As I write this on November 8th, the outcome of the midterm elections is uncertain – and I am a nervous wreck. The date has so many echos in history, some good, some bad. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered the x-ray, a boon to medicine. On this day, Hitler started the Beer Hall Putsch, a (for now) unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government. An attempt to kill Adolf Hitler and other high ranking members of the Nazi party during the 16th anniversary observances of the Beer Hall Putsch failed in 1939. In 1994, the Republican Party won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives on 11/8 for the first time in over forty years. And on November 8, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a law enacted to address the crisis of Native children being separated from their families, communities, and cultures, the gold standard for child welfare policies and practices. Decades if not centuries of children stolen and a culture to be extinguished were supposed to be a thing of the past.
If you read this on November 9th, the constitutionality of the anti-genocidal ICWA is argued in front of the Supreme Court, with 4 cases consolidated under Haaland v. Brackeen, challenged by non-Indian families who wish to adopt American Indian children, along with the state of Texas and three other states with very few Native inhabitants. They are represented pro bono by Gibson Dunn, a high-powered law firm which also counts oil companies Energy Transfer and Enbridge, responsible for the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines, among its clients. (A date, by the way, equally if not more ominous than November 8th: a night of coordinated waves of anti-Semitic violence in 1938, known as Kristallnacht, for the many glass windows broken in Jewish stores, homes and synagogues, 30.000 Jewish men imprisoned, the beginning of he Holocaust.To add insult to injury, the Nazi regime blamed the Jews for the riots and imposed exorbitant fines on Jewish communities for the damages. Never forget.)
Ostensibly the Brackeen case is about the right of White parents to adopt American-Indian children, but at closer inspection, it is the first step in a far broader attack on tribal rights and sovereignty, one that ultimately aims at control over land and extraction of resources. I figure, rather than biting my nails over the election outcome, I’ll try to fill you in about what is at stake with courts that are stacked – and might be ever more so. (Detailed information about the case can be found in a terrific podcast, This Land, by Rebecca Nagle, (Cherokee Nation,) in an overview by Lakotalaw.org. and an essay in yesterday’s VOX. I am summarizing below.)
The Supreme Court is asked to decide on basically two major issues. Plaintiffs contend that federal protections to keep Native children with Native families constitute illegal racial discrimination and that ICWA’s federal standards “commandeer” state courts and agencies for a federal agenda. In other words, White families wanting to foster and adopt Native children are claiming reverse racism and arguing that federal overreach is trampling states’ rights associated with the Commerce Clause – two dogwhistles frequently linked to the desire to dismantle anti-racist policies.
So, legislation consciously designed to undo genocidal, racist policy is claimed to be racist because it gives preference to Native families to adopt native children over the rights of Whites. Never mind that Native status is a political designation (seeMorton v. Mancari) and not a racial one. And with that political status come certain rights – tribal law and sovereignty included. According to the ACLU:
“Tribal sovereignty is the right of tribes — 574 currently recognized by the federal government — to make and be governed by their own laws. This sovereignty is inherent, as Native Nations existed long before the creation of the United States. Hundreds of treaties have guaranteed tribal nations the right to self-govern. Through these treaties, Native Nations gave up their right to millions of acres of land that would become the United States in exchange for promises to tribes, including the guarantee that lands “reserved” for tribes would be governed by the tribes in perpetuity. The outcome of Brackeen v. Haaland could put centuries-long legal precedent upholding tribal sovereignty — including tribes’ right and ability to preserve their unique cultural identities, raise their own children and govern themselves — in jeopardy.”
Under the guise of “equality” language, Native tribes’ federal protections and rights are supposed to be gutted, with tribal rights claimed to violate the rights of individuals. The framework upheld by ICWA “is the same federal framework that recognizes the inherent right of Tribal Nations to protect their sacred sites, burial grounds, and drinking water. If the Supreme Court chips away at Tribal sovereignty, oil and gas companies will have a clearer path to extract fossil fuels on Tribal lands without the consent of Tribal Nations.”
The pro bono lawyers for the plaintiffs have previously represented Walmart, Amazon, Chevron, Shell and Energy Transfer, the pipeline company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that indigenous people have protested against at Standing Rock, which cost the pipeline company upwards of $7.5 billion. Indigenous resistance worried the oil industry and only seven months after the indigenous camps in North Dakota were shut down, Gibson Dunn filed the case that is now in front of the Supreme Court in federal court.
Vultures, all.
This is of course not new. In the 1950s the same argument was used by Western States congressmen to terminate tribes: Collective rights of tribes shouldn’t trump individual rights of US citizens. The results were catastrophic. The legal abolition of dozens of tribes led to the privatization of their lands for the benefit of white settlers and businesses. Now as well, it is not only the children who will suffer, although studies across the last decade have shown how much they do. In two studies from 1969 to 1974, the Association on American Indian Affairs found that 25-35% of all Native children had been separated from their families and placed in foster homes or adoptive homes or institutions. Ninety percent were placed in non-Indian homes. Yet today, after ICWA was established, Native children are four times more likely to be removed from their families than white children are from theirs. And according to a 2020 study, in many states Native family separation has surpassed rates prior to ICWA. This is mostly due to states ignoring or flouting ICWA requirements. (Ref.)
But a potential ruling of the ICWA as unconstitutional has further consequences. The plaintiffs’ arguments about the commerce clause (the other leg they stand on in addition to claims of reverse racism) could potentially invalidate much of the last century of federal law — including landmark statutes such as the Affordable Care Act, the ban on whites-only lunch counters, and the federal ban on child labor. It is questionable if the Supreme Court would go this far. But then again, with this court you never know. I guess worriedly biting my nails will not stop after November 8th….
Photographs today are from Texas, where the case originated. Images are of missions, the church actively involved in the “reeducation” of Indian children and erasure of tribal language and culture, and some photographs from hikes.
In memory of Alice Meyer (z”l) who fought the rising dark forces to the end.
Tiresias:” You mock my blindness? Let me tell you this: You with your precious eyes,you’re blind to the corruption of your life, to the house you live in, those you live with – ” (415) – SophoclesOedipus the King, translated by Robert Fagles.
