Too Little in Koons Tulips

The American artist Jeff Koons has offered a monumental sculpture to the city of Paris in honor of the victims of the 2015 terror attack at the Bataclan concert hall.  This made the news not because of his largesse, but because a number of artists and other cultural observers have made it known that they believe the sculpture should not be installed, that a more appropriate process of memorialization should be followed.  It’s easy to attack Koons for being too commercialized, both re: the imagery of his art and his capitalist capitalization on the gallery system, but I want to talk about a different question—is Bouquet of Tulips a good memorial?

Jeff Koons. Monumental sculpture offered by donation to the City of Paris in memory of the attacks of 2015 - 2016.   Paris, Place de Tokyo - installation in 2018.  Image via Noirmontartproduction.

Early critics pointed out that the proposed location is near some of Paris’s busy modern art sites, but that it isn’t near the Bataclan.  I noticed immediately that Bouquet of Tulips would be near the Flame of Liberty, a similarly figurative, industrial public art object. Though originally installed in 1989 as a pendant to the State of Liberty’s flame and the spirit of global friendship, in 1997, it became a memorial to Princess Diana after her sudden death when her car crashed in a nearby tunnel.  There is a visual similarity to the two works, but the Flame of Liberty indicates how location (and, perhaps, a dose of candle-based imagery from an Elton John song) can often be the most important factor in sanctifying a memorial.

Flame of Liberty - my photo, 2011.

The larger consideration in evaluating a proposal for a memorial is whether or not that sculpture, or other installation, can evoke the emotional impact of the tragedy it represents.  Can that memorial call its viewers immediately to understand that the event in question is significant and substantive in the popular memory of the nation?  Do the people who most need the memorial—those impacted whether directly or indirectly—see their feelings and experiences reflected in the imagery and message that the memorial presents?  As Kirk Savage notes in his book about the installation of memorials after the Civil War, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), the relationship between an audience and a memorial is not a one-way street. Though viewers, and mourners, project their experiences on to the memorial, the physical presence of the sculpture serves powerfully to shape both the rituals involved in memorializing the tragedy in question but also to establish how the tragedy is remembered in the future.  If Parisians see Bouquet of Tulips as a superficial gesture from an outsider, it cannot serve its purpose because it fails to provide the oneness and catharsis they need.

A number of articles that I read did fixate on this idea of Koons being an outsider, an American—the artists, politicians, and other cultural figures who signed an open letter denouncing Bouquet of Tulips suggested that a competition be put in place for a memorial so that French artists may also suggest ways of remembering their countrymen. Yet competitions may equally exclude the views of “the people,” and debates have circulated for many, many years about whether or not art can display the inherent traits of the nation that produces it.  (See: art historian Michael Fried’s discussion of “Frenchness” in Manet, or the entire history of American art history.)  It's not only the artist's American-ness that poses a problem.  Koons and his representatives responded by pointing to the visual similarities between Lady Liberty’s torch and the flop of tulips and also twinning the intention of Bouquet of Tulips with the Statue of Liberty’s representation of the so-called spirit of friendship between France and the United States.  The canned nature of that rationale, proposing friendship as a balm, strikes me as both too obvious and too indicative of exactly how right the letter’s signatories are.

Of course, all through the nineteenth century, as France cycled through bloody war after bloody rebellion, the government and other organizing bodies solved the problem of allowing people to feel represented in their memorials and monuments by selling subscriptions.  By this I mean that, if I were a well-enough-to-do French person of that era, I might be able to buy a share in a monument project so that my very dollars assisted in its completion and publicly displayed my allegiance to the message.  Kirk Savage notes: “What gave monuments their peculiar appeal in an era of rising nationalism was their claim to speak for ‘the people.’” Though the “era of rising nationalism” is a concept of the long nineteenth century, we live in an era of confusing national allegiances and an era where people must remain attentive to the attempts of certain groups of people to speak for others.  The Bouquet of Tulips, even if Koons is sincere in his admiration of Paris and its people, is the vision of one man, and the suspicion that Bouquet of Tulips would be reproduced for gallery displays and sold causes a distillation of respect for his intent.  The open letter calls this “product placement” that would diminish the prominence of modern and contemporary French artists celebrated in the nearby museums.  They are right, but that may still not be the greatest sin of this project.

