s post Euro-American settlement history, this essay will explore the landscape to human figure analogy to offer a new critical understanding of Midwestern identity and, moreover, a call for a more subtle and multifaceted anatomization of the ways that we perceive the region and shape our understanding of its past, present, and future. What might be gained if we moved beyond analogy and metaphor and take seriously the possibilities of analyzing the region—in addition to and alongside its inhabitants—as a materially defined and moreover embodied subject? I propose that the propensity of Midwestern image makers to envision the region as a living and often anthropomorphized form is born of (and in that way embodies) an array of unusually visceral and psychologically laden affinities that arise when a landscape and its inhabitants act upon each other in mutually constitutive ways. This means moving beyond frameworks that focus only on human authority over the land to instead perceive how the land also experts power over and sometimes against its human inhabitants, and how those inhabitants respond to its capacity to do so.