DO YOU REMEMBER the unfolding of this famous tragedy? A priest implores the mighty Oedipus, the king of Thebes who rescued all his people once before, to stop the plague that’s ravaging the land. The ruler eagerly agrees, but when he starts intuiting the truth that after all might save them, he does not want to see it – just as the blind prophet Tiresias, who knows and was commanded to reveal it, has trouble naming it for fear of wreaking havoc. The truth, once it’s acknowledged, will lift the plague but also devastate the king, and his desire to remain unseeing does end up leading to his ultimate demise, including gouging out his eyes himself. Blind, after all, for real.
Perhaps you share with me a sense of needing to protect ourselves from ever more bad news, unending, constant, one development more dire than the next. It feels like our sanity depends on turning our eyes and ears away from yet more fear-inducing bits, just like the king of Thebes. Pandemic(s), the rise of authoritarian regimes drifting into fascism, wars and the ultimate threat to our existence, the devastation of our planet through self-inflicted climate change: plagues, all.
So why expose yourself to looking at depictions of the Holocaust, no matter how compelling, how educational, how directly speaking to the human heart? Won’t looking at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education‘s current exhibition, Harley Gaber’s Die Plage (The Plague) depress us even more?
We must. We must engage because we’ve known since Ancient Greece, if not before, that blind passivity does not end well. We must, because the medium that carries the message, in this case walls and walls of 390 assembled, collaged, sometimes manipulated archival photographs from 1918-1945 Germany and other objects, is more effective than a thousand words or numbers. It conveys that plagues will haunt us unless we fight them and uproot the seeds that have been lying fallow, not destroyed. And if you argue I should skip the guilt trip, since all your life you’ve faced the issues of the Holocaust to utmost saturation, I get it, but I disagree.
The only way to fight the plague is to name, to depict and educate. It requires from all of us a willingness to be confronted with the history, our part in it, its implications for the world we live in right this moment. Even when looking is hard.
A close inspection of Gaber’s installation might reveal some parallels to social and political developments right here and now. It reminds us how authoritarian mindsets are fostered and how right wing structures are organized from scratch, with the support of protofascistic organizations. We live in a time where authoritarians get increasingly elected into office internationally, like Meloni in Italy, Orban in in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia or are hovering in the wings, like Le Pen in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, (party for Freedom) PVV in Holland, and the Sweden Democrats, a right wing, Islamo-phobic populist party that won in recent elections as part of a coalition with centrists. Yesterday holocaust survivor #LilianaSegre (a victim of Mussolini’s race laws) handed over the Presidency of Italy’s Senate to Benito La Russa, a man who wants to be an heir to Mussolini, gives the fascist salute, and collects fascist memorabilia.
Just last weekend, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) doubled their votes in state elections to over 10%. One of their politicians, Holger Winterstein, publicly danced on the slabs of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin this week, spouting phrases about the rebirth of the German Volk.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin – Photo Friderike Heuer
Many characteristics of fascism can be found in the platforms of all of these leaders, including racial purity as a basis for national belonging, a fear of White-replacement, anti-feminism, a cult of leadership and worship of the military, a rebirth narrative, suspensions of democratic freedoms, and attacks against the press. I need not spell out how all of this applies to what is going on closer to home.
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“Perhaps the belief that consciousness permeates everything and transcends – by that I mean encompasses – the cyclic nature of living and dying, would allow us to accept the inevitable beginnings and endings of things as part of a meaningful continuity, not just a tragic aberration” – Harley Gaber, September 2010 as related in the Interviews by Robert Reigle.
HARLEY GABER (1943 – 2011) was born in Chicago into a Jewish-American family. Until the 1970s he was trained and worked as a composer, studying with Horace Reisberg in high school, then Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and later Darius Milhaud, among others. His minimalist work is hailed as among the most distinctive of post-World War II American music. (The link leads to a detailed review of the artist’s music.)
His interest in artistic abstraction had started early with a fascination of Jackson Pollock’s painting, which he claimed influenced his music. So did Morton Feldman‘s elegant 1963 chamber work dedicated to the painter “De Kooning,” by all reports. The cross-over between music and visual art was present then, from the beginning. So was the tendency, in both art forms, to alternate between sparseness – compression, exigence, selection – and abundance, with the former more characterizing the music, the latter the visual onslaught of the montage motifs. Major compositions include Sovereign of the Centre (1972-74),The Winds Rise in the North: String Quintet (1974), I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt Fuji in 2009, The Realm Of Indra’s Net and InMemoriam 2010.
Harley Gaber in front of one of his photomontage panels in 2000 – Photo courtesy of Christina Ankofska
In the late 1970’s Gaber moved from NYC to California, leaving music behind for a time, devoting himself to playing and teaching tennis, taking care of his aging parents, and eventually the montage work across a decade that resulted in Die Plage. Several trips to Germany were undertaken for archival research and exploring historic places, Weimar and the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site in Weimar’s suburbs, among them.
KZ Buchenwald Memorial Site – Photos Friderike Heuer
By 2002 he returned to composing, as well as some forays into film-making. His view of music shifted in perspective, former technical musical tools and conceptualization of consciousness replaced by a focus on the complexities of the heart. In a profound crisis, wrecked by insomnia, he took his own life in 2011 two weeks after his last composition, In Memoriam 2010, was published, a piece commissioned by the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation, dedicated to Nancy Epstein, who passed away in 2010 and was a close family friend of the Gabers.
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“Eine neue Kunst muss endlich angeben müssen wozu sie gebraucht werden will. ” (It’s about time that a new form of art declares what it wants to be used for.) – Berthold Brecht, Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst.
FOR SOMEONE INTERESTED in quantum physics and in the art of the Weimar Republic, as Gaber was by all reports, photomontage seems ideally suited as a visual medium. The combination of intimate scale and monumental extent, with ever smaller units affecting each other across space, in some ways mirrored his approach to musical notation. He drew parallels between our insights from physics to how he perceived humanity to function. In quantum entanglement you cannot describe the state of one of the quanta without the state of the other one. They can only be apprehended as a unit, even if they are far apart. Gaber’s montages gave visual life to this concept: the distinct groups of a society only to be understood in their linkage to each other. Perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed part of the same system under the umbrella of a deadly ideology.
Photomontage basically refers to collaging with photographs, creating new and different wholes from altered parts, telling a story. It used to be a dark room, paper, scissors and glue affair. These days computer technology allows seamless merging and alteration of digital images where all evidence of historical reality of the components disappears. At the heart of it is fragmentation and construction, playing with perspectives that encourage or prevent a subject’s visibility. The use of scale can obscure – sometimes smaller segments can distract from the larger picture, sometimes grand expansions blur your ability to see detail. Visibility, of course, will matter only if you are inclined to look. The switching back and forth between micro, macro or intermediate levels can be in itself demanding.
