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L’Air des Géants
29 Sep
Stefan Sagmeister. Everybody Always Thinks They Are Right. August 27-September 13, 2015, Parc de la Villette, Paris. Photograph by Philippe Barnoud.
Choi Jeong Hwa. About Being Irritated. August 27-September 13, 2015, Parc de la Villette, Paris. Photograph by Philippe Barnoud.
Pride
12 Sep
A friend of mine, a young gay man from Kazakhstan, was impressed by the act of Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis going to jail for her convictions. On the face of it, I can understand the impression one would make going to jail for one’s beliefs. I have grown up with heroes religious who were willing to go to jail based on their beliefs, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Cliff Frasier, Mahatma Ghandi, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few. My friend does not know the long tradition in America of political dissent involving persons religious, and the concomitant endeavor to liberate people from systems of oppression. Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam understood the oppressive, and destructive, policies of the United States against the people of Vietnam. Liberation theology activists from the same era sought to free people throughout the Americas from political systems of oppression, something the greater Catholic Church, whom these individuals also served, was not able to embrace.
What my friend does not see in this recent action is the media spectacle it was intended to be by both Davis and her counsel, Liberty Counsel. Davis opposes liberatory movement, in this case the newly gained right of gay couples to marry. As a person holding an elected position serving the public, Davis should have stepped down from her post. That would have been an honest action. But, instead, she held onto her position in order to refuse marriage licenses to persons from that public, persons she should have been serving. What I see in this spectacle is calculation and strategy without the love nor compassion which has clearly characterized the bravest of heroes religious from my perspective. And what I finally see, in the stride to a podium before a crowd following release from jail, in the raising of arms by political supporters — including presidential contender Mike Huckabee, who recently dodged an apt question about Biblical proscription against divorce and remarriage — what finally was clearly visible about Kim Davis, is that this individual bristles with pride, a pride of ego so anathema to humility and the teachings of Christianity that there could never be a heroic action on the part of this person.
Aquarium of the Bay
17 Aug
Pacific Sea Nettle, Chrysaora fuscescens
Eggyolk Jellyfish, Phacellophora camtschatica
Moon Jellyfish, Aurelia aurita
Images of Power and Control
12 Aug
When I first sat across from this cat I was disturbed. My friend resells objects he finds at flea markets. I always considered his eye for aesthetics quite good. This object was something he chose not to resell, but decided instead to decorate his home with. A trophy in the way of Walter Palmer’s skinning and decapitation of Cecil the lion? Several steps removed perhaps, but still as potent.
Two lions guard the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. I do not yet know the author of these sculptures; perhaps Arthur Putnam, an artist whom the museum’s benefactor Alma Spreckels patronized. Lions have an universal appeal as guardians of entrances. The lion as protector will become a cultural artifact of memory just as the grizzly bear, long ago driven to extinction, continued to exist as the State of California’s empty icon of Anglo conquest.
Giuliani Monteverde, Italian, 1837-1917. Columbus as a Boy, 1872. Marble. Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Marc and Ellen Hagstrom Kapellas, in memory of Emil A. Hagstrom. 1991.49
Exploration, conquest, extraction. History demands tribute to the feats of western expansion. We honor this tradition in the image, whether carved, painted, or photographed.
After Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, French, 1827-1875. Le Chinois (Asia), ca. 1872. Bronze. Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Museum purchase, Collis P. Huntington Memorial Fund and Walter Buck Fund, California Palace of the Legion of Honor. 1968.2
Lesser men than the idols of our historic pageantry also claim room to create their own monuments of conquest and destiny. The barbaric history of lynching in America testifies to that with the record that remains of numerous photographic keepsakes. I welcome the time when trophies extracted through violence come to an end.
dpduckworth 