Sandow Birk’s ongoing project has been to revamp the whole legacy of painting and the language of history painting as something that fits California. This means both bringing a California sensibility (surfer jokes, burger-joint references) to reiterations of history paintings and attempting to come to terms with a place where the very idea of history is problematic. The mythology would have it that California went from pristine wilderness to suburban paradise in a single uneventful bound—and thus are erased the hideous injustices of the genocide of the Native Californians and the marginalization of the Californios who lived here when California was still Mexico, to say nothing of the environmental disaster and drive-by shooting that was the Gold Rush and the epic corruption of the railroad corporation that ran California into the twentieth century. But Birk has attempted to revive history painting without painting the California past. Or is it that Birk has revised history painting to reflect the reinvention of history as being about places and classes and bodies rather than epic moments and heroic men? He has done what the new historians do: look at what has been overlooked—literally in the architecture of odd corners, figuratively in the history of class and consumption—and seek out patterns of meaning.
His surfer series only mocked histories unfolded elsewhere; but his In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias portrayed a comic battle in a fictional future that said much about the present (and included images of “The Bombardment of the Getty Center” as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in ruins); and his prison paintings were situated in the absolute present tense. History is what gives a place meaning, generally, and Birk has wrestled with the conundrum of California, a place full of amnesiac erasures of history and impositions of histories that never happened, a place whose roots are, in some strange way, in the future. Rome was the eternal city; perhaps California as heaven, hell, and purgatory is the eternal present tense.
The Wal-Mart Biennale
[2006]
It isn’t that, when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B. Durand’s 1849 painting Kindred Spirits last year, she got the state of Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to lower her taxes—in this case, about $3 million on a purchase price of $35 million. It isn’t that the world’s richest woman and twelfth richest person (according to a Forbes magazine 2005 estimate) scooped the painting out from under the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided to sell it off. It isn’t that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New England cultural life and a lot of other older American paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she’s building in Bentonville, Arkansas, the site of Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters—after all, people in the middle of the country should get to see some good art too. It might not even be, as Wal-Mart Watch points out, that the price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two years providing for Wal-Mart’s 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal-Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only twenty-nine hours a week, for an annual income of $11,943—so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under three thousand years to earn the price of the painting without taking any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn’t exempt our semi-immortal worker).
The trouble lies in what the painting means and what Alice Walton and her personal fortune of $18 billion or so mean. Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering, a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways. The superb Rockefeller folk art collections in several American museums do not contain any paintings of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of striking miners and their families in Colorado, carried out by Rockefeller goons, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles doesn’t say a thing about oil. But something about Wal-Mart and Kindred Spirits is more peculiar than all the robber barons and their chapels, galleries, and collections ever were, perhaps because there’s no redemptive Carnegie library-building urges behind Walton’s acts, or perhaps because, more than most works of art, Durand’s painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Wal-Mart has been directly savaging. In an era when oil companies take out advertisements proclaiming their commitment to saving the environment, halting global warming, promoting petroleum alternatives, and urging conservation, while many of them also fund arguments against the very existence of climate change, nothing is too contrary to embrace. But Kindred Spirits is older, more idealistic, and more openly at odds with this state of affairs than most of the hostages to multinational image-making.
Kindred Spirits portrays Durand’s friend, the great American landscape painter Thomas Cole, with his friend, the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. The two stand on a projecting rock above a cataract in the Catskills, bathed, like all the trees and air around them, in golden light. The painting is about friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself. In the work of Cole, Durand, and Bryant, as in the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, you can see an emerging belief that love of nature, beauty, truth, and freedom are naturally allied, a romantic vision that still lingers as one of the most idealistic versions of what it might mean to be an American.
Cole was one of the first American painters to see the possibilities in American landscapes, to see that meaning could be greater rather than less in a place not yet full of ruins and historical associations, and so he became an advocate for wilderness nearly half a century before California rhapsodist and eventual Sierra Club co-founder John Muir took up the calling. Bryant had gained a reputation as a poet before he became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post and thereby a pivotal figure in the culture of the day. He defended a group of striking tailors in 1836, long before there was a union movement, and was ever after a champion of freedom and human rights, turning his newspaper into an antislavery mouthpiece and eventually becoming a founder of the Republican Party, back when that was the more progressive and less beholden of the two parties. He was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and of the projects that resulted in New York’s Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum—of a democratic urban culture that believed in the uplifting power of nature and free access. Maybe the mutation of the Republican Party from Bryant’s to Walton’s time is measure enough of American weirdness. Or maybe the details matter, the details of what the painting is and what Wal-Mart and its heiress are.
Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the wealthy dry-goods merchant Jonathan Sturges as a gift for Bryant, in commemoration of his beautiful eulogy for Cole, who died suddenly in 1848. Bryant left it to his daughter Julia, who in 1904 gave it to what became the New York Public Library. It was never a commodity exchanged between strangers until the library, claiming financial need, put it and other works of art up for sale. And so now a portrait of antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came from degrading working conditions in the United States and abroad and from ravaging the North American landscape.