Then there is the matter of representation: who is represented, how do we represent? Are we manipulated by caricature, or surreal additions, by use of symbolism and/or text? If our hold on reality is ridiculed by including absurd juxtapositions, are we turned off enough to turn away? The question every artist needs to struggle with is how to represent a topic so over-saturated in visual memorial culture like the Holocaust. How do you prevent archival photographs of boots and soldiers, trains and camps and swastikas in endless repetition from being seen as overly familiar tropes, sparking associations only to a concept, safely relegated to the past?
In Europe between the wars, photomontage techniques were used by many artists who were part of the Dadaist movement, protesting against the First World War. The surrealists soon grasped this tool that lent itself to their exploration of consciousness and free association – with quite a few women as path breakers: Emila Medková, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, and Hannah Höch. But the real surge of photomontage could be seen when first Russian constructivist artists applied it regarding issues of social justice and then the Neuer Deutscher Verlag (New German Press), run by Willi Münzenberg, committed itself to photomontage as a propaganda tool, most famously in its flagship periodical Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (or AIZ) (Worker’s Illustrated), which it began publishing in January 1925. By 1930, artist John Heartfield, clearly a model for Harley Gaber, began to contribute his intense montages to the AIZ, attracting yet more readers. The new art form had signaled its intentions: agit-prop.
In 1931, one of my favorite montage artists, César Domeal-Niewenhuis, curated the very first exhibition devoted solely to the new art form – Fotomontage – under the aegis of the Berliner Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Raoul Hausman opened the event, and the montages were displayed in sections divided between advertising and political art, with John Heartfield and the Bund revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (The league of revolutionary German visual artists) dominating those exhibits. Experimental works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch, among others, had their own corner. I do not know if Gaber saw the catalogue or was familiar with this work, but it likely would have resonated. A fascinating retrospective of the history of art during the Weimar Republic opened in Berlin at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in 1977 – Wem gehört die Welt: Kunst und Gesellschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Who owns the World: Art and Society in the Weimar Republic). It might have been an impetus for Gaber’s new dedication given that the exhibition focused on the ways in which the artists related to the people, how they attempted to contribute to changing the world and how those actions were received. The anti-war photomontage work of his U.S. contemporary, the brilliant Martha Rosler, devoted to exposing the failure of our political class to learn anything from history, might also have been of interest to him. We will never know.
Then again, the desire to create this monumental work might have come from a uniquely Jewish-American perspective trying to map the universal principles that emerge when humans embrace or are exposed to the maelstrom of ideology and desire for dominion. By deconstructing the specifics of that moment, or of the era that produced the horror, Gaber hoped, perhaps, to lay bare mechanisms that translate generally. As a humanist he certainly acknowledged the agency of human beings, respecting moral values, but was also quite aware that living up to our potential is contextually shaped.
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“Here the ten plagues will be enumerated, and it is a widespread—though not particularly old—custom to remove a drop of wine from the cup for each plague. This strange practice was explained to me, when I was still a boy, that wine is a symbol of joy, and because each plague caused our tormentors to suffer on our account, the joy over our own liberation is diminished…Whether this explanation may make claim to historical truth may remain unanswered, but one must recognize the poetic truth in it, because it breathes the spirit of Judaism.”Rabbi Eduard E. BanethDer Sederabend: Ein Vortrag, (A Lecture on the Pesach Seder) published in Berlin in 1904.
ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS of the Passover Seder is the recitation of the plagues sent by G-d to punish the Egyptians who enslaved the Jews – that is if you share the table with young kids. With glee and abandon they dip their fingers, fling the drops of grape juice, yell the names of the afflictions, vermin among them. (Bonus: throwing the plastic frogs and locust used for decoration at each other.) The plagues seem far away, the threats averted. But much history is learned during this annual event, oral transmission linking generation after generation.
Harley Gaber did not grow up around a seder table, the household culturally Jewish, but he intuitively understood the role of children in societies that try to relate their history and, for some, keep their power hierarchies intact.
The montage display contains numerous single images of children and also groups them in ways that form more cohesive narratives. You have the (pre)-teens of the Hitler Youth right next to their Jewish age mates, ready for the trains to be transported. The uniforms of the Hitler Youth (an early unit of the Storm Troopers, mandatory participation for all youth) prepared for the soldierly character of the NSDAP, signified in-group membership, and conferred status. They had to be bought by the parents and many boys were keen on them, thinking it was cool. Children learn the values early, but also understand the power distribution, growing right into docile and willing soldiers, as long as they are not the bottom of the heap.
Top and bottom, after all, a major concept in fascistic thinking, which denies the truth that all of usare equal. In their twisted ways, race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical and mental health were markers of the hierarchy. The spatial word “unter” (below) an important suffix for power relations: there was the Untertan (imperial subject,) the Untergebene (subordinate) and eventually the Untermensch (subhuman), denying Jews and Roma their humanity.
One of the prominent texts in Gaber’s installation reads: “Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen.” (We’re traveling to Poland to give the Jews a good hiding.) The German verb is mostly used in the context of teachers beating their students, something children could easily comprehend. Now they weren’t the targets, but someone else was. It was not just the teaching that violent persecution of minorities was ideologically justified. Children learned early on that hatred, anger or resentment – the whole range of anti-humanistic feelings – were acceptable and even desirable, as long as they found their targets in convenient scape goats. Rote expression of loyalty in these paramilitary youth camps eventually turned to the real thing. Belonging felt good, de- individuation in those group settings eased remaining conscience.
Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen
Parallel to spending afternoons and evenings in these organizations (divided by age groups and gender,) indoctrination became part of the school day as well. It was not just what was NOT allowed to be read or learned, (book banning, anyone?) but importantly how curricula and instruction materials were centrally under the complete control of the party apparatus, as were the hiring and firing of (dis)loyal teachers and professors. Education was no longer geared towards the development of personality and learning, but forced the kids to put on mental blinders, uncritically digesting what was offered, a reduction to the atavistic stages of development. I see Harley Gaber’s work as enormously prescient in that the indoctrination of youth, so prominently displayed in his montages, is to be feared, and easily accomplished when education becomes usurped by those in power and ideologically or religiously driven. We see it, here and now.
