Imagine a gold candlestick: nothing fancy, just a single candle. One person figures it’s only brass. A professional evaluator sees that it’s gold and of very high quality workmanship. To another person it’s the candlestick his grandmother always had on the mantel. Maybe this turns out to be the candlestick that JFK always kept at his bedside at Hyannis Port in case the electricity went out in one of those coastal storms. What if it turns out to have been a holy candlestick on the altar of an early and famous churchman?
Now imagine that someone is selling the candlestick. If it’s the guy who thinks it’s brass selling to the guy who knows it belonged to JFK, the second guy has struck it rich. When what the seller knows and the buyer knows are quite different, it is the value gradient, dependent upon knowledge and expertise, that will make someone a lot of money. The last aspect, sacred, will only be valuable to the extent that the Holiness is recognized. Now you’re looking at the Indian artifact market.
The world is awash with what amounts to cultural detritis, flotsam and jetsam from people who move all the time, who build collections and then discard them, who outgrow one phase or enthusiasm while starting another, who travel and buy memorabilia, then die so their heirs must clean out the house. One of the most popular TV shows is about objects that people bring to an evaluator to see what they are worth, because every now and then something that seems mundane or simply curious turns out to be valuable, even VERY valuable. But to whoever let it go, it was nothing worth keeping. Everyone in Montana knows stories about an old painting stored in a chicken coop that was actually painted by Charlie Russell. In Europe that might be a Rembrandt.
This is probably more true of Indian artifacts than a lot of other categories, like books or art or china or silver. So many tribal objects have been created that were meant for tourist trade or for impressive decoration, that few people would be able to tell real antiquities or even whether the bead-sewing stitches were authentic or whether a buckskin dress were brain-tanned or chrome tanned or sewn with actual sinew or dental floss. And even fewer would be able to identify something particularly sacred or meant for ceremonial use. Many indigenous artifacts are made of humble substances, not diamond-studded gold.
Second-hand stores, “antique” stores, garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, used book stores, art auctions that attract side bazaars in nearby motels where each room is rented by a free-lance entrepreneur or -- more than anything else -- eBay keeps all these objects on the move -- losing some of their provenance as they go but also acquiring new legends meant to enhance value. The newspapers claim Brubaker, the book thief, made $500,000 a year on eBay. I’d bet you money that dozens of people in Great Falls, where he lived, knew he was doing it, didn’t exactly approve but didn’t get worried about it, because it was just “stuff,” not carefully promoted like the art work at the main CM Russell Auction or the materials displayed at the CM Russell Museum.
There is no free-standing Indian museum in Montana except the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning -- which has no budget at all, certainly no way of acquiring materials and no qualified anthropologist to evaluate them. The most persistent and detailed stories about Indian artifacts being stolen and sold by insiders come from this institution. The tribe refuses to take responsibility for it because it is a money sink. The flood in 1964 undermined one side of the foundation and compromised the storage. Much precious material was lost to water damage. They are so nervous about being investigated that they refused to allow Rosalyn LaPier, a highly qualified Ph.D. candidate married to an outstanding scholar, access to the collection and archives. She is a tribal member. The white scholar traveling with her was allowed in. Those controlling access were Blackfeet. Such confusion and anxiety mess up information.
Outsiders have little or no mental picture about these matters. They’re still back in the nineteenth century or maybe the 1950’s when whites still dominated the professions and administrations. Outsiders today would not be able to pick a living Blackfeet Indian out of a line-up, much less valuable NA artifacts. We’re in this strange time when Hollywood costumers and cowboy artists probably know more about NA material culture than the tribes themselves do. I don’t know of any high school that has an “intro to anthro” class nor do I know of any Montana tribal college that does, which is not to say they don’t exist.
The whole point of “wheelin’ and dealin’” is to buy low and sell high. ("Stealin’" is, of course, about as low as you can go, and so is representing a lesser artist’s work as a greater artist’s work as in the recent scandal of the purported Russell that turned out to be a Seltzer.) Finding objects, like arrowheads, is a bending-over sort of serendipity, but many people, esp. in the SW, have profited from removing pots or bones or more elaborate objects by digging them up. With backhoes. They do not care that they are losing value from these objects by taking them out of their context, because they won’t be selling to the people who would appreciate that sort of value, presumably scientific information.
What makes buying Indian artifacts on a reservation so profitable is that the people themselves are likely to be low income, which is to say “needy,” and may be impaired by substance abuse. Also, younger people may have lost the values of the older culture and those converted to the more Taliban-type versions of Christianity may have been told that ancient ceremonial objects are the work of the Devil, which ought to be destroyed.
My personal bias about everything in life is that education is likely to be at least part of the answer. This is particularly true here. Even if the younger people or more corroded people cannot resist selling their people’s material objects, they can at least be taught the real value of them. Diminishing the value differentials should slow down traffic. That would probably effectively curtail if not end much of the vacuuming power of the well-informed swindler.
I’m not even close to ending this series.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
INDIAN ARTIFACTS: JOHN HELLSON
Here comes a story at the opposite extreme from the Uhlenbeck’s, one I can only tell now because a confirming article showed up through Google. I had to pay $4 to get a copy from the New York Times, but I already knew the information. I was just afraid to use it for fear of a libel case.
In the Sixties in Browning, Montana, I was married to Bob Scriver, a sculptor of Western subjects, including the Blackfeet. He was born in Browning in 1914, probably one of the first white babies, grew up there, taught school and led bands there, opened a taxidermy shop, then a museum, and finally became well-known as one of the best and most authentic of the Cowboy Artists of America. He was also a member of the National Sculpture Society at a time when cowboy artists were normally ghettoized. In the end he died there in Browning.
While I was with Bob, and I mean lying alongside him one morning on waking, he described a dream. It was a dream meaning that he should become the Keeper of a Thunder Pipe Bundle. In those days most people weren’t aware of such a thing, not even many of the tribal members, esp. the younger ones. We knew because a man named John Hellson had been stopping by with his wife, Diane, a beautiful young woman from a prominent Blood family, and their kids, bright-eyed, smart little guys. He had introduced Bob to a whole new class of artifacts, Sacred Bundles, very different from the fancy beaded parade gear that most people in Browning admired. In fact, when Bob was leading the Indian Band, he wore a buckskin beaded suit he had paid a woman to make for him. It was not sacred.
Sacred Bundles didn’t mean a whole lot until you knew the story behind them. The last few of the old people who kept them were careful not to talk about them, even though an example of one of the Thunder Pipes hung in the Museum of the Plains Indian on the edge of town. John explained it all. Bob was entirely captured by these ideas. He was not a strong Christian, but he was very much of the “place” which is the essence of autochthonous culture.
John was about the same size as Bob, a Brit with intense blue eyes and a beard. He told us he was a pugilist in Cornwall, which was why he had no teeth. He had that kind of square, confrontive build and manner. Somehow his credentials and employment were a little mysterious, but that wasn’t unusual among the steady procession of people who had mysteriously acquired a great deal of knowledge and a certain number of artifacts. He was intense, eloquent, and seductive. On Feb 5, 2006, I put his photo in my blog. He did NOT like his photo to be taken.
John guided Bob through the acquisition of Tom Many Guns’ Medicine Pipe Bundle. Tom had been an informant for anthropologists and was still an active member of the Bundle Opening ceremony every spring, but he was aging, had a tendency to be thirsty, and was rumored to be selling little pieces of the Bundle contents. Bob wrapped on a blanket, took along a regular Blackfeet smoking pipe, presented himself to Tom with other gifts plus money, and eventually that Bundle was transferred to us in the traditional Indian Way. Richard Little Dog was the ceremonialist. A lot of money changed hands, a good deal of it going to John Hellson as the broker. John had had many Bundles transferred to himself.
I want to emphasize that for our part we were totally sincere and respectful. The only person who was cranky about the ceremony was Tom Many Guns’ wife, Margaret, who was used to the ceremonial status. The others were agreeable, or so it seemed. This was fifty years ago. The present Bundle Keepers were children. The Sacred Bundles in Bob’s artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” are from John Hellson, with a few exceptions. They were acquired after Bob divorced me in 1970. They are extremely controversial and all have been put back into tribal custody by the Royal Alberta Museum.