So... is Bouquet of Tulips a good memorial?  The answer is no.  It could be an excellent sculpture, one that seems lovelier than many works by Koons, but its factory-produced exterior feels hard and cold in even the mock-ups.  Arguments against its construction and installation could begin and end there without ever bringing in the practical questions about public financing or the danger of placing a 35-ton sculpture over exhibit galleries, two points that the open letter does raise.  Without a substantial emotional connection to the place where the Bataclan attack occurred or the people who were most deeply affected by it, a statue is simply a statue.  It may be appropriate for a modern art museum to have a statue by an artist like Jeff Koons in front of it, but that sculpture cannot be a proper memorial in a city that needs more than “optimism, rebirth, and the vitality of nature” to process the effects of a tragic event.

Bewitching History

The other day, I had an unexpected meeting with an older gentleman who told me many stories about his family history, including one story about the Salem Witch Trials that I, long-obsessed with the Salem Witch Trials, had never heard. 

Salem Witch Trials memorial.

He said that he had an ancestor who had been tried for witchcraft, convicted, and sentenced to hang—but who had then escaped before she could be executed.  I was stunned!  I thought, “Hmmm, I want to know more about the person who helped her,” then I texted the whole story to my best friend and headed home.  A few hours later, after I had gone to the grocery store and was frantically cooking some faux pho to eat for dinner, my best friend texted me a link to a Wikipedia entry on Mary Bradbury—a woman in 1692 Salem who was tried for witchcraft, convicted, sentenced to death, and then escaped before she could be executed.  So it’s true!

As we’ve come closer and closer to Halloween, witchy happenings and black cats have been in the news, Hocus Pocus has been playing nonstop on cable television, and pop culture recommendations have veered toward the spooky or paranormal.  In short, this has always been my favorite time of the year because both fictional and nonfictional manifestations of witchcraft fascinate me.  In recent months, a witchcraft museum opened in Cleveland – the Buckland Gallery of Witchcraft and Magick – providing a more permanent, more public home for a collection that’s been in development for many years.  I’ve been dying to go since I first read an article about it a couple weeks ago.

When I logged into the Ohio Digital Library to put a hold on the new John Green book (17 holds per each of 17 copies – who says kids don’t read…), they recommended three or four serious books on modern Wicca and Witchcraft for my reading pleasure.  One of them, Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft, was written by Raymond Buckland, the man whose collection forms the basis of the new museum in Cleveland.  The other authors also sound familiar to me from years of reading about witchcraft and paganism in history and practice.

This is all to say – it’s important to me that history include the dark corners and address subjects that blur the line between fact and fiction.  It’s important to me that museums present topics that require a leap of faith on the part of visitors who need to trust the institution to give them information.  Whether or not Halloween is right around the corner.

Where are the Art Historians in the Public Scholar Grants?

One of my pictures from Claude Monet's house in Giverny.

Let’s talk about the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholar grants.  For the last few years, the NEH has funded a program designed to encourage humanities scholars and other writers to write books designed to present humanities topics to broad audiences.  You have to have published a book, or a few articles geared to non-specialist audiences to even qualify, so it does not deal in pipe dreams or half-baked proposals.  Most importantly, this program strikes me as utterly crucial to the survival of the humanities in this country and perhaps also utterly crucial to the survival of the university itself.  I have learned the hard way that people, in general, don’t understand the work of being a scholar, and affording them ways to connect with true subject matter experts increases the likelihood of them viewing the humanities favorably.

A quick glance at the recently announced recipients finds a number of topics that are just tremendously fun—books that would catch your eye on a Barnes & Noble shelf and convince you to take them home.  “The Lost Laugh: American Comedy Between the World Wars.”  “A History of Wiretapping in the United States.” “A Scissor, A Shoe, The Sidewalk’s Slant: Disability and the Unlikely Origins of Everyday Things.” “Howard Hughes, the CIA, and the Untold Story Behind Their Hunt for a Sunken Soviet Submarine.” I would read any of those books and a number of other potential titles that I have not included here.  However, none of those proposed book titles belongs to an Art Historian.  Indeed, there is only one Art Historian among the recipients this year: Wanda Corn, a very distinguished historian of American art, for her project “From Local Folk to National Icon: The Three Lives of Grant Wood’s American Gothic.”