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“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”– James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
GABER’S INSIGHT about the interconnectedness of a nation’s strata can be found in his depictions of ordinary Germans going about their lives in union with the rising fascists, as well as conservative politicians, who engaged in Faustian bargains with the Nazi representatives in order to hold on to power. At least that was my interpretation, thinking that perhaps one of the photographs portrayed Kurt von Schleicher, the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, eager to keep oversight over the military and appeasing his rival Hitler, eventually murdered by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives.
Top row, 6th panel from the left – portrait of someone reminding me of von Schleicher.
We often forget that during the rise of radical forces more moderate political parties are willing to form alliances with them in order to achieve or stay in power, with the strong belief, if one is generously speculating, that they might keep them in check and under influence within their power arrangements.(A good introduction to this topic can be found here.) That certainly was the case with Hindenburg and Hitler, or Emperor Emanuel and Mussolini, catastrophic miscalculations, both.
Just looking at the current gubernatorial race in Oregon, we have reports that one of the candidate has tied herself to “multiple far-right extremists, including a militia leader, a financial backer of the January 6th insurrection, and a Q-Anon conspiracy theorist.” Another one is reported to have sought the endorsement of the Timber Unit, a group full of extremists, and accepted their award. She lamented to The New York Times: ‘You can see the deterioration of the beautiful City of Roses, now the city of roaches.’ Some people have interpreted that as a de-humanizing reference to Portland’s many unhoused people (a claim denied by the candidate), and a dog whistle to the far right that calls them pests. Roaches. Pest. Plague.
It is not only politicians, though. When celebrities, like Kanye West this week, spout unequivocally anti-Semitic statements on Twitter to their 30 million followers (there are roughly 14.8 million Jews alive) and are welcomed to the platform by the richest man in the world in short succession, it opens more space for resonance for poisonous beliefs and strengthens those who already agree. In Germany, 36.000 people marched in the state of Thuringia alone, at the beginning of October, called by the AfD to protest political conditions, with far-right extremists joined by many ordinary citizens in fear of deteriorating economic conditions due to the war in Ukraine and other political decisions around immigration and environmental protection. When right-wing extremists take to the streets together with the supposedly “middle class,” when there are no longer any fears of contact, the citizenry acts like a sounding box for the Neo-Nazis, amplifying the message. It normalizes anti-democratic positions. Harley Gaber warned us.
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“Memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisibles present.” –Hanna Arendt,The Life of the Mind (1977)
HARLEY GABER’S PHOTOMONTAGES attempted to make the invisible present through creative juxtapositions. He was keenly aware that only testimony, in this case a visual, constructed epic, can keep the past and its lessons alive. In that way, this installation could not be more timely for Jewish museums and institutions in a day and age where the memory of the living is receding, given that the last survivors of the Holocaust are passing on. Memory can only be kept maintained, if we transmit it, true for German and U.S. history of fascism alike. We owe a debt of gratitude to individuals as well as organizations who engage in that task.
From left to right: Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Steve Gaber, Harley’s brother, Christina Ankofska. Harley Gaber installing one of his panels. photo on right courtesy Christina Ankofska.
After Gaber’s death, his friend Dan Epstein, President of the Epstein Family Foundation that sponsors this exhibition, and Steve Rees, a close friend of the Gaber family, organized the preservation of the work. Much time and resources went into digitizing, cataloguing and storage of 4.200 (!) montages (the 390 on exhibition are a subset based on prior selections by the artist.) This will enormously help curations of this body of work in the future.
Alerted by an article in the NYT about new and diverse approaches to Holocaust and genocide education at Jewish museums, Epstein and Rees (the co-manager of the project) approached a number of them to discuss the possibility of exhibiting Gaber’s work. OJMCHE, under the leadership of Judy Margles, decided to host the project. Margles was able to secure the talents of Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Executive Director of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) to act as guest curator who extended the scope of the project beyond the photomontage work. You will find interesting materials that allow glimpses of the musician and philosopher as well. Yaverbaum, in turn, received support from Gaber’s brother Steve and Harley’s former partner Christina Ankofska in exploring the art and life of Gaber.
Christina had accompanied Gaber on one of his research trips to Germany, and was present for much of his work creating his montages and preparing them for one of the few exhibits he lived to see. She told me a story that she thought encapsulated his humanism, as much a part of him as were his visionary and creative talents. They left the installation of Die Plage in L.A. (LA Times review from the year 2000 here,) long after midnight, starving. Miraculously they came upon a hot dog cart, amidst a group of unhoused people. Gaber decided: “Hotdogs for all!” and they found themselves happily gorging in famished company now generously treated in the early morning hours. A Mensch, in other words, whose memory should be a blessing. It is up to us to keep his memory and that of all who perished under fascist rule, alive. Gaber’s montages will be of great assistance in that effort.
Memorial marker at the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site. Part of the inscription for the victims, women and girls in this case, reads: “But you live as long as other humans keep you in their memory.” Many other markers are spread across the site for specific groups of victims. NON OMNIS MORIAR – I shall not wholly die. Photo Friderike Heuer
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Harley Gaber: Die Plage
October 7, 2022 – January 29, 2023
OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION 724 NW Davis Street Portland, OR 97209
Let me explain why I chose photographs of glorious sunflowers as an antidote to today’s musings about Fascism 101.
The term fascism is a derivative of fasces, a bundle of reeds that stand stiff when bound together while flailing alone, containing an axe, symbolizing the state’s power over life and death.
It was a logo for fascism in the early days. Meloni’s FdI uses a tricolor burning flame, which can be found on Mussolini’s tomb. And closer to home, a lot of neo-Nazis and other modern white supremacists have adopted the symbol of a sun wheel or black sun, used by Nazi Germany, the Nazi Party, the SA and the SS as “Sonnenrad” in their time. I figured real sunflowers, with their life-affirming color, their petals like flames, their meaning in the struggle against oppressors (think Ukraine,) and their ability to brighten our mood in dark days, would be the perfect counterbalance.
Given my mental preoccupation with the Italian elections and their potential implications for Europe, never mind the vulnerable sections of society in the country itself, I went back to Robert O. Paxton‘s 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism. It explains the distinctly 20th century political innovation (with some hints at precursors like tyranny, dictatorship and despotism) and its shapeshifting nature. Fascism has no constant doctrine, no core principles, adopting many forms to reach and exercise power, an absolute power affecting individual freedoms. The good news: he conceptualizes the rise of fascism as requiring a run through 5 stages – and only twice have all 5 been reached: in Mussolini’s rise to power and in Hitler’s regime. All other attempts have failed, and not for lack of trying.