In September, 1981, John was sentenced for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of irreplaceable anthropological treasures from the University of California's Lowie Museum. Normally such thefts are hushed up. I’ve talked to more than one Blackfeet who boasted about stealing from exhibits at the Montana Historical Society, which denies such acts vehemently. There were always thefts from Bob Scriver.
The article went on, “The museum's management refused to follow the usual practice of close-mouthed acceptance of such thefts, Mr. Norick said, and school authorities insisted that Mr. Hellson be prosecuted. The Alameda County district attorney's office accepted a plea bargain arrangement under which Mr. Hellson pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property and received the two-year prison sentence. No other prosecutions are pending.”
The article said, “He presided over the carrying off of $500,000 worth of artifacts. This week he received a two-year prison sentence.” His marriage was over. And the article said, “The Lowie Museum's problem has elements in common with theft problems at art museums, where charges of improper trading and other actions against the museums' interests have also been made against curators and directors in several institutions.” This was also allegedly true of Mike Kennedy, the director of the Montana Historical Society in the Sixties, but I haven’t found any documentation. I’m just remembering.
The point is that some artifacts collectors are plainly and frankly thieves -- ferociously informed and sometimes with good credentials, fueled by greed, enabled by insiders and I mean insider members of the tribes as well as white opportunists. I could name a dozen but would be well-advised not to without proof.
When I wrote the biography of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I tried to locate John Hellson, even though I knew that when Bob was organizing his artifact book by photographing all the work he was selling to the Royal Alberta Museum and actually paid John to curate the artifacts, even knowing he’d just gotten out of jail for stealing, John rewarded him by stealing three or four pieces of Bob’s he could get into his pocket, including a grizzly claw necklace. Bob realized it, put out the alarm, located a few pieces in the SW, and sent a police officer named Rooney to bring them back. There was a warrant for Hellson’s arrest which expired when Bob died in 1999.
What has recently renewed interest in John Hellson is the case against a Montana fellow named Brubaker, who stole books and pages from libraries. The two of them, now in their seventies, were traveling together until Brubaker was arrested. He’s now serving a thirty month sentence. But that’s not about Indian artifacts. It’s about books.
In the Sixties in Browning, Montana, I was married to Bob Scriver, a sculptor of Western subjects, including the Blackfeet. He was born in Browning in 1914, probably one of the first white babies, grew up there, taught school and led bands there, opened a taxidermy shop, then a museum, and finally became well-known as one of the best and most authentic of the Cowboy Artists of America. He was also a member of the National Sculpture Society at a time when cowboy artists were normally ghettoized. In the end he died there in Browning.
While I was with Bob, and I mean lying alongside him one morning on waking, he described a dream. It was a dream meaning that he should become the Keeper of a Thunder Pipe Bundle. In those days most people weren’t aware of such a thing, not even many of the tribal members, esp. the younger ones. We knew because a man named John Hellson had been stopping by with his wife, Diane, a beautiful young woman from a prominent Blood family, and their kids, bright-eyed, smart little guys. He had introduced Bob to a whole new class of artifacts, Sacred Bundles, very different from the fancy beaded parade gear that most people in Browning admired. In fact, when Bob was leading the Indian Band, he wore a buckskin beaded suit he had paid a woman to make for him. It was not sacred.
Sacred Bundles didn’t mean a whole lot until you knew the story behind them. The last few of the old people who kept them were careful not to talk about them, even though an example of one of the Thunder Pipes hung in the Museum of the Plains Indian on the edge of town. John explained it all. Bob was entirely captured by these ideas. He was not a strong Christian, but he was very much of the “place” which is the essence of autochthonous culture.
John was about the same size as Bob, a Brit with intense blue eyes and a beard. He told us he was a pugilist in Cornwall, which was why he had no teeth. He had that kind of square, confrontive build and manner. Somehow his credentials and employment were a little mysterious, but that wasn’t unusual among the steady procession of people who had mysteriously acquired a great deal of knowledge and a certain number of artifacts. He was intense, eloquent, and seductive. On Feb 5, 2006, I put his photo in my blog. He did NOT like his photo to be taken.
John guided Bob through the acquisition of Tom Many Guns’ Medicine Pipe Bundle. Tom had been an informant for anthropologists and was still an active member of the Bundle Opening ceremony every spring, but he was aging, had a tendency to be thirsty, and was rumored to be selling little pieces of the Bundle contents. Bob wrapped on a blanket, took along a regular Blackfeet smoking pipe, presented himself to Tom with other gifts plus money, and eventually that Bundle was transferred to us in the traditional Indian Way. Richard Little Dog was the ceremonialist. A lot of money changed hands, a good deal of it going to John Hellson as the broker. John had had many Bundles transferred to himself.
I want to emphasize that for our part we were totally sincere and respectful. The only person who was cranky about the ceremony was Tom Many Guns’ wife, Margaret, who was used to the ceremonial status. The others were agreeable, or so it seemed. This was fifty years ago. The present Bundle Keepers were children. The Sacred Bundles in Bob’s artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” are from John Hellson, with a few exceptions. They were acquired after Bob divorced me in 1970. They are extremely controversial and all have been put back into tribal custody by the Royal Alberta Museum.
In September, 1981, John was sentenced for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of irreplaceable anthropological treasures from the University of California's Lowie Museum. Normally such thefts are hushed up. I’ve talked to more than one Blackfeet who boasted about stealing from exhibits at the Montana Historical Society, which denies such acts vehemently. There were always thefts from Bob Scriver.
The article went on, “The museum's management refused to follow the usual practice of close-mouthed acceptance of such thefts, Mr. Norick said, and school authorities insisted that Mr. Hellson be prosecuted. The Alameda County district attorney's office accepted a plea bargain arrangement under which Mr. Hellson pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property and received the two-year prison sentence. No other prosecutions are pending.”
The article said, “He presided over the carrying off of $500,000 worth of artifacts. This week he received a two-year prison sentence.” His marriage was over. And the article said, “The Lowie Museum's problem has elements in common with theft problems at art museums, where charges of improper trading and other actions against the museums' interests have also been made against curators and directors in several institutions.” This was also allegedly true of Mike Kennedy, the director of the Montana Historical Society in the Sixties, but I haven’t found any documentation. I’m just remembering.
The point is that some artifacts collectors are plainly and frankly thieves -- ferociously informed and sometimes with good credentials, fueled by greed, enabled by insiders and I mean insider members of the tribes as well as white opportunists. I could name a dozen but would be well-advised not to without proof.
When I wrote the biography of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I tried to locate John Hellson, even though I knew that when Bob was organizing his artifact book by photographing all the work he was selling to the Royal Alberta Museum and actually paid John to curate the artifacts, even knowing he’d just gotten out of jail for stealing, John rewarded him by stealing three or four pieces of Bob’s he could get into his pocket, including a grizzly claw necklace. Bob realized it, put out the alarm, located a few pieces in the SW, and sent a police officer named Rooney to bring them back. There was a warrant for Hellson’s arrest which expired when Bob died in 1999.
What has recently renewed interest in John Hellson is the case against a Montana fellow named Brubaker, who stole books and pages from libraries. The two of them, now in their seventies, were traveling together until Brubaker was arrested. He’s now serving a thirty month sentence. But that’s not about Indian artifacts. It’s about books.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
ARTIFACT COLLECTORS: UHLENBECK
Let’s try some local case studies before we go to the SW law cases which have not come to trial yet. I have a hunch that by tracing out some very different artifact collectors, we can uncover issues. Too many people reach a point of view by excluding any evidence that conflicts with it.