A look at previous lists of recipients pulls up a few photography-themed texts and another few art history topics. Bette Talvecchia, whose book Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture I found VERY useful for a seminar paper once upon a time, won a Public Scholar Grant in 2015-16 for her project titled “The Two Michelangelos.”  It proposed to examine the lives and works of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, greatest of Renaissance and Baroque painters, respectively, in order to illuminate the history of their eras and suggest “enduring meaning for our own culture.”  James Henry Rubin received a Public Scholar Grant in 2016 for “Why Monet Matters, or Meanings Among the Lily Pads.”  His intended argument is that Monet’s fantastic abstractions appeal “to something deep in modern consciousness,” and that they must because they were created during a historical period with such intense turmoil.  There is one more project on the list of past recipients that is categorized as Art History, but the author is a Communications professor, Kembrew McLeod, who proposes to examine the DIY aesthetic of 1960s and 1970s New York.  It’s called “The Pop Underground: Downtown New York’s Converging Arts Scenes in the 1960s and 1970s.”

If I’m being honest, there’s only one of those four projects that excites me, and it’s the one that is not by a self-identified Art Historian.  I certainly believe that Rubin’s take on Monet will be meaningful, and I would go so far as to say that many people will find it useful to understand that Monet didn’t just paint water lilies, cathedrals, and haystacks to convey their beauty. I’m sure a book about the Michelangelos will find an audience, and I have also greatly respected Wanda Corn’s previous work. And I wonder if there were other applications from Art Historians that were not selected for funding, or I wonder if Art Historians view museum catalogues as their primary means of reaching wider audiences.  I also wonder if my field has not been brave enough to move forward into the public realm.

Art Historians have been chafing against the confines of survey courses for years, lamenting the fact that, to cover 3,000 years of visual expression in two semesters, you hit the highlights. The geniuses! They’re crowd pleasers for a reason, but I would suggest that another book on Michelangelo is not the best way to indicate what Art History, as a field, can do.  Where are the visual culture projects, the ones that have direct resonance with what mainstream readers see every day?  Where are the projects about the artists working the margins, the ones whose work ends up giving us new ways to see our geniuses?  It’s fine to have geniuses, but not to worship them to the exclusion of everyone else.  I admit that even I have a copy of that Van Gogh biography from a few years ago that proposed, on the basis of John Rewald’s original notes and a few other sources, that Van Gogh had actually been shot accidentally and had not committed suicide.  If that were true, that would be an example of why a new biography could be good.  I’m not sure supporting new biographies of our great geniuses actually abets new research, no matter how smart the author is.

I want to see books by Art Historians that have the same bestselling potential as “A History of Wiretapping in the United States,” which will draw immense interest between current events and everyone who’s ever seen The Wire, a seriously learned crew.  There must be some topic in the history of art that could drive that kind of interest without capitalizing on the worst clichés of the field.  To me, McLeod’s book seems interesting because it will certainly talk about art, but also the broader cross-section of society that influenced the art and vice versa.  I wish that I could offer more concrete suggestions for projects I wish had been proposed, but I’m a person who wrote my entire dissertation because I was mad it didn’t already exist. So I hope I’ll know a good Public Scholar project when I see it.

Women in Trouble at Wartime - Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Lifeboat (1944)

“Lady, you don’t look like you’ve just been shipwrecked.” 

That’s the first line in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), uttered by a man, just pulled out of the ocean, to a luminous Tallulah Bankhead.  She wears a fur coat, and her hair remains meticulously coiffed—exactly as if a Nazi U-Boat had not sunk the ocean liner she was on.  She also then announces that, as a Margaret Bourke-White-style journalist, she has captured their whole ordeal on film. When the man knocks her camera, full of “irreplaceable stuff,” into the water, she responds indignantly at first, and then seems to instantly recover.