Maybe the problem is that the Crystal Bridges museum seems like a false front for Wal-Mart, a made-in-America, artisanal edifice of idealism for a corporation that is none of the above. The museum will, as such institutions do, attempt to associate the Wal-Mart billionaires with high culture, American history, craftsmanship, beautifully crafted objects—a host of ideals and pleasures a long way from what you find inside the blank, slabby box of a Wal-Mart. One of the privileges of wealth is buying yourself out of the situation you helped to make, so that the wealthy who advocate for deregulation of environmental standards install water purifiers and buy cases of Perrier, while those who advocate for small government simply hire their own security forces and educators.
Walton, it seems safe to assume, lives surrounded by nicer objects, likel
y made under nicer conditions, than she sells to the rest of us. Perhaps Crystal Bridges will become one of the places we can go to revisit the long history that preceded industrialization and globalization, when creation and execution were not so savagely sundered, when you might know the maker of your everyday goods, and making was a skilled and meaningful act. One of the pleasures of most visual art is that linkage between mind and hand, lost elsewhere as acts of making are divided among many and broken down into multiple repetitive tasks. Perhaps Walton could build us the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff Locally by Hand for People They Knew, or perhaps that’s what Crystal Bridges, along with the rest of such institutions, will become. Or she could just plan to open the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff at some more distant date, though about half of what’s in Wal-Mart, sources inform me, is still actually made here—for now. The world’s richest woman, however, seems more interested in archaic images of America than in the artistry behind them.
She has already scooped up a portrait of George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale and paintings by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper for her museum. That museum, reports say, will feature many, many nineteenth-century portraits of Native Americans—but it would be hard to see her as a champion of the indigenous history of the Americas. The Wal-Mart that opened last November in Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, is built so close to the great Pyramid of the Sun that many consider the site desecrated. The Wal-Mart parking lot has eradicated the site of a smaller temple. “This is the flag of conquest by global interests, the symbol of the destruction of our culture,” said a local schoolteacher. Thanks to free trade measures like NAFTA, Wal-Mart has become Mexico’s biggest retailer and private-sector employer.
Imagine if Walton were more like Jonathan Sturges, supporting the art of her time. Imagine her supporting artists who actually had something to say about Wal-Mart and America (and Mexico, and China). Imagine that, in the mode of the Venice Biennale or the São Paolo Biennale, there was a Wal-Mart biennale. After all, Wal-Mart is itself China’s seventh-largest trading partner, ahead of Germany and Russia and Italy; if it were a nation, it would be the nineteenth-biggest economy in the world. Since it’s on the same scale as those countries, why shouldn’t it have its own contemporary art shows? But what would the Wal-Mart nation and its artists look like?
Rather than the open, luminous, intelligent architecture Moshe Safdie will probably bestow on Bentonville, Arkansas, imagine a shuttered Wal-Mart big box—of which there are so many, often shut down simply to stop employees from unionizing—turned into a MOCA, a museum of contemporary art, or, better yet, a MOWA, a Museum of Wal-Mart Art. Or Wal-Art. After all, Los Angeles’s MOCA was originally sited in a defunct warehouse. You could set the artists free to make art entirely out of materials available at Wal-Mart or to make art about the global politics of Wal-Mart in our time—poverty, consumerism, sprawl, racism, gender discrimination, exploitation of undocumented workers.
Imagine a contemporary artist, maybe using Photoshop, reworking Kindred Spirits again and again. Imagine that Cole and Bryant are, this time, standing not on a rocky outcropping but in, say, one of the puzzle and art supply aisles of a Wal-Mart near Kaaterskill Falls, dazed and depressed. Or imagine instead some sweatshop workers, a little hunched and hungry, on that magnificent perch amid the foliage and the golden light, invited at last into some sense of democratic community. Imagine paintings of Edward Hopper’s old downtowns, boarded up because all the sad and lonely people are shopping at Wal-Mart and even having their coffee and hot dogs there. Imagine video-portraits of the people who actually make the stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, or of the African American truck drivers suing the corporation for racism, or of the women who are lead plaintiffs in the nation’s largest class action lawsuit for discrimination. Imagine if Alice Walton decided to follow the route of Kmart with Martha Stewart or Target with architect Michael Graves and commissioned some cutting-edge contemporary art about these issues: videos and DVDs you could buy, prints for your walls, performance art in the aisles, art that maybe even her workers could afford. Imagine if Wal-Mart would acknowledge what Wal-Mart is rather than turning hallowed American art into a fig leaf to paste over naked greed and raw exploitation. But really, it’s up to the rest of us to make the real Museum of Wal-Mart, one way or another, in our heads, on our web sites, or in our reading of everyday life everywhere.