The first stage is Protofascim. Movements arise that promise change when the population is disillusioned or upset with the failures of government and has lost trust in current leadership. Para-governmental organizations are founded that lure with a promise of brotherhood and power to make things right. Ideas often center around purity, a mythological past, and belonging. Typical examples include: encouragement of of racism which establishes an “us vs. them” (belonging and status,) touts purity (superior vs. inferior genetics,) stokes anti-Semitism which serves to establish scapegoats (international financiers…) or xenophobia (those immigrants are going to replace you) and often pursues a radical ideology regarding reproduction (more -white- babies) to enlarge a power base.
Stage 2 is Rooting. The proto-fascist movements now seek to gain footholds in local politics (School boards, Governor Races,) promising help for the disadvantaged and those who feel demoted or excluded. Eventually fascists enter national politics, making use of democracy to get voted in. Taking advantage of gridlock within 2 or more party systems in liberal democracies, the newcomers step in and are often supported by the conservative right who is willing to form alliances with far right parties in shared opposition to the dreaded Left. (Remember the very first victims of the Holocaust were persecuted Marxists.)
Stage 3 is the Acquisition of Power. It has never happened though a military coup, but through alignments and alliances with the conservative bloc within liberal democracy. The center-right underestimates the power of the far-right wing, thinking of extremists as clowns, fools or idiots, convinced they can control them. (Ask President Hindenburg or King Emanuel about that…) Before the traditional powers know it, they will have been subverted.
Stage 4 refers to the Exercise of Power. Fascists gain power through alliances with different groups, the military, parties, the church, and business leaders. As such they compromise their own “ideology,” the prior promises to help the powerless, but that does not disturb them. One of the hallmarks of fascism is that its proponents laugh at principles, much less uphold them. If working with capitalist interest or conservative elites wields power, so be it. Denial, redirection and confusion are part of the playbook.
In the interest of intermittent levity, here is a short clip of a German satire with English translations. You’ll see in a minute why I chose it.
Stage 5 is defined as radicalism or entropy – Hitler radicalized, overstretched his empire with the invasion of Russia which lead to the eventual collapse of the Reich. Mussolini could not deliver on his promises and was run out of office after the allied invasion of the South of Italy.
In Italy, but also in the US, we are seeing some of these stages unfolding in real time. Individual freedoms – bodily autonomy, the ability to choose who to have sex with or marry, when to abort, how to define ones own gender – are under attack. Racial differences are put in the spotlight and claimed to hurt the traditional segments of the population that believed itself to be at the top of the hierarchy: Immigrants are coming to take your jobs, your women, Blacks are rivals via affirmative action, usurping your college placements, etc. The radical Right is allowed to agitate against Muslims, and the media, with a wink and a nod from the center right parties for whom this serves a purpose.
A German article in the weekly Die Zeit, Boomer Fascism, alas not translated, warns of trivialization of the current developments we are seeing in Italy, Hungary, Sweden and the US. Beginning with the fact that fascism is not named, he compares the situation to a smoldering fire, with the underground ideology erupting in flames once conditions are right. According to the author, Georg Diez, the cause for these recent rightward swings lies in the long-lasting effects of the 2008 financial crash and recession, which, among others, led to unchecked privatization and subsequent obscene increases in inequality.
"As a reminder: the crisis was caused by radical deregulation, by artificial bubbles in the real estate sector, for example, by fraudulent practices, speculation, profit-seeking, greed - and the solution was to provide existential help to those who were to blame for the whole thing, while those who were the victims of the charades had to foot the bill. It was all a form of expropriation after 2008, the most massive bottom-up redistribution in such a short time. With low interest rates you couldn't help but get richer and richer in the decade that followed - if you already had money beforehand. The others sagged, more and more and more, the lower classes anyway and increasingly the middle class. Fear and tension were the result, aggression and aversion increased."
(The link to the article contains a number of books and scholarly treatises he cites, dealing with the consequence of Austerity, the hallmark of political decision making that was profoundly undemocratic. Many of the books are in English, if you are interested in further reading.)
It’s not like we shouldn’t know better. Watch (again, I presume) this American educational propaganda clip from the 1940s).
In memory of all those who knew to accept the suffering and death with courage and dignity.
This plaque hangs on the wall of the Holocaust museum at the site of the former Concentration Camp Risiera de San Sabba, in Trieste, Italy. I don’t have to tell you why I am thinking about it and all the other impressions gained during my last visit to Italy in 2018. We owe the victims of fascism to sound the alarm.
I am not sure what is worse, the outcome of this weekend’s Italian elections, with historically low participation due to bad weather as much as disillusionment by younger voters who stayed home, or the white-washing of the result we see in the international media. The right-wing bloc composed of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), the right-wing Lega and the centre-right Forza Italia performed as predicted, with FdI leader Giorgia Meloni likely to become the next prime minister.
Meloni is a true heir to Mussolini, and no claims of “post-fascism, breaking the glass ceiling as a woman, she is no tyrant, nothing much will change for Italy since they always vote out those who underperform,” or any of the other softening assurances can hide the factual truth: the Italian voters opted for a self-proclaimed fascist, surrounded by other extremists and abetted by a center-right coalition that wanted power. I think the worst statements for me were by those who had always insisted that there is no chance for a revival of fascism (in Europe or elsewhere) and then, seeing the results, refer to the democratic process that led to right-wing power, essentially saying: “Deal with it.”
In her acceptance speech Meloni used anti-Semitic dogwhistles about refusing to be slaves to international financiers. Yesterday she proclaimed that she considers banning same-sex couples from adopting children, and possibly dissolving same-sex couples’ legal parentage over the children they’ve already adopted. Her program includes disappearing the Sinti and Roma from the street, guarded camps for illegal migrants, incarceration of leftist, and destroying the union offices. Here is an in-depth description of her rise to power and her goals.
In general, Italy is the Western country that has suffered the most severe and prolonged economic decline over the last decades other than Greece. There has been a severe downslide since the 1980s. Italians are earning less in real terms than they did in the 1990s, and large number of scientists and others in the STEM field have left the country due to lack of support. The resulting lack of development and economic stagnation is one of the key conditions that we know leads to people embracing political extremes.