I want to start with the story of Professor Uhlenbeck, as recovered and published by Mary Eggermont-Molnar. (Darrell Kipp calls her my “Canadian cousin” because we are both quasi-academics who work with Blackfeet materials.) Mary E-M has a “congregation” of Dutch historians. She has been particularly valuable in promoting and actually DOING the translation of materials in European languages that are about Native Americans. These materials are very early because the Europe-based missionaries and empire-builders were the first contacts. Mary’s earlier book was “Montana: 1911,” (University of Calgary Press and University of Nebraska Press), the translation of Mrs. Uhlenbeck’s journal that summer. The second one, which has just recently been published is “C.C. Uhlenbeck (1866-1951): A Linguist Revisited.” (Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, XXIX, ii/XXX,i (Fall 2008/Spring 2009)) Much of the latter is not in English. Mary is a contributor, rather than editor.
The Uhlenbecks, a rather elderly pair of Europeans, so focused on their work and innocent in their understanding of the Blackfeet, illustrate well some of the problems in passing judgment on collectors. Willie (Mrs.) Uhlenbeck, writing in the 1911 summer, remarked that in their walks they often came across weathered ridge-burials and felt they should not take anything even though the bodies in coffins were often exposed by the shattering of the coffins. (Fifty years later, in 1961, I would still come across traces of boards and bones.) The protection of the graves came mostly from the conviction of the tribal people that disturbers would be cursed. Indeed, many of those deaths were from smallpox, a durable germ. By the time of the Uhlenbeck’s the belongings might include elaborate and valuable objects: a chair made of buffalo horns, guns, or jewelry. Unbelieving youngsters and greedy outsiders did not hesitate to loot.
In the end, Willie confessed, they did take a bracelet that had been scattered apart from the main burial. They felt guilty and did not show their Indian friends. The Uhlenbecks saw but did not take skulls that were entirely fleshless, cleaned by insects, sun and wind into gleaming white bone. Such mementos mori are almost irresistible to frontiersmen’s dark humor, which was quite Shakespearean as well as often drunken. Many skulls ended up in bars, staring at the patrons. Plenty of more sophisticated folk had a skull on their mantel or desk.
What the Uhlenbecks were collecting was not material objects but the language -- though taking the language did not remove the language. In fact, Uhlenbeck’s work is one of the forces that has preserved the language to be studied in modern times. No Native American person of the time had the training to analyze and record these materials and most whites on the scene would have been happy to see the language vanish along with the people. It was the very issue of “vanishing” that attracted Professor Uhlenbeck to the work of preservation.
His methods, however, were interesting then to the local people and still interesting now, though we might long for video recordings of the proceedings. Living in a little tent provided by John Tatsey, furnished by their travel trunks and a few crates, plus an ingenious but cranky contraption of a camp bed that accommodated both of the couple, the professor paid informants to come and tell him stories in the Blackfeet language, providing translations as they went. All day he transcribed these onto paper. In the evening, after a meal provided by the Tatsey’s, curious Blackfeet came to listen while Uhlenbeck read the stories back to them as a check on accuracy and asked their opinions. They were amazed at this parlor trick since they had thought only English was susceptible to reading and writing! There was always much joking and merriment.
The Professor didn’t make money nor did he live in luxury. (His best luxury was his wife, who constantly worked to make him comfortable by brewing tea and heating stones in their little stove to wrap in rags to keep their feet warm at night.) But he did gain in prestige and the knowledge that his work had value, though it was sharply criticized by some in the field. Certainly this has got to be among the earliest written records of even provisional accuracy concerning the language. And yet, the descendants of Tatsey, perhaps empowered by watching what this man did, discredit written versions of Napi tales, insisting that their own versions, several generations down the line, are more authentic and real. For them, this is true. They also want money for the stories.
At one point there was a China-style Red Cultural Revolution in Browning that rejected all white contributions to knowledge about Blackfeet. Many valuable records and documents ended up at the dump, where a few people tried to save some of them. It was a vanishing done by themselves. This purge seemed to be necessary to clear out resentment that was blocking progress. At that time it was also considered “backward” if not simply “dangerous” to preserve the Blackfeet language, because it would cause a person to be punished in white society. Due mostly to the efforts of the Piegan Institute, this has reversed. (Tatseys helped with this.) In fact, the “impossible” (which many said teaching non-speakers would prove to be) turned out to be wrong. Now speaking Blackfeet is considered a major coup and obviously valuable cultural preservation. Uhlenbeck’s work is important again. These radical swings in popular sentiment do not help to stabilize legal status, much less preserve the materials in question.
Another issue invisible to local Blackfeet as well as whites is the scientific study of how the human mind forms language. One source of theories is the comparison of grammar in different languages to see what forms are universal and which are local. Many know about Whorf’s theories that the Hopi speak in gerunds (words ending in “ing”) which is a product of their understanding of the world as transient processes interacting. This striking notion has provoked philosophical theories and personal transformation. The realization that different languages are the product of different world-views is considered a major element of a good humanities education.
But another more suspicion-provoking use of material like Uhlenbeck’s studies is the deep-history tracing of relationships and development over time of population movement across the continent in a kind of DNA of “talk.” Until the conclusions are spat out at the end of the study, the process seems like another of those inscrutable “ours-to-know-because-you’re too dumb” things that people in ivory towers do. Hopefully a little diplomacy might prevent such problems. Willie Uhlenbeck, with her crate of hard candies, knew what Julie Andrews knew: “a spoonful of sugar makes the theories go down!”
The questions here are mostly related to gradients in the difference of education.
I want to start with the story of Professor Uhlenbeck, as recovered and published by Mary Eggermont-Molnar. (Darrell Kipp calls her my “Canadian cousin” because we are both quasi-academics who work with Blackfeet materials.) Mary E-M has a “congregation” of Dutch historians. She has been particularly valuable in promoting and actually DOING the translation of materials in European languages that are about Native Americans. These materials are very early because the Europe-based missionaries and empire-builders were the first contacts. Mary’s earlier book was “Montana: 1911,” (University of Calgary Press and University of Nebraska Press), the translation of Mrs. Uhlenbeck’s journal that summer. The second one, which has just recently been published is “C.C. Uhlenbeck (1866-1951): A Linguist Revisited.” (Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, XXIX, ii/XXX,i (Fall 2008/Spring 2009)) Much of the latter is not in English. Mary is a contributor, rather than editor.
The Uhlenbecks, a rather elderly pair of Europeans, so focused on their work and innocent in their understanding of the Blackfeet, illustrate well some of the problems in passing judgment on collectors. Willie (Mrs.) Uhlenbeck, writing in the 1911 summer, remarked that in their walks they often came across weathered ridge-burials and felt they should not take anything even though the bodies in coffins were often exposed by the shattering of the coffins. (Fifty years later, in 1961, I would still come across traces of boards and bones.) The protection of the graves came mostly from the conviction of the tribal people that disturbers would be cursed. Indeed, many of those deaths were from smallpox, a durable germ. By the time of the Uhlenbeck’s the belongings might include elaborate and valuable objects: a chair made of buffalo horns, guns, or jewelry. Unbelieving youngsters and greedy outsiders did not hesitate to loot.
In the end, Willie confessed, they did take a bracelet that had been scattered apart from the main burial. They felt guilty and did not show their Indian friends. The Uhlenbecks saw but did not take skulls that were entirely fleshless, cleaned by insects, sun and wind into gleaming white bone. Such mementos mori are almost irresistible to frontiersmen’s dark humor, which was quite Shakespearean as well as often drunken. Many skulls ended up in bars, staring at the patrons. Plenty of more sophisticated folk had a skull on their mantel or desk.
What the Uhlenbecks were collecting was not material objects but the language -- though taking the language did not remove the language. In fact, Uhlenbeck’s work is one of the forces that has preserved the language to be studied in modern times. No Native American person of the time had the training to analyze and record these materials and most whites on the scene would have been happy to see the language vanish along with the people. It was the very issue of “vanishing” that attracted Professor Uhlenbeck to the work of preservation.
His methods, however, were interesting then to the local people and still interesting now, though we might long for video recordings of the proceedings. Living in a little tent provided by John Tatsey, furnished by their travel trunks and a few crates, plus an ingenious but cranky contraption of a camp bed that accommodated both of the couple, the professor paid informants to come and tell him stories in the Blackfeet language, providing translations as they went. All day he transcribed these onto paper. In the evening, after a meal provided by the Tatsey’s, curious Blackfeet came to listen while Uhlenbeck read the stories back to them as a check on accuracy and asked their opinions. They were amazed at this parlor trick since they had thought only English was susceptible to reading and writing! There was always much joking and merriment.