A couple years earlier, in 1942, Mrs. Miniver had shown audiences a different kind of strong woman during World War II. Set in a small village near London, this movie shows us the Miniver family as the war really begins to affect their lives, and Greer Garson plays the titular lady of the house.  Watching this movie felt like revelation after revelation.  I looked up Garson, wondering why I hadn’t seen any of her other movies.  I looked up the date, stunned to find that it came out in the United States so soon after we had entered the war.  I wondered how relevant it must have seemed to people who were experiencing similar events in real time, starting to view a new hat as a vice or wondering if they had enough sugar to make treats for their children.  Knowing that Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk would be coming out soon, I was immediately intrigued by Mr. Miniver being among the men who sailed off to ferry distressed British soldiers home on their leisure and fishing boats.

It was something of a coincidence that I watched both these movies in a short period of time—I’ve been joking lately that maybe my true calling in life is to watch old movies and tweet about them.  That might just be true, but I had never really thought before about the spectacular machine of Classic Hollywood chugging out naturalistic dramas in real time.  It seems entirely counterintuitive to the magic usually ascribed to the Hollywood of that era.  Sure, we now have films like Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Lone Survivor (2013) that have addressed current conflicts, but both came years after those conflicts had been minimized both tactically and in the American media.  More importantly, the home front presence is limited in these films primarily to weeping wives and phone calls home. Just as it has been entirely possible for contemporary Americans to ignore the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I cannot think of a movie that puts regular people, outside military service, in a situation like that which occurs in either of these movies from World War II.  Argo (2012) is, perhaps, a recent exception, but it balances the damning reality that Iran is still unstable and potentially dangerous today with the high drama of the 1970s set piece.

Turning back to World War II and these classic films, both Mrs. Miniver and the people in Lifeboat encounter an enemy directly—a German who has survived, but landed in enemy territory.  Neither man speaks English, and it’s up to the two smartest women—Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver and Tallulah Bankhead as Lifeboat’s Constance Porter—to deal with them.  Mrs. Miniver outsmarts her German pilot prisoner.  At first he threatens her, and she responds with kindness.  When he collapses, she takes his gun, hides it, and waits for the police to arrive—never losing her cool.  In Lifeboat, we’d guess from the beginning that Constance Porter is unflappable, except where her precious camera and her livelihood are concerned, but she also happens to speak German. She translates for the stranded German, who survived after his U-Boat sank; indeed, he finds himself in the same situation as the American survivors are.  And when their small boat is nearly overtaken by stormy seas, it is the German who saves the day, revealing in the process that he speaks perfect English and has understood them the whole time.  It’s hard to draw conclusions about these scenes without irretrievably spoiling these films, but a huge part of their narrative success is the role-playing aspect of imagining what you’d do in a similar situation.  If you were Mrs. Miniver, would you, too, be able to act decisively when it mattered?  If you were Constance Porter, would you trust the German, or throw him overboard to save yourself?

I mentioned above that a crucial part of my interest in these movies had to do with the fact that they came out while there was still no end of the war in sight.  So how did they both fare?  Mrs. Miniver was MGM’s most profitable film that year, and it still ranks on Best of All Time lists.  Lifeboat did not do as well—it received only a limited release, and truly can only be viewed as a success through the eyes of modern critics praising it as part of the Hitchcock oeuvre.   Crowds understandably did not appreciate the portrayal of a German that was not straightforwardly evil.  And yet I noticed that the print of Lifeboat I saw still had a message on the end credits to let viewers know they could buy War Bonds in that very theater where they saw the film.  The ever reliable research source of Wikipedia (joking, joking) suggests that President Franklin Roosevelt rushed Mrs. Miniver into American theaters knowing that a well-timed sermon delivered in a shelled church would provide meaningful propaganda when he needed it most.

It’s not surprising to me that Hitchcock would produce a movie during World War II that asked harder questions than audiences were willing to hear.  What is surprising is that both of these movies feel new and creative; they’re not just films to revisit as historical research.  They’re living, breathing representations of an era very different from our own, yet one that still feels relevant to a contemporary viewer.  After many years of recommending movies to people, I know they don’t always listen if the movie was made before 1960 and/or is still in black and white—but these films are both deeply worth the time it takes to watch them.  And if anyone wonders what I’m watching next, I have about five Hitchcock movies (2 major, 3 minor) left on the DVR to work my through.