Bread for the Poor
The Italian left has been fighting against each other instead of forging a coalition that would have provided a chance to garner enough votes. It is also the case that the Italian roots of fascism have not been historically worked through, in contrast to, say, Germany, which has tried to analyze and understand the causes for the catastrophe the nation unleashed on the world. Italian voters might have opted for change, rather than the ideology underlying Meloni’s power book. But that does not solve the problem that once in power, these ideologies can quickly turn the world into chaos. Particularly when they are part of an international alliance that mutually reinforces each other, with Victor Urban and Steve Bannon, for example, being declared allies of Meloni.
Trieste itself has a complex history, a place apart under various occupiers, and one that had a complicated relationship with its Slovenian neighbors and part-time occupiers, with lots of anti- Slav sentiment held up to today, as part of a general anti-immigrant movement that the FdI stoked and exploited. The town and harbor were a pivotal part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a link between Italy, Central Europe and the Balkans. There were violent liberation movements at the beginning of the 20th century, and the US and Britains who controlled Trieste after WW II only gave it back to Italy in 1954, when they were sure it would not fall in then Communist Yugoslavia’s hand.
Trieste was a magnet for intellectuals, with James Joyce, who lived and wrote here for years, still reigning supreme on the literary tourist circuit, next to Italo Svevo. Their commemorative busts have recently gotten dubious company: in 2019 the city erected a statue of Gabriel d’Annunzio, a nationalist who openly inspired fascism and is claimed as a hero by the extreme right. Last year, Trieste was a hotbed of Covid-deniers and demonstrations against vaccination. As a consequence, the city suffered a large number of infected and a serious crisis at the local hospitals.
Historically the city was a symbolically crucial site for Italian nationalism as a laboratory and showcase for fascism, with new buildings erected on a massive scale and fascist agitators shipped in from other parts of the country to encourage the movement’s development there in the 1930s. The central part of the town is a tourist hub, with loads of visitors from cruise ships roaming the small streets and large plazas; the neighborhoods up the hills get quickly less picturesque, with poverty visible in the outskirts.
Mussolini himself visited in September 1938 and announced in a rousing speech, delivered at the Piazza Unità, the promulgation of the racial laws.
He sanctioned the complete expulsion of Jewish citizens from civil society. In 1943, he was toppled after the successful Allied invasion of southern Italy, but the northern half of the country was now occupied by its Nazi “allies.”
Trieste and the province of Fruili became part of the Reich, forcibly tugged back into their pre-1918 alignment with central Europe. It was the Nazis who converted an urban rice processing plant, the Risiera di San Sabba, into a transit camp, with indications that it was also intended from the start as a death camp, the only one actually inside an Italian city, within earshot of the population. Ovens designed for drying rice provided a ready-made infrastructure for a new, grimmer, purpose.
Prisoners held at San Sabba – some to die there, some on their way to other camps across occupied Europe – ranged from local Jews to people with learning disabilities to other members of the area’s resistance to fascism, including the writers Boris Pahor and Giani Stuparich. In charge of the camp was one of Austria’s most notorious Nazis: Odilo Globočnik, the man responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Poland, among numerous other appalling crimes.(Ref.)
Here are some photographs from the memorial site – the sculpture in the right upper corner stands in place of the crematorium chimney. The torture cells were directly adjacent to those housing the inmates, leaving them exposed to the screams that would soon be their own. The majority of over 5000 deaths were cause by beatings. Beaten to death, yes. Some prisoners were shot. The neighborhood was directly adjacent, the population fully aware of what was happening. Many of those neighbors and other collaborators of the Nazis were killed and thrown into mass graves in ravines of the area by Tito and his partisans who sought revenge for the thousands of killed Slavs after 1945. The region has clearly experienced the horrors and consequences unleashed by fascism. And yet.
In last week’s elections, the Trieste region voted for the right wing bloc (FdI, League and Forza) by close to 50%.
We can’t despair, but we can’t ignore the developments either. Here is the partisans’ song.
Note to Self: The strength of right wing movements in Hungary, Sweden, and now Italy (and potentially in our own country come election time) should propel us to examine the link between fascism and capitalism. Can’t do that in the framework of a blog, alas. But will write about the stages of fascism next time.
Not sure how many people would agree with this sentiment found on Oregon City’s Willamette Terrace walkway. But I do believe we can all agree that the city, some 30 minutes south of Portland, is extremely polite. There is a welcome sign, wherever you turn.
You get encouraging advice (if I only knew what “there” is…)
perhaps leading to Eternal Impact, equally mysterious,
or fortification at the end of the road (the fountains themselves long dried out.)
Jokes aside, there is history wherever you look, preserved and displayed in public and museums. A lot of it can be found just looking at the buildings, the murals, the signage they offer, or the names they chose for their establishments.
Jail cells at the end of the alley center top – Masonic Temple center bottom. Municipal elevator from one level of the city to another.
Arch Bridge and original marker
I had come to Oregon City to look at the work of several artists displayed for the day at the Stevens Crawford Heritage House, another place where you can learn about the past. It was empty (still my condition to go inside in public places) on an early Saturday afternoon before a gathering organized by Art in Oregon to celebrate local artists and their work.
This is a collage made of paper clippings by one of the early inhabitants of the house – art always having been present, it seems.
The Craftsman American Foursquare House was built in 1908, and made into a museum after the last owner passed in 1968 and donated the property to the Clackamas Historical Society. It is furnished and equipped with everything original to the period, transporting you into the past. A large room on the ground floor has now been made in to the Mary Elizabeth Gallery, with local art hung there and in upstairs spaces as well.
On view were paintings by Kelsey Birsa, her Livingroom series containing a number of works dealing with the psychological effects of the pandemic and her ways of coping with it. One of the colorful attention magnets was a wall paper she created to reflect the garden surrounding the gallery, one of the few spaces to interact socially given the threat of infection. Her oil paintings, sometimes with added media, gold leaf, newspaper clippings or fabric draped over, were hung on top of the colorful background.
Kelsey Birsa Coping Mechanisms (2020)
Kelsey Birsa Here (2019)
Upstairs you could see some of Natalie Wood’s photographs,
Natalie Wood Were such her Silver Will (2019)
On display for the day were also the work of Clairissa Stephens, in the process of setting up her delicate botanical drawings with silverpoint on a gesso-like underpainting, from ink and pencil sketches.