The Professor didn’t make money nor did he live in luxury. (His best luxury was his wife, who constantly worked to make him comfortable by brewing tea and heating stones in their little stove to wrap in rags to keep their feet warm at night.) But he did gain in prestige and the knowledge that his work had value, though it was sharply criticized by some in the field. Certainly this has got to be among the earliest written records of even provisional accuracy concerning the language. And yet, the descendants of Tatsey, perhaps empowered by watching what this man did, discredit written versions of Napi tales, insisting that their own versions, several generations down the line, are more authentic and real. For them, this is true. They also want money for the stories.
At one point there was a China-style Red Cultural Revolution in Browning that rejected all white contributions to knowledge about Blackfeet. Many valuable records and documents ended up at the dump, where a few people tried to save some of them. It was a vanishing done by themselves. This purge seemed to be necessary to clear out resentment that was blocking progress. At that time it was also considered “backward” if not simply “dangerous” to preserve the Blackfeet language, because it would cause a person to be punished in white society. Due mostly to the efforts of the Piegan Institute, this has reversed. (Tatseys helped with this.) In fact, the “impossible” (which many said teaching non-speakers would prove to be) turned out to be wrong. Now speaking Blackfeet is considered a major coup and obviously valuable cultural preservation. Uhlenbeck’s work is important again. These radical swings in popular sentiment do not help to stabilize legal status, much less preserve the materials in question.
Another issue invisible to local Blackfeet as well as whites is the scientific study of how the human mind forms language. One source of theories is the comparison of grammar in different languages to see what forms are universal and which are local. Many know about Whorf’s theories that the Hopi speak in gerunds (words ending in “ing”) which is a product of their understanding of the world as transient processes interacting. This striking notion has provoked philosophical theories and personal transformation. The realization that different languages are the product of different world-views is considered a major element of a good humanities education.
But another more suspicion-provoking use of material like Uhlenbeck’s studies is the deep-history tracing of relationships and development over time of population movement across the continent in a kind of DNA of “talk.” Until the conclusions are spat out at the end of the study, the process seems like another of those inscrutable “ours-to-know-because-you’re too dumb” things that people in ivory towers do. Hopefully a little diplomacy might prevent such problems. Willie Uhlenbeck, with her crate of hard candies, knew what Julie Andrews knew: “a spoonful of sugar makes the theories go down!”
The questions here are mostly related to gradients in the difference of education.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
VETERAN'S DAY OVERCAST
Today is still -- no wind -- with rain threatening, so I’ve been up on the garage tarping the roof. Don’t worry. I’m very careful, it’s a flat roof, there’s a little parapet around it, and my ladder is good to 300#. I also read the directions pasted on it and corrected the angle of incline. I do learn even as I age. This is a bigger and better quality tarp, but plastic and therefore slippery where double. I have to watch my sleeves and pants legs, which tend to catch on things. One of the worst hazards is people who startle me by calling out, “Be careful up there! Don’t fall!!!”
It’s Veteran’s Day and all I’m a veteran of is roof-tarping, but nailing lathe gets one’s blood flowing, though one must be careful to pay attention to the task at hand. What occurs to me most is that Veteran’s Day is a far cry from what it used to be, and I don’t mean just that our own officers shoot our own soldiers. (One soldier said he could understand it if ordinary enlisted went crazy, but a MAJOR??)
Here’s my provisional list of what’s happened to us and I’m not going to mention the end of the Cold War, though that’s relevant. What I’m talking about affects everyone on the planet, even if they’re not consciously part of a nation or organized religion.
First is urbanization, which includes a lot of depersonalization. Here in Valier everyone knows what goes on to a far greater extent than in the great warrens of cities where so many people are from different backgrounds, so different that they eat different foods and wear different clothes, things that have to be imported from an entirely different ecology, meant for a different climate. The greatest commonality is via television, which is for sure the lowest common denominator. Night after night it presents everything in juvenile terms: sex, violence, rivalry, power, paranoia. This is today’s Cold War and pits us against huge mysterious corporations that are destroying the planet. No way to even find them.
Second is the domination of the Middle Man. (I don’t mean males, of course, but Middle Persons doesn’t work. Maybe Interlocutors, but they don’t talk. They don’t have to because they have us by the throats. Consider that the farmer raises a chicken, someone else buys them or has already contracted to buy them, someone else kills and cuts them up, packages them, freezes them or makes them into something else by adding a lot of processing, stores them until prices are good, advertises, distributes them to chain stores that redistribute to individual merchants. Most of the eventual cost is post-chicken. Meanwhile other Middle Men work at changing laws to favor their products, esp. the ones that are cheap to produce and are then off-loaded on poor people by using government subsidies: breakfast cereal, cookies, biscuit mix. Swing by your local food bank and see what they’re giving out. By now so many people are used to eating such things that they don’t protest. They’d be better off eating pemmican.
Industrialization is a Third Force that may destroy us all. Everything is produced in huge amounts by big factories. I vividly recall touring a Nabisco cookie factory right after WWII, which everyone thought was a major advance. (The first sugar wafers I ever ate.) But now industry -- huge organized groups easily creating monopolies and cartels -- has taken over things like recreation, art, school supplies (Texas and Florida dominate the textbook industry because they are high population), medicine. (Did you know Tamiflu is said to be traced back to a dominant pharm company headed by Rumsfeld?)
It’s as much a marketing, commodifying attitude as it is an actual business model, but industry operates by analyzing things into parts and that leads to the next concept: contracting out the parts, everything from torture to sewing shirts to leading people through confusing computer apps while speaking a confusing accent. We’ve been contracting out our wars. In one incident Blackwater killed about the same number of innocent civilians as Major Hasan did, but we feel that it’s none of our business. We’re contracting out our guilt.
Mechanization has been messing with wars since the invention of the chariot, but never has it been so high tech that a three-foot-long predator operated by a young man in Iowa can zoom into a village in Afghanistan, fire a rocket -- guided by a satellite feed -- into a designated house, and be gone before anyone can react enough to save survivors, whatever “saved” means. No risk except money and the destruction of the predator only means more profit for the company that makes them.
Don’t tell me you don’t know. You’ve probably watched as many Harrison Ford spy movies as I have. Or “The Spy Game” with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. Remember the onlookers who stand behind the computer operators, watching people die and cheering? What do you think radicalizes Redford and Pitt? Did you think it was the money they make? I think it’s the scripts they read.
I would include on my list the erosion of public schools and their mission, which is to produce citizens, NOT to create employees of corporations. Last night I listened to Brian Kahn’s Artemis Common Ground (rebroadcasts at http://www.yellowstonepublicradio.org/programs/local/home_ground.html ) while he interviewed a ranch boy, an evangelical Christian, who had been home-schooled until high school. (He said that because his parents interconnected with other home-schoolers, his range of acquaintances was more varied and larger than the tight little bubble of the local high school where the pressure for conformity was high.) He has been attending Gutenburg College in Eugene, OR. http://www.gutenberg.edu/ I was impressed with his level of thought. This year he’ll enroll at MSU as a history major. He is a SHINING example of what we ought to be doing. Brian Khan is not a bad example either.
What I see in the army is something that was very true in WWI, WWII, the Korean War (the one my classmates “attended” and the scariest because of the emphasis on mind control), the Vietnam War (the one my students fought that radicalized our whole society). An actual war in a foreign country teaches young people. There is a class of young floaters now that has to be taught to tie their shoes. The army can do it and the constant high level of poverty forces those floaters to sign-up. It’s a ghost draft.
But there are other lessons about other ways of life, about reliability for the sake of one’s comrades, about courage even in little ways, about simple survival by endurance. If Hasan had kept it pulled together enough to actually serve overseas, I think it would have saved his sanity in a way no amount of reading Freud and Jung could do. PTSD is about the recurring memory of something ghastly and ghostly, which is FAR harder to fight than the original experience was. Hasan got pulled into the unreal world of movie phantoms.