The 2017 Cleveland Inkubator + Writing Habits

I'm the ginger in the row under the purple banner.

Yesterday, I went to the 3rd annual Cleveland Inkubator, a free, day-long writing conference put on by a local nonprofit Literary Cleveland. This organization began about two years ago, and in a sense, I’ve been there from the start—though I’ve only taken one of Lit Cleveland’s paid workshops, I’ve attended all three Inkubators and participated in workshops on fiction and non-fiction with a number of local writers whose work I enjoy.   My face is even front and center on their marketing materials (see above).   Yet sometimes I still ask myself: am I truly a writer? Or is that just what my business card says? If I’m feeling particularly flat on any given day, I follow that up with: and why did I list “writer” on my business card in the first place?

This year at the Inkubator, there were a number of suitable workshops for “agnostic” writers; that's how I like to refer to people who can’t decide if they’re writers. Another workshop could stoke my interest in the paranormal and occult. I started the day with a workshop on “Facing the Blank Page” a.k.a. the true story of my every effort to write fiction. I followed that up with “The First Page of Your Novel”—this workshop focused on how good the first pages of famous novels are and how to make your first page good enough to convince a publisher to keep reading. The last workshop I did—“Tarot for Writers”—suggested using tarot cards as a tool when you’re stuck. Not as a crutch, but as a way of brainstorming from one choice about a character to the next. All of the instructors gave practical exercises that could be applied in any situation, and they also gave advice for continuing along a writing path.

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Around the time that I was in middle school, a local independent bookstore near my town sponsored a yearly short story contest. My middle school English teacher had us write short stories for the contest every year—she would choose the best two or three stories from the class and then submit them to the store’s contest. I’ve written before on this blog about how, as a small child, I wrote stories all the time, but this contest was different. We came to expect it. We let ideas marinate over time knowing when the contest would again become the subject of our lessons. The most beautiful part? We were allowed to write about whatever we wanted, and this teacher, like many other writers I’ve met since, encouraged us to write what we knew.

What I knew as a fifth-grader was that I really loved my cat, Mayflower, and I wanted him (yes… him) to be some kind of superhero. So I wrote a ghastly short story about an alien cat with superpowers, to which my heroic teacher responded with unmerited grace and kindness. It did not make the final cut for the store’s contest.

What I knew as a sixth-grader was my then very active passion for medieval history, the remnants of which now mostly serve to inform my consumption of Game of Thrones. This knowledge, combined with an especial interest in the Black Death, meant that my protagonist was a young girl, about my age at the time, who began the story by walking the streets of her village as a cart rolled by with a man yelling, “Bring out your dead!” This, too, did not make the cut, but was more successful as a story.

And what did I know as a seventh-grader? My tremendous interest in grisly moments in history remained, and this time I wrote my story about the Salem Witch Trials. Again, my protagonist was a girl, around my age, forced into nearly impossible circumstances. And this time, my teacher chose my story to move on to the store’s contest.

The bookstore has since closed, and I am not aware of any similar opportunity for kids that age in the area. But while it lasted, it meant that there was at least one time a year when a routine could be followed, a story cranked out and put up for review. It meant that, when my high school English teacher made a similar demand for a short story, it was a matter of flexing a muscle that’s already in shape. When she asked specifically for historical fiction, I wrote a story about a little boy who accidentally becomes embroiled in the Black Sox scandal—in that case, baseball was what I knew.

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My point here is this: writing is a habit, and one that you need to practice and hone. Anyone will tell you that, but it’s one thing that I knew for certain when I was writing my dissertation. I didn’t always fool around with daily word goals, at least not until finishing was almost at hand. I did, however, make sure that for as many days as possible I was in the library trying to write between 3pm and 8pm—these were the hours I did best at writing. The words usually flowed the best when I had been reading all morning and could actively rework the thoughts and concepts I had just read.

Today, in my morning workshop, I had a long-needed moment of epiphany—a moment so clear that I can’t even remember what triggered it now. But I understood that I do, truly, know all the habits and techniques that it takes to write, whether that’s a novel or a non-fiction book.  Or blogging on a regular basis.  Or finally admitting that maybe it's time for me to go back to that dissertation, which I loved.  I just need to get that muscle back in shape.