All three of the artists had participated at some time or another in Art in Oregon‘s unique opportunity to spend a one-month residency at the Heritage House to work on their art in solitude. They are granted 24 hour access to a studio room and facilities (although they cannot live in the house,) in exchange for 20 hrs. of volunteer services at the museum. The Mary Elizabeth Gallery offers a chance to show work at the end, but is not exclusively slated for residents. The next exhibition, for example, is comprised of a huge variety of local talent, opening on September 23, 2022. The Ghost Showfeatures Alycia Helbling, Autumn Cornell, Don Hudgins, Elliott Wall, Erik Sandgren, James Dowlen, Jennifer Viviano, Kelly Shannon Chester, Kristin Neuschwander, Laura Weiler, Leslee Lukosh, Leslie Peterson Sapp, Nanette Wallace, Owen Premore, Tim Dallas – quite a range of divergent styles and media.
Mary Elizabeth Gallery
603 6th St. Oregon City, OR 97045
September 23 - November 1, 2022
RECEPTION: Friday, October 14, 6-9pm
Open on Halloween: 4-7pm
Gallery hours : Friday-Saturday 10-4pm
***
I am regularly drawn back to Oregon City because of the river, the falls, and the not-so-distant past that still affects a complicated presence. The industrialization of the place provided homes and work for many colonial settlers, while displacing the tribes who lived on the land and for whom Tumwater Falls was a place of great existential and cultural significance. A bit of a walkway can be found at the north end of the river, surrounded by informative signs and public art. A view point further south does the same and allows visitors to look at the falls from afar.
Adam Kuby and Brian Borrello are the public artist team that created the Waterfall sculpture at Willamette Terrace Walkway.
Mill after mill, using the power generated by the water for processing lumber, wool, flour and eventually paper, clogged the banks of the river and interfered with access to the falls.
Several years back I had actually participated in a walk through one of the old mills, Blue Heron Paper Company, now condemned, for an extended photoshoot that resulted in this compilation. (If you click on the book in the link and then on full view, you can scroll through the pages. Some of the resulting montages (below) were hung in a show at the Oregon City Hall.)
The site of the bankrupt paper mill, some 23 acres, was purchased in 2019 by the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, who announced the new name for the planned restoration project just 2 weeks ago: Tumwata Village. It refers to the Native name for the falls and reflects the historic tribal connection to the area. Much demolition still going on, lots of rebuilding in the future. Details can be found in a newly launched website: www.tumwatavillage.org.
The planning process itself has been complex, though. Since 2011, much debate involved historic rights, and differing visions for a development that would protect tribal history and also would allow the general public to access the falls. Under the umbrella of the Willamette Falls Legacy Project multiple constituent partners focused on a commitment to public access, environmental and cultural restoration, as well as economic development. Oregon City, Clackamas County, regional government Metro and the state of Oregon partnered with the Grand Ronde Tribe, and eventually the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs were invited by the Willamette Falls Trust, which began as the Legacy Project’s fundraising arm before expanding operations. As is so often the case in projects with numerous participants, conflicting needs, demands and eventually tensions were difficult to resolve.
This spring the Grand Ronde tribe left the project to pursue the restoration on their own propriety bordering the river directly and independently. Information about claims of conflicting interests can be found here and here, and in an OPB interview. Of importance to those of us who are not entitled to take a position, given our lack of historic knowledge and access to innumerable facts, is to remember:
“… these fractures stem from painful histories. None of these confederations, or the boundaries between them, existed before colonization. In fact, in 1855 there was only one western Oregon reservation: Siletz, which is where the tribes that became part of Grand Ronde were originally scheduled to be sent. But President James Buchanan abruptly decided to establish the Grand Ronde Reservation as a second western Oregon reservation instead of an extension of Siletz. On a foreigner’s whim, the tribes became separate peoples.
“Over the years, there’s been a lot of trauma and historical legal wrongs done to the tribes just falling out of that history.” (Ref.)
That is what I am thinking about when looking at this natural marvel, the largest waterfall in the Northwestern United States by volume, and the seventeenth widest in the world. It is 1,500 feet (460 m) wide and 40 feet (12 m) high with a flow of 30,849 cu ft/s (874 m³/s), located 26 miles (42 km) upriver from the Willamette’s mouth. Images below are from last week and from winter months, showing the effects of season on the river.
The horse-shoe shapes falls in September above, January below
The falls are one of the few remaining places to fish for lamprey eels.
September above, January below
Maybe the town itself is not one of the prettiest ever, but the nature at its doorstep is. They both hold a lot of history.
Here is what I currently listen to, water (or sea) foam, in musical form.
TO PUT IT BLUNTLY: I came for the art. Stayed for the history. And left with a mind filled with thoughts about access to education. It all started out, however, with standing at the doorstep of the wrong museum.
Leave it to me and my heat-addled brain to drive to Newport, OR to visit OSU’s current Art About Agriculture exhibit displayed at a Lincoln County Historical Society‘s venue, look up the address for something called “museum” and end up at the Society’s Burrows House. Which was closed. I rang the doorbell and a startled, but exceedingly friendly book keeper tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted. Ah, I was supposed to be at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center (PMHC) overlooking the bay and the iconic Yaquina Bay bridge!
Good thing that my ridiculously stereotypical German punctuality had left some leeway to make it in time to the appointed meetings across town with the various parties involved in my query to learn more about what’s going on in Newport, OR. Somewhat flustered, nonetheless. Soon absorbed by so much I had to take in.
Let us first look at The Sustainable Feast (August 5- September 30, 2022) a collection of artworks about food production and consumption. It was in the process of being hung by Owen Premore, Directing Curator of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, when I arrived. Curating so many diverse works across two locations (the Visual Art Center at Nye Beach is the second one) is an art in itself – the sequencing as demanding as the mounting. Premore had his work cut out for him, while also training museum staff how to hang and distribute. Consider the statistics:
Number of art submissions to the open call: 290 artworks by 91 artists. Counties represented: 12 Oregon counties, 5 Washington counties, and Kaua’I County in Hawai’i. Artworks selected for inclusion in the tour by a blind jury: 59 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at PMHC: 49 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at VAC: 12 artworks by 12 artists
Quite a feat.
I will then turn to what I learned about the Maritime Center and its new Executive Director, Susan M.G. Tissot, appointed at the beginning of May, who gave me the grand tour of the building, related its history and provided much food for thought. Finally I will fill you in with what’s new at Newport’s Visual Arts Center, which is also exhibiting some of the Sustainable Feast‘s displays in the Upstairs Gallery (August 5 to 28, 2022) and has new leadership as well. Yes, it was a full day. Glorious, too.