There’s only one way to cure the fear of getting up there and tarping the roof: that’s to get up there and do it.
It’s Veteran’s Day and all I’m a veteran of is roof-tarping, but nailing lathe gets one’s blood flowing, though one must be careful to pay attention to the task at hand. What occurs to me most is that Veteran’s Day is a far cry from what it used to be, and I don’t mean just that our own officers shoot our own soldiers. (One soldier said he could understand it if ordinary enlisted went crazy, but a MAJOR??)
Here’s my provisional list of what’s happened to us and I’m not going to mention the end of the Cold War, though that’s relevant. What I’m talking about affects everyone on the planet, even if they’re not consciously part of a nation or organized religion.
First is urbanization, which includes a lot of depersonalization. Here in Valier everyone knows what goes on to a far greater extent than in the great warrens of cities where so many people are from different backgrounds, so different that they eat different foods and wear different clothes, things that have to be imported from an entirely different ecology, meant for a different climate. The greatest commonality is via television, which is for sure the lowest common denominator. Night after night it presents everything in juvenile terms: sex, violence, rivalry, power, paranoia. This is today’s Cold War and pits us against huge mysterious corporations that are destroying the planet. No way to even find them.
Second is the domination of the Middle Man. (I don’t mean males, of course, but Middle Persons doesn’t work. Maybe Interlocutors, but they don’t talk. They don’t have to because they have us by the throats. Consider that the farmer raises a chicken, someone else buys them or has already contracted to buy them, someone else kills and cuts them up, packages them, freezes them or makes them into something else by adding a lot of processing, stores them until prices are good, advertises, distributes them to chain stores that redistribute to individual merchants. Most of the eventual cost is post-chicken. Meanwhile other Middle Men work at changing laws to favor their products, esp. the ones that are cheap to produce and are then off-loaded on poor people by using government subsidies: breakfast cereal, cookies, biscuit mix. Swing by your local food bank and see what they’re giving out. By now so many people are used to eating such things that they don’t protest. They’d be better off eating pemmican.
Industrialization is a Third Force that may destroy us all. Everything is produced in huge amounts by big factories. I vividly recall touring a Nabisco cookie factory right after WWII, which everyone thought was a major advance. (The first sugar wafers I ever ate.) But now industry -- huge organized groups easily creating monopolies and cartels -- has taken over things like recreation, art, school supplies (Texas and Florida dominate the textbook industry because they are high population), medicine. (Did you know Tamiflu is said to be traced back to a dominant pharm company headed by Rumsfeld?)
It’s as much a marketing, commodifying attitude as it is an actual business model, but industry operates by analyzing things into parts and that leads to the next concept: contracting out the parts, everything from torture to sewing shirts to leading people through confusing computer apps while speaking a confusing accent. We’ve been contracting out our wars. In one incident Blackwater killed about the same number of innocent civilians as Major Hasan did, but we feel that it’s none of our business. We’re contracting out our guilt.
Mechanization has been messing with wars since the invention of the chariot, but never has it been so high tech that a three-foot-long predator operated by a young man in Iowa can zoom into a village in Afghanistan, fire a rocket -- guided by a satellite feed -- into a designated house, and be gone before anyone can react enough to save survivors, whatever “saved” means. No risk except money and the destruction of the predator only means more profit for the company that makes them.
Don’t tell me you don’t know. You’ve probably watched as many Harrison Ford spy movies as I have. Or “The Spy Game” with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. Remember the onlookers who stand behind the computer operators, watching people die and cheering? What do you think radicalizes Redford and Pitt? Did you think it was the money they make? I think it’s the scripts they read.
I would include on my list the erosion of public schools and their mission, which is to produce citizens, NOT to create employees of corporations. Last night I listened to Brian Kahn’s Artemis Common Ground (rebroadcasts at http://www.yellowstonepublicradio.org/programs/local/home_ground.html ) while he interviewed a ranch boy, an evangelical Christian, who had been home-schooled until high school. (He said that because his parents interconnected with other home-schoolers, his range of acquaintances was more varied and larger than the tight little bubble of the local high school where the pressure for conformity was high.) He has been attending Gutenburg College in Eugene, OR. http://www.gutenberg.edu/ I was impressed with his level of thought. This year he’ll enroll at MSU as a history major. He is a SHINING example of what we ought to be doing. Brian Khan is not a bad example either.
What I see in the army is something that was very true in WWI, WWII, the Korean War (the one my classmates “attended” and the scariest because of the emphasis on mind control), the Vietnam War (the one my students fought that radicalized our whole society). An actual war in a foreign country teaches young people. There is a class of young floaters now that has to be taught to tie their shoes. The army can do it and the constant high level of poverty forces those floaters to sign-up. It’s a ghost draft.
But there are other lessons about other ways of life, about reliability for the sake of one’s comrades, about courage even in little ways, about simple survival by endurance. If Hasan had kept it pulled together enough to actually serve overseas, I think it would have saved his sanity in a way no amount of reading Freud and Jung could do. PTSD is about the recurring memory of something ghastly and ghostly, which is FAR harder to fight than the original experience was. Hasan got pulled into the unreal world of movie phantoms.
There’s only one way to cure the fear of getting up there and tarping the roof: that’s to get up there and do it.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
HEAD FAKE (ARTISTIC)
When I was about six and the movies still meant going to a theatre to see a double feature, one major and one minor, plus a newsreel, a cartoon and maybe a couple of shorts, there was a funny short about Fibber Magee and Molly, who were normally on the radio. An ongoing gag was Magee’s closet, which was so full that when he opened the door everything fell out in a sound effects masterpiece. In the movie the contents included unlikely things, including a head mannequin for modeling hats. From the hat shelf, it looked at the avalanche and rolled its eyes. I was both chilled and amazed. How could only a head do that? I worried about whether the head were a conscious person. I kept asking and asking about that head until people got tired of me.
In the last few days I’ve finally watched all four Indiana Jones movies, which features MANY heads that melt, explode, exfoliate -- both on and off bodies. This time I knew sorta how they did it and it was ME who got tired of it.
Then my new Sculpture Review came.
Glancing at the cover, I assumed this couple was a pair of famous sculptresses. Then I read the articles inside. It’s an absolutely brilliant collection of essays about sculptors who do super-real sculptures. These two old ladies are by Ron Mueck and if you doubt their origins as plastilene, here they are in the early development.
We’re used to Duane Hanson’s super-real depictions of people. In the museums people get confused about who’s real and who isn’t, talking to the sculptures and then being startled when someone they thought was a sculpture walks off. The technology is not different from what we used in the foundry fifty years ago, except that the substances are quite different -- polymers and silicones. Some of these people do movie work -- a combination of trick imitation people or prostheses that age the actor and quite splendid sculptures for backgrounds in temples or to be animated for movies like “Jurassic Park.” The sculptor Joey Orosco is famous for his dying triceratops, massively pitiful.
But simply being hyperreal is not enough to be real “art.” Ron Mueck has a strong metaphysical component to what he does. One of his most famous pieces, called “Dead Dad," simply depicts the corpse of an old man which he created while his own father was dying at some distance. Nude, finally vulnerable after a lifetime of being difficult, it reveals that personhood and body are not the same thing -- and yet they are. When Mueck makes these pieces, he is working out something in his heart and mind. As well as dead people, he makes lovers -- cupped together and less than three feet long -- and infants, sometimes huge.
This particular sculptor combines his ultra realism with a completely different scale. "Woman in bed” is actually as big as she looks. That’s the sculptor putting giant curlers in her hair. He’s right next to her -- not in the distance to make him look small. The author, Ann Landi, points out that we have become accustomed to seeing faces thirty feet tall in the movies, as well as vignettes like the one above. (That’s all of her -- a face, an arm and bedding.) Her musing dismay is somewhere between a photo and reality. The new materials that make the technique possible allow philosophical and aesthetic significance.
