Whalom Park isn’t much like Kosovo, but visiting the rusted remains of America’s 10th-oldest amusement park is one hell of way to spend a drizzly Saturday afternoon. Amid the fun-fair structures left languishing in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, is the Flying Comet roller coaster, a wooden skeleton of erected hills that ends in a covered-tunnel finale called the Black Hole. Tucked away from the road is a game booth that once must have held a football challenge; its sign now cries ouch own. Nearby, a hollowed-out bumper-car platform morphs human-size shadows into a menacing ghoul — or at least that’s what happens when Stu Sherman pokes his head into an opening to snap a shot of the spookily darkened interior.
It was Sherman’s idea to check out Whalom Park today. An autodidactic photographer in his third year of law school at Boston University, the 24-year-old Long Island native has a photography show hanging at Cambridge’s Zeitgeist Gallery called “Kosovo Punk” — sundry images of the protected Eastern European state’s citizens and architecture. Sherman shot the series last winter during a month-long trip with two friends to the riot-addled region, where his retired cousin had been doing contract work for the United Nations. During his travels, Sherman interviewed and photographed various local musicians, like Hosenfefer, a punk-rock trio he found on the Web and who turned out to be two dead ringers for Silent Bob and one Jay look-alike. Or the Muslim rapper Rrusta, formerly of Jericho Walls, a Rage Against the Machine–influenced band whose pre-emptive “Don’t Fuck With Albanians” became an aggro-anthem for the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Sherman met with these musicians — in a region where skirmishes still haunted recent memories and people still patrolled with automatic weapons — hoping to learn how art informed their political views. What he found varied. “Rrusta, for example, questioned a great deal of the corruption in government and politics. He was trying to challenge his own people to fix their own country and rebuild Kosovo,” recalls Sherman. “Hosenfefer, however, seemed to support the current culture and beliefs.” After all, they were Kosovo-bred versions of Kevin Smith creations. “Some, but not all, of the bands were reinventing their world.”
Sherman wasn’t trying to impose a Western perspective on his interactions. “My work is pretty critical of American and Americana culture,” he admits, specifying that the socioeconomic subjects in his viewfinder tend to be “consumerism” and “overconsumption.” That’s evidenced in an online amateur photo gallery of Sherman’s Kosovo work hosted by American Apparel (www.americanapparel.net/gallery/amateur)— also a subtle irony.In that series, there’s a two-dimensional President Clinton waving from a five-story banner suspended from a bleak-looking high-rise. There’s a curbside line-up of headless mannequins modeling sweaters while the crumbling building behind them looks like it just puked its guts out. There’s also a holiday scene of a pathetic-looking Santa seated before a fake Magic Kingdom, flanked by two people costumed in Pez-like Goofy and Mickey Mouse heads—all sponsored by a bank. It’s these poignant and simple scenes of Western symbols and commerce, juxtaposed against Kosovo’s broken-down cityscape, that speak volumes.
