American Bog: Erosion, Identity, and the Fragile Image
In his American Bog series (2013), Mark Alexander turns his attention to a distinctively American iconography: Abraham Lincoln, Mickey Mouse, the Stars and Stripes, and the colonial-era Freakes. Rendered in thick, dark oil paint and decayed hues, these images are instantly recognisable yet visibly altered. Their surfaces have been darkened, eroded, and bruised — not vandalised, but weathered. The effect is haunting, not because the viewer is shown something monstrous, but because these familiar symbols feel like they are slipping away.
If this sounds like criticism, it isn’t — or at least, not in the familiar sense. The American Bog paintings are not polemical. They are neither satirical nor accusatory. Like much of Alexander’s work, they feel more like acts of witnessing, or rituals of preservation through transformation. The works don’t seek to condemn. They seem to ask instead: what happens to even our most powerful symbols when time — and reproduction, and ideology — have pressed too long upon them?
Cultural Icons and the Dorian Gray Effect
The title American Bog carries two immediate associations. First, the image of a bog as a site of burial — and preservation. A place where bodies, once lost, remain intact but warped, chemically transformed. Second, the echo of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where a portrait ages and decays in place of the subject. In Alexander’s version, the decay is not hidden. It is the point.
Lincoln’s face emerges from the canvas with a quiet severity, but the light around him is gone. Mickey Mouse, so often a cartoon shorthand for innocence or joy, looks pale and withdrawn, as if drawn back into some pre-cultural substratum. Even the American flag, a symbol designed to rally, now looks like it has been left out in the rain for a century.
There is affection here — or at least, a kind of reverent curiosity. These are not brutal parodies or glib détournements. The figures have been chosen carefully, with a sense of their place in the American psyche. The Freakes, for instance — likely referencing the Freake-Gibbs portraits of colonial New England — are hardly household names. Their inclusion expands the timeline: from origin myth to commercial empire.
Time, Loss, and the Alexander Method
Across Alexander’s practice, time operates like a corrosive force, but also like a medium. In The Blacker Gachet, he reimagined Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet in tones so dark they seem to repel light. The glass placed over the work reflects the viewer, implicating them in the act of looking — and in the impossibility of seeing the image fully. It is not parody. It is an elegy.
A similar impulse runs through American Bog. Here too, the artist does not reimagine for the sake of novelty. He reimagines to register what is fading, what is buckling, what is under pressure. The pigment, the surface, the visual language — all are made to bear the weight of cultural time.
The series also invites comparison to Ground and Unground, in which canonical paintings dissolve into earthy colours and textures, emerging as if from sediment. There, the gesture was archaeological. In American Bog, it is forensic. Each painting offers an image not of power, but of its afterlife.
Is This a Critique of the US?
It would be easy to interpret these works as a dark commentary on American decline — especially in the context of 2013, marked by economic unease and political division. The tarnished faces and darkened flags seem to cry out: look what’s become of us.
But Alexander’s tone is more meditative than critical. He is not mocking these symbols. He is watching them. In this, the series shares DNA with with Views From Nowhere – An Epoch of Rest, where silent figures gaze out across abstracted spaces, suspended in time. There, the paintings imagine what it might mean to remain still in a world moving too fast. In American Bog, the question is reversed: what survives when the image moves too slowly, too often, too publicly?
If there is any indictment here, it is not of the United States as such, but of the cultural process that flattens symbols through repetition. Mickey Mouse, once subversive, now exists as pure emblem. Lincoln, once radical, now appears frozen in consensus. These works do not scold America — they grieve for it, or perhaps for the way its myths have become too heavy to hold their own meaning.
What the Bog Preserves
The metaphor of the bog is worth dwelling on. A bog preserves through suffocation. It slows time, yes, but also distorts. Bodies pulled from the peat are recognisably human — but their features are flattened, their colours turned black, their textures leather-like. In these paintings, we are shown what American identity looks like after immersion in centuries of projection, commodification, and ideology.
And yet, Alexander gives us more than decay. The works are beautifully constructed. Their frames are bespoke. Their surfaces are laboured. The reverence is in the making. Just as in The Blacker Gachet, where mourning was accompanied by precision, the American Bog series seems to say: even when a symbol has lost its force, it can still be treated with care.
There’s something almost devotional in this — a belief, perhaps, that images retain something essential, even after erosion. Not the full truth. Not the original power. But a residue.
Conclusion: After the Image
The American Bog paintings do not offer easy answers. They do not ask the viewer to reject Lincoln, or Mickey Mouse, or the flag, or even the idea of America. They ask something quieter, and perhaps more difficult: to consider what happens to cultural icons when they have been asked to bear too much for too long.
In this, the series joins a larger conversation in Alexander’s work — about how meaning survives erosion, how history clings to the surface of things, and how art might bear witness not to a golden age, but to what remains after its shine has gone.
Whether we read these works as critique, homage, or some unstable blend of the two, they offer a powerful reminder that to paint an icon is not necessarily to celebrate it. Sometimes, it is simply to watch it sink, slowly, into the bog.