Giancarlo Biagi, the editor of the Sculpture Review, which is published by The National Sculpture Society formed to defend figurative sculpture in an age of abstraction, has brilliantly renewed the content of the small review to make it intensely modern, always organized around a theme. The issue doesn’t just explore this hyperrealism but puts it in the setting of historical efforts, some of which have become sources for set artists in today’s films. Masks, puppets, robots and the attempted depiction of the future by someone like Fritz Lang, which now seem both dated and prescient, make us think differently about what we see. His lead editorial focuses on the photos of William Howard Mumler, who used double exposures to create metaphysical photos of what he claimed were the ghosts of one’s ancestors hovering just behind the chair. Just so do ancestors lurk behind every sculpture.
This piece is my size. It is very much related to my state of mind when I’m blogging, gathering up fuel for thought. This sturdy nude woman with her arms full of sticks is also a female Sisyphus and an image that any contemporary middle European peasant or early Native American or country African woman would understand. I worry sometimes that movies and esp. footage of explosions and catastrophes around the world are eroding our respect for the human body, forcing us to look at people as parts incapable of housing thoughts and emotions. Artists like Hoeck et al restore the sanctity and wonder of our flesh.
Since the reproductive technology of the Internet may not allow the posting of these images, I urge you to go to www.sculpturereview.com where you can at least see the front cover and -- if you are so inclined -- order the magazine. Libraries in the past have always carried Sculpture Review, but budgets are unreliable now. The world’s progress is very uneven but, maybe in the face of preconceptions about representational art being old-fashioned and predictable, this sculpture is absolutely cutting edge.
Artists discussed include William Howard Mumler; Wesley Wofford (Batman & Robin, Planet of the Apes); Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht, and Walter Schulze-Mittendorf (Metropolis); Rudolph Belling; Ron Mueck; Michelle Millay and Joey Orosco who share a studio (Jurassic Park, Ghost and the Darkness).
In the last few days I’ve finally watched all four Indiana Jones movies, which features MANY heads that melt, explode, exfoliate -- both on and off bodies. This time I knew sorta how they did it and it was ME who got tired of it.
Then my new Sculpture Review came.
Glancing at the cover, I assumed this couple was a pair of famous sculptresses. Then I read the articles inside. It’s an absolutely brilliant collection of essays about sculptors who do super-real sculptures. These two old ladies are by Ron Mueck and if you doubt their origins as plastilene, here they are in the early development.
We’re used to Duane Hanson’s super-real depictions of people. In the museums people get confused about who’s real and who isn’t, talking to the sculptures and then being startled when someone they thought was a sculpture walks off. The technology is not different from what we used in the foundry fifty years ago, except that the substances are quite different -- polymers and silicones. Some of these people do movie work -- a combination of trick imitation people or prostheses that age the actor and quite splendid sculptures for backgrounds in temples or to be animated for movies like “Jurassic Park.” The sculptor Joey Orosco is famous for his dying triceratops, massively pitiful.
But simply being hyperreal is not enough to be real “art.” Ron Mueck has a strong metaphysical component to what he does. One of his most famous pieces, called “Dead Dad," simply depicts the corpse of an old man which he created while his own father was dying at some distance. Nude, finally vulnerable after a lifetime of being difficult, it reveals that personhood and body are not the same thing -- and yet they are. When Mueck makes these pieces, he is working out something in his heart and mind. As well as dead people, he makes lovers -- cupped together and less than three feet long -- and infants, sometimes huge.
This particular sculptor combines his ultra realism with a completely different scale. "Woman in bed” is actually as big as she looks. That’s the sculptor putting giant curlers in her hair. He’s right next to her -- not in the distance to make him look small. The author, Ann Landi, points out that we have become accustomed to seeing faces thirty feet tall in the movies, as well as vignettes like the one above. (That’s all of her -- a face, an arm and bedding.) Her musing dismay is somewhere between a photo and reality. The new materials that make the technique possible allow philosophical and aesthetic significance.
Giancarlo Biagi, the editor of the Sculpture Review, which is published by The National Sculpture Society formed to defend figurative sculpture in an age of abstraction, has brilliantly renewed the content of the small review to make it intensely modern, always organized around a theme. The issue doesn’t just explore this hyperrealism but puts it in the setting of historical efforts, some of which have become sources for set artists in today’s films. Masks, puppets, robots and the attempted depiction of the future by someone like Fritz Lang, which now seem both dated and prescient, make us think differently about what we see. His lead editorial focuses on the photos of William Howard Mumler, who used double exposures to create metaphysical photos of what he claimed were the ghosts of one’s ancestors hovering just behind the chair. Just so do ancestors lurk behind every sculpture.
This piece is my size. It is very much related to my state of mind when I’m blogging, gathering up fuel for thought. This sturdy nude woman with her arms full of sticks is also a female Sisyphus and an image that any contemporary middle European peasant or early Native American or country African woman would understand. I worry sometimes that movies and esp. footage of explosions and catastrophes around the world are eroding our respect for the human body, forcing us to look at people as parts incapable of housing thoughts and emotions. Artists like Hoeck et al restore the sanctity and wonder of our flesh.
Since the reproductive technology of the Internet may not allow the posting of these images, I urge you to go to www.sculpturereview.com where you can at least see the front cover and -- if you are so inclined -- order the magazine. Libraries in the past have always carried Sculpture Review, but budgets are unreliable now. The world’s progress is very uneven but, maybe in the face of preconceptions about representational art being old-fashioned and predictable, this sculpture is absolutely cutting edge.
Artists discussed include William Howard Mumler; Wesley Wofford (Batman & Robin, Planet of the Apes); Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht, and Walter Schulze-Mittendorf (Metropolis); Rudolph Belling; Ron Mueck; Michelle Millay and Joey Orosco who share a studio (Jurassic Park, Ghost and the Darkness).
Monday, November 09, 2009
WHAT IS ART? PAUL SCHILPP & ALVINA KRAUSE
When I was an undergrad at Northwestern University in what was then the School of Speech, I kept worrying my advisor, a kind but conventional man who wanted to make sure I’d be able to earn a living, by signing up for courses in religion. It was bad enough that I was taking so many theatre courses, though I assured him I would be a dramatics teacher. When I signed up for Philosophy of Religion, the professor was Paul Schilpp. http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Paul_A._Schilpp That has probably affected the course of my life as much as the concurrent acting classes from Alvina Krause, which have always been my point of entry into the understanding of human beings. Schilpp was a Methodist minister, the son of a minister, and yet a major humanist. If I had known that the Ethical Culture folks claimed him, I’d have joined up.
Schilpp ventured into aesthetics. He proposed that “art is the expression of a relationship between man and the universe.” He was pre-feminist but I’m sure he soon moved to being more inclusive. My quibble with his definition came from AK. I insisted that “expressing” a relationship -- no matter what it was with -- was not enough. That a real artist COMMUNICATES a relationship with the universe. I still insist on that. He was partly affronted (He was born in Germany, after all! He was Authority!) and partly amused at my stubbornness. I think it is about the difference between theory and practice, the difference between the philosopher and the actor.
But there is more. Schilpp was from an existentialist generation which soon led us into a therapeutic generation: “get it out, get it all out!” If it was a rank mess that no one could decipher, too bad. The middlemen “entre-preneurs” used the “Emperor’s New Clothes” strategy. “What? You don’t understand this? Surely you must see what the rest of us see!” And “everyone is buying it, so how can it be without value?”
And there’s still more. Art is a reaching out from the shell that traps so many. It is a way of seizing the world (okay, the universe -- all right, other people) and demanding that they pay attention. “Look! Look at this!” Which implies that maybe they ought to do something about it, which can lead to social reform or maybe social celebration or even, after all, a celebration of the universe.
Sometimes we get really confused. The crafters and ethnic skill celebraters insist that clever birdhouses and finger-woven Red River sashes are art and maybe they are, sort of. But they are not world-shaking expressions of a new relationship between humans and the universe. It’s a question of dimension. On the other hand, must experts always be urging us to listen to what they claim is sublime and penetrating? Why can’t we just look at art and SEE, FEEL, soak up all the amazing newness or overwhelming antiquity of it? Why does Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud have to be explained? Who can explain the Sphinx? And then there were the jokes like the upside-down urinal that gave everyone permission to claim “found art.” At the time it was a necessary harrowing of an over-conventional and boring status quo, but the point has been made.