The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans
[2003]
There was a time not so long ago when everything was recognizable not just as a cup or a coat, but as a cup made by so-and-so out of clay from this bank on the local river or a coat woven by the guy in that house out of wool from the sheep visible on the hills. Then, objects were not purely material, mere commodities, but signs of processes, human and natural, pieces of a story, and both the story and the stuff sustained life. It’s as though every object spoke—some of them must have sung out—in a language everyone could hear, a language that surrounded every object in an aura of its history.
“All commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time,” said Marx, but who now could dissolve them into their constituent histories of labor and materials, into the stories that made them about the processes of the world, made them part of life even if they were iron or brick, made them come to life? For decades, tales have circulated of city kids who didn’t know that milk came from cows, and, more recently, reports of the inability of American teenagers to find Iraq on a map have made the rounds; but who among us can picture precisely where their sweater or their sugar comes from?
I’ve been thinking about that because a new shopping mall has opened up at the eastern foot of the Bay Bridge, in what was once, according to the newspaper, the biggest shell mound in Northern California. From the 1870s to the 1920s, this place was Shellmound Park, an amusement park, racetrack, dance hall, and shooting range; but Prohibition put the pleasure grounds out of business, and the mound was bulldozed for industry. The remains of seven hundred Ohlone people that an archaeologist snatched from the construction site in 1924 are still at the University of California at Berkeley. The site became industrialized, hosting paint and pesticide factories that eventually made it into a wasteland so toxic that those venturing into it wore moon suits. Now it has been reclaimed for shopping, and the cleanup has disturbed the remaining Ohlone burial sites.
The street that goes out to the shopping center is still called Shellmound, but the outdoor mall itself includes the usual chains that make it impossible to know if you’re in Phoenix or Philadelphia: Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Express, the three versions of the Gap corporation, including Old Navy and Banana Republic, all laid out on a fake Main Street. Anti-Gap protestors haven’t arrived yet, though they are frequent presences in downtown San Francisco, decrying both the Gap’s reliance on sweatshop labor and the clear-cutting of old-growth redwood forests in Mendocino by the Gap’s and those forests’ owners (see www.Gapsucks.org). But the day the mall opened, activists from the International Indian Treaty Council handed out flyers protesting the desecration of a burial ground. The mall is a doubly modern site, a space that could be anywhere, into which commodities come as if out of nowhere.
In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels recounts the crimes behind the production of everyday things—ceramics, ironware, glass, but particularly cotton cloth. He wrote in a time when objects were first becoming silent, and he asked the same thing that the activists from Gapsucks.org do, that we learn the new industrial languages of objects, that we hear the story of children worked into deformity and blindness to make lace, the story of the knife grinders with a life expectancy of thirty-five years, or today the story of the Nike workers who are paid less than living wages to work long hours in excruciating conditions. These industrial stories have always been environmental stories too, about factory effluents, cotton chemicals, paper dioxins, the timber industry, the petrochemical industry, on and on.
Somewhere in the industrial age, o
bjects shut up because their creation had become so remote and intricate a process that it was no longer readily knowable. Or they were silenced, because the pleasures of abundance that all the cheap goods offered were available only if they were mute about the scarcity and loss that lay behind their creation. Modern advertising—notably for Nike—constitutes an aggressive attempt to displace the meaning of the commodity from its makers, as though you enter into relationship with very tall athletes rather than, say, very thin Vietnamese teenagers when you buy these shoes. It is a stretch to think about Mexican prison labor while contemplating Victoria’s Secret lavender lace boy-cut panties. The objects are pretty; their stories are hideous; so you get to choose between an alienated and ultimately meaningless world of consumption and one that makes terrible demands on you. And to tell the tales is to be the bearer of bad news—imagine activists as Moses coming down from Sinai but cutting straight to Leviticus, with forty thousand or so prohibitions: against shrimp (see www.montereybayaquarium.org), against strawberries (methyl bromide, stoop labor), against gold (see www.greatbasinminewatch.org), and on and on. It’s what makes radicals and environmentalists seem so grumpy to the would-be consumer.
Maybe the real questions are which substances, objects, and products tell stories that don’t make people cringe or turn away and how to take these items from the margins to the mainstream. For the past half century, the process of artmaking has been part of its subject, and this making becomes a symbolic act that attempts to substitute for the silence of all the other objects. But nobody lives by art alone. There’s food from the wild, from your own garden, from friends, ancient objects salvaged and flea-marketed, heirlooms and hand-me-downs, local crafts, and a few things still made with the union label, but it’s not easy for anyone to stay completely free of Payless or Wal-Mart. Too, good stories—such as those told by pricey organic and free-range and shade-grown food that is available only in the hipper stores of the fancier regions—can be a luxury.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 35