Should we add that “art is an expression [communication] of the relationship of a man [person] to the universe” according to his or her own time and place? (Sorry about reducing to two genders, but I can never remember the GLBTG formula, and I don’t want to refer to people as “it.”) Or isn’t that already assumed when you consider what a person is? Alvina Krause would say so. And she’d make you spell out the time and place, to show that you had done more than a surface study. Not enough to study Cleopatra in order to stage “Caesar & Cleopatra” -- what about the time and place of GBS? Then you have the relationship between two times and places to consider.
Was Paul Schilpp trying to move art to the status of religion or religion into the realm of art? I suspect there was at least a little of that and the crossover is in my philosophy as well. What IS my relationship to the universe? May I simply feel it? Must I define it? And, once defined, should I express it in an art form (including words as an art form) and must I communicate it? (Testify.) Yes, I think you should follow that progression of obligations as far as it will go. (And it should probably not carry you into the ministry, though that might seem logical. At least that was a blind alley for me, leading to institutional bondage.)
What would Paul Schilpp make of Cinematheque and boys at-risk? (I know what AK would make of them -- actors.) First, he would never condemn or reject them. His stance was inclusion. Second, he would be interested in what they had to say and defend their right to say it. (He was a staunch member of the ACLU and consistently in hot water over his liberal ideas, sometimes barely surviving as a professor.) Third, if they told him there was no God, he would solemnly agree. Then he would begin to try to persuade them that there was something beyond themselves, not necessarily something requiring a name, but perhaps worthy of expression. Oh, all right, even communication to others.
It all sounds so theoretical and easy until the living dilemmas appear. And that’s where the ministry part comes in. Ministry, I would suggest, is the part of the communication equation that consists of listening and understanding. What I understand when I listen to Cinematheque is that they need to act out the New Being to which they aspire before they can step into it, clothing themselves in a new way while never abandoning pride in their naked bodies. It’s interesting that these boys are never fat or ugly. They are all desirable. It is the terms of desire that must be renegotiated.
Schilpp ventured into aesthetics. He proposed that “art is the expression of a relationship between man and the universe.” He was pre-feminist but I’m sure he soon moved to being more inclusive. My quibble with his definition came from AK. I insisted that “expressing” a relationship -- no matter what it was with -- was not enough. That a real artist COMMUNICATES a relationship with the universe. I still insist on that. He was partly affronted (He was born in Germany, after all! He was Authority!) and partly amused at my stubbornness. I think it is about the difference between theory and practice, the difference between the philosopher and the actor.
But there is more. Schilpp was from an existentialist generation which soon led us into a therapeutic generation: “get it out, get it all out!” If it was a rank mess that no one could decipher, too bad. The middlemen “entre-preneurs” used the “Emperor’s New Clothes” strategy. “What? You don’t understand this? Surely you must see what the rest of us see!” And “everyone is buying it, so how can it be without value?”
And there’s still more. Art is a reaching out from the shell that traps so many. It is a way of seizing the world (okay, the universe -- all right, other people) and demanding that they pay attention. “Look! Look at this!” Which implies that maybe they ought to do something about it, which can lead to social reform or maybe social celebration or even, after all, a celebration of the universe.
Sometimes we get really confused. The crafters and ethnic skill celebraters insist that clever birdhouses and finger-woven Red River sashes are art and maybe they are, sort of. But they are not world-shaking expressions of a new relationship between humans and the universe. It’s a question of dimension. On the other hand, must experts always be urging us to listen to what they claim is sublime and penetrating? Why can’t we just look at art and SEE, FEEL, soak up all the amazing newness or overwhelming antiquity of it? Why does Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud have to be explained? Who can explain the Sphinx? And then there were the jokes like the upside-down urinal that gave everyone permission to claim “found art.” At the time it was a necessary harrowing of an over-conventional and boring status quo, but the point has been made.
Should we add that “art is an expression [communication] of the relationship of a man [person] to the universe” according to his or her own time and place? (Sorry about reducing to two genders, but I can never remember the GLBTG formula, and I don’t want to refer to people as “it.”) Or isn’t that already assumed when you consider what a person is? Alvina Krause would say so. And she’d make you spell out the time and place, to show that you had done more than a surface study. Not enough to study Cleopatra in order to stage “Caesar & Cleopatra” -- what about the time and place of GBS? Then you have the relationship between two times and places to consider.
Was Paul Schilpp trying to move art to the status of religion or religion into the realm of art? I suspect there was at least a little of that and the crossover is in my philosophy as well. What IS my relationship to the universe? May I simply feel it? Must I define it? And, once defined, should I express it in an art form (including words as an art form) and must I communicate it? (Testify.) Yes, I think you should follow that progression of obligations as far as it will go. (And it should probably not carry you into the ministry, though that might seem logical. At least that was a blind alley for me, leading to institutional bondage.)
What would Paul Schilpp make of Cinematheque and boys at-risk? (I know what AK would make of them -- actors.) First, he would never condemn or reject them. His stance was inclusion. Second, he would be interested in what they had to say and defend their right to say it. (He was a staunch member of the ACLU and consistently in hot water over his liberal ideas, sometimes barely surviving as a professor.) Third, if they told him there was no God, he would solemnly agree. Then he would begin to try to persuade them that there was something beyond themselves, not necessarily something requiring a name, but perhaps worthy of expression. Oh, all right, even communication to others.
It all sounds so theoretical and easy until the living dilemmas appear. And that’s where the ministry part comes in. Ministry, I would suggest, is the part of the communication equation that consists of listening and understanding. What I understand when I listen to Cinematheque is that they need to act out the New Being to which they aspire before they can step into it, clothing themselves in a new way while never abandoning pride in their naked bodies. It’s interesting that these boys are never fat or ugly. They are all desirable. It is the terms of desire that must be renegotiated.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
WRITING: Orientalism Out West
Tim and I and the Cinematheque boys have been talking about writing techniques and genres. This phrase that starts with “Madly Anointed, etc.” collided with Donald Pittenger’s thoughts on 2blowhards.com talking about how 19th century Western art is essentially Orientalist, and I created the following satire which is also mock-porn.
* * * * * * *
“Madly Anointed, Kissed, Bowed Down Before” -- oh, yes. I’ve seen it before my very eyes. “Oooooh, Mr. Saddle, I just loooove your work!” But she’s not looking at the work. She’s looking at him. Or more specifically, his zipper. He is well-packed, but she doesn’t know how good a shooter yet. She badly wants to find out. Wants to get astride the saddle, so to speak.
He’s not even young: rather grizzled. Okay, very grizzled Not very tall. Pretty strong, though. Sculptors do develop shoulders. But she’s thinking too much about Rodin, Picasso, Pollock -- boasting cocksmen. Some guys do get old and tired, even if they are famous and the toast of the country.
I’m his model, his beautiful young Native American brave who hunts the buffalo in only a breechclout. Sometimes the customers come on to me, but not this one. To her I am invisible. Indians are used to being invisible. She must have a father complex. Of course, she’s no young chick herself. She leeeeans on his shoulder, draaaaging her dangling boobs along his denim shirt. So innocently. He pretends he doesn’t notice. That will set the hook better than responding would. He’s not thinking about her body -- he’s thinking about her checkbook. But later. It’s time to close and he’s NOT inviting her to dinner. There ARE limits.
We eat out. Neither one of us wants to cook or wash dishes. He’s always after me to eat salads, but I stick to pizza and beer. I’m always after him for his smoking, but he pays me no mind. He likes to pretend he’s in an old noir film, blowing smoke. Blowing smoke, all right.
When we get back, he goes to the shower. “Bean? Bean! Come wash my back.” I got my name by announcing when I was little that I was a “human being.” My family teased me by pretending I was saying “human bean.” People here don’t like little boys who put on airs. They didn’t take me seriously. Sometimes not even seriously enough to make sure I had enough to eat or a warm place to sleep. I don’t always want to wash anyone’s back, but I do it. I’m not stupid.
Anyway, he’s cute when he’s all wet. He’s so hairy he’s like a teddy bear and I like to dry him off the way you’d dry a little boy -- getting into all the crevices, like, well, between his toes. When he’s dry and tousled and pink-cheeked, I can hardly resist him and kiss him on the mouth. He responds.
The doorbell. I hope it’s not that woman. No, it’s Sad’s agent. Yeah, I call him “Sad” and there IS something sad about him. Like all white men. Especially the ones who long for the 19th century. “Why gone those times?” they sigh. But -- the doorbell.
The agent, Sid, has been on a kick for quite a while. Someone explained Orientalism to him and he got it into his head that the American Indian is the new Oriental, the jeweled exotic with the clever tongue and substances with magic effect. It’s a 19th century idea really, to be so in love with desert people on horseback. But it does fit, doesn’t it?
In a Seven of Swords way -- do you like Tarot? Sad LOVES Tarot and I’ve learned to tell the cards for him. (A woman I knew in college taught me.) It’s not that he’s superstitious, he’s just so narcissistic that he wants everything to be about him. The Seven of Swords is a two-edged card about secrecy and trickery. It’s my card and I make it come up in almost every reading. I never really tell him which card is his. Best for him to keep wondering and considering.
“Read this!” insists Sid, and pushes a computer download into my hands. It says “Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists. . . . Orientalism was more widely used in art history referring mostly to the works of French artists in the 19th century, whose subject matter, color and style used elements from their travel to the Mediterranean countries of North Africa and Western Asia.
“These meanings were given a new twist by 20th century scholar Edward Said in his controversial book Orientalism, in which he uses the term to describe a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, Orientalism implies essentializing and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. Said was critical of this scholarly tradition.”
Sounds like Sioux to me. But Sad has an idea for a new bronze and he and Sid go off to make little mockup miniatures on the kitchen table with toothpicks for spears. I take my iPhone to bed to watch vids for a while. I’m getting a little tired of all this mercantilism, all this narcissism, all this . . . what is it? Orientalism.
In the morning when I wake up that woman is back. I walk down the street for ice cream. Hey, that’s a good breakfast! Dairy, isn’t it? I’m lactose tolerant. I can handle it. I love vanilla white.
But when I come out of the shop with my triple-dip cone, I almost run into a guy coming towards me, almost smoosh my ice cream on his silk shirt. While I’m watching the ice cream and desperately juggling to keep it from going on the sidewalk, a hand comes out to steady mine. A black hand. A very BIG black hand.
He lifts my hand up to his beautiful ebony face and he swallows the whole top of my vanilla cone -- takes it in his mouth and puuuuulls it slowly between his red velvet lips.
I lift my gaze to his smiling eyes.
It’s a few days before I get back to the issue of Orientalism.
* * * * * * * * *
I’ve debated a few days over whether to post this. Some people will not understand the idea of “mock” and think it is “true” porn. But not “American” porn, which is always violent. Personally, I think sex is essentially hilarious.
The shadow issue is that I might be punished for writing such things. There are already people who shut me out because I’m too “outspoken.” Tim is finding that even his medical care is affected by his demonized reputation. The doctors are tempted to punish him for other people’s fantasies about him.
* * * * * * *
“Madly Anointed, Kissed, Bowed Down Before” -- oh, yes. I’ve seen it before my very eyes. “Oooooh, Mr. Saddle, I just loooove your work!” But she’s not looking at the work. She’s looking at him. Or more specifically, his zipper. He is well-packed, but she doesn’t know how good a shooter yet. She badly wants to find out. Wants to get astride the saddle, so to speak.
He’s not even young: rather grizzled. Okay, very grizzled Not very tall. Pretty strong, though. Sculptors do develop shoulders. But she’s thinking too much about Rodin, Picasso, Pollock -- boasting cocksmen. Some guys do get old and tired, even if they are famous and the toast of the country.
I’m his model, his beautiful young Native American brave who hunts the buffalo in only a breechclout. Sometimes the customers come on to me, but not this one. To her I am invisible. Indians are used to being invisible. She must have a father complex. Of course, she’s no young chick herself. She leeeeans on his shoulder, draaaaging her dangling boobs along his denim shirt. So innocently. He pretends he doesn’t notice. That will set the hook better than responding would. He’s not thinking about her body -- he’s thinking about her checkbook. But later. It’s time to close and he’s NOT inviting her to dinner. There ARE limits.
We eat out. Neither one of us wants to cook or wash dishes. He’s always after me to eat salads, but I stick to pizza and beer. I’m always after him for his smoking, but he pays me no mind. He likes to pretend he’s in an old noir film, blowing smoke. Blowing smoke, all right.
When we get back, he goes to the shower. “Bean? Bean! Come wash my back.” I got my name by announcing when I was little that I was a “human being.” My family teased me by pretending I was saying “human bean.” People here don’t like little boys who put on airs. They didn’t take me seriously. Sometimes not even seriously enough to make sure I had enough to eat or a warm place to sleep. I don’t always want to wash anyone’s back, but I do it. I’m not stupid.
Anyway, he’s cute when he’s all wet. He’s so hairy he’s like a teddy bear and I like to dry him off the way you’d dry a little boy -- getting into all the crevices, like, well, between his toes. When he’s dry and tousled and pink-cheeked, I can hardly resist him and kiss him on the mouth. He responds.
The doorbell. I hope it’s not that woman. No, it’s Sad’s agent. Yeah, I call him “Sad” and there IS something sad about him. Like all white men. Especially the ones who long for the 19th century. “Why gone those times?” they sigh. But -- the doorbell.
The agent, Sid, has been on a kick for quite a while. Someone explained Orientalism to him and he got it into his head that the American Indian is the new Oriental, the jeweled exotic with the clever tongue and substances with magic effect. It’s a 19th century idea really, to be so in love with desert people on horseback. But it does fit, doesn’t it?
In a Seven of Swords way -- do you like Tarot? Sad LOVES Tarot and I’ve learned to tell the cards for him. (A woman I knew in college taught me.) It’s not that he’s superstitious, he’s just so narcissistic that he wants everything to be about him. The Seven of Swords is a two-edged card about secrecy and trickery. It’s my card and I make it come up in almost every reading. I never really tell him which card is his. Best for him to keep wondering and considering.
“Read this!” insists Sid, and pushes a computer download into my hands. It says “Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists. . . . Orientalism was more widely used in art history referring mostly to the works of French artists in the 19th century, whose subject matter, color and style used elements from their travel to the Mediterranean countries of North Africa and Western Asia.
“These meanings were given a new twist by 20th century scholar Edward Said in his controversial book Orientalism, in which he uses the term to describe a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, Orientalism implies essentializing and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. Said was critical of this scholarly tradition.”
Sounds like Sioux to me. But Sad has an idea for a new bronze and he and Sid go off to make little mockup miniatures on the kitchen table with toothpicks for spears. I take my iPhone to bed to watch vids for a while. I’m getting a little tired of all this mercantilism, all this narcissism, all this . . . what is it? Orientalism.
In the morning when I wake up that woman is back. I walk down the street for ice cream. Hey, that’s a good breakfast! Dairy, isn’t it? I’m lactose tolerant. I can handle it. I love vanilla white.
But when I come out of the shop with my triple-dip cone, I almost run into a guy coming towards me, almost smoosh my ice cream on his silk shirt. While I’m watching the ice cream and desperately juggling to keep it from going on the sidewalk, a hand comes out to steady mine. A black hand. A very BIG black hand.
He lifts my hand up to his beautiful ebony face and he swallows the whole top of my vanilla cone -- takes it in his mouth and puuuuulls it slowly between his red velvet lips.
I lift my gaze to his smiling eyes.
It’s a few days before I get back to the issue of Orientalism.
* * * * * * * * *
I’ve debated a few days over whether to post this. Some people will not understand the idea of “mock” and think it is “true” porn. But not “American” porn, which is always violent. Personally, I think sex is essentially hilarious.
The shadow issue is that I might be punished for writing such things. There are already people who shut me out because I’m too “outspoken.” Tim is finding that even his medical care is affected by his demonized reputation. The doctors are tempted to punish him for other people’s fantasies about him.
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