***
FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS, OSU’s College of Agricultural Science has called on local artists to submit work that helps bring people closer to agricultural resources and research, increasing our understanding and valuing of agriculture, diversity of approaches and innovation in our food system. At its core it is an educational mission, one made possible by significant resources put into the Art in Ag production, including helping the annual show tour across the state for maximal access for visitors. Included is the acquisition of jury-selected art works for the University’s Permanent Collection, which at this time holds fiber arts, mixed media assemblages, paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and works on paper including drawings, photographs, and prints. Permanent collection displays can be found across the state, including at the OSU campus in Corvallis, the Oregon Housing and Community Services in Salem, and the Oregon Food Bank and Wheat Marketing Center in Portland.
The current exhibition shows a wide array of media, and ranges from mediocre to stellar exhibits, a fact I found particularly appealing: this is not an elitist display, but a cross section of artists of all levels interacting with nature, their eco systems, the way food is processed and problems or successes associated with issues related to agriculture. Rather than being in awe, the visitor is drawn in, recognizing our own place and time, exposed to art that is quietly accessible.
I am featuring below selected works that give an impression of the range of media and topics. Go visit the exhibition to get the full sense of artistic talent!
Toni Avery Grey Skies,Golden Fields Acrylic
As a photographer I was of course drawn to particularly strong work by Loren Nelson, David Schaerer, and someone new to me, Craig J. Barber. Whether you depict the simple beauty of a vegetable,
Loren Nelson Bent Pepper, 1999 Black&White Photograph, Archival Pigment Print
or the interaction with the land,
Dave Schaerer Commercial Clam Diggers 2 2012 Digital photographic print
often made harsh by working conditions under a system that has not been kind to or even exploitative and harmful to those it hires, the photographs engage the viewer to think through the issues. This is particularly relevant in a year where farm workers in Oregon, most of them Latinos, have finally been granted overtime pay, something they had been excluded from since the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Since June and July, Oregon also has new OSHA state rules that protect workers when temperatures soar beyond 80 degree or the air becomes clogged with wildfire smoke.
Craig J. Barber Trimming Rhubarb Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
The heat protections require employers to allow workers to take paid breaks to get relief from the heat, provide access to shade areas outdoors and an adequate supply of drinking water, have a heat illness prevention plan and to gradually introduce workers to high temperatures. Some 87.000 farm workers, independent of immigration status, construction workers, forestry professionals, highway workers, and utility personnel will be protected. (Ref.)
Craig J. Barber Hooking Up an Irrigation Hose Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
My eye was caught by a mixed media exhibit by a local Newport artist that teemed with detail, helping us understand the biodiversity required for healthy soil.
Carol Shenk Healthy Soil Biodiversity Mixed media – Details below
My interest was piqued by a mixed media installation that informed, in rebus-like fashion, about animal husbandry and intergenerational transfer of knowledge on a Central Oregon sheep farm in Crook County.
Andries Fourie Powell Butte Romneys Mixed media
There was fiber art,
Sheryl LeBlanc Eat Uni and Help the Kelp Fiber arts
unusual bead work,
A. Kimberlin Blackburn A Farmer’s Life with Luna at the Waterfall 2022 Glass beads, acrylic, thread and up-cycled ceramics
gorgeous sculpture of fungi,
Hsin-Yi Huang The Magnificent Fungi 2022 Porcelain fired to Cone 8 in oxidation atmosphere
and a cabbage.
Crista Ames Unfurl Ceramic: stoneware
There was whimsical work combining installation and photography (all the vegetables were photographed at markets by the artist.)
James Erickson Singer Farms Mixed media sculpture
Video installation could be found next to traditional paintings.
Katy Cauker Orchard Late Summer – Carpenter Hill 2022 Acrylic on Canvas
Julia Bradshaw Cafeteria 2022 – Video, Chafing Dish, TV Monitor – you saw empty dishes moving along an assembly line inside the chafing dish, clever.
Mabel Astarloa Haley Decay 2 2022 Oil
***
THE EXHIBITION AT THE MARITIME CENTER is located in the Mezzanine, a space recently refinished, plied with soft carpeting to shelter from uneven floor planks, equipped with beautiful exhibition panels, and with a professional lighting system that tells you right off the bat that Susan Tissot is not a woman of half measures. If something needs done, it will get done right.
30 years of experience in the museum world, including 19 years as Executive Director at different institutions across the western states and Hawai’i, have produced an accumulated knowledge base and varied skill set (think fundraising, grant writing, and above all museum development) that are surely needed in the current situation: cultural institutions all over the place have been battled by economic factors, the closures and difficult working conditions due to the pandemic, with non-profits some of the hardest hit.
What stood out to me in our interaction, though, was Tissot’s infectious enthusiasm for education and her curiosity in conversation. Here was a woman who could have simply made a sales pitch to get her institution on the map – plenty of positive features to highlight, intriguing history of the building to report, neat stuff to show. All of which she did, mind you – I now know the history of a house built by wealthy entrepreneurs, converted into nightclubs and restaurants, and eventual transformation of this beautiful space with its breathtaking views into the current historical center.
The Doerfler Family Theater, for example, is in the building’s basement. There you can directly choose which of 12 short documentaries you would like to see. It also serves as an auditorium for a variety of performances and belongs on a long list of things that hold much potential for this venue. The varied engagement of community members is formidable. To mention just a few, the Board President and retired Director of the Port of Toledo, Bud Schoemake, spent the last 18 years working tirelessly on the building and also oversaw project management of the mezzanine remodel.
Jo An McAdams, the Board Secretary has also been very involved; she is a USCG wife whose husband was a Master Chief. Jo An got the USCG in Newport to help the PMHC do some heavy lifting getting the new exhibit panels here and up on the mezzanine from the shop in Toledo. Joe Novello, a retired US Coast Guard, educator and author who runs the Toledo Community BoatHouse worked with Schoemake on the exhibit panels. Art exhibits are lined up for the near future that will speak to a variety of interests and regional strengths.
The work of three Northwest artists, Cascade Head artist Duncan Berry’s Gyotaku printing on wood panels, McMinnville artist Andy Kerr’s wildlife painting on wood panels and Lincoln City artist Nora Sherwood’s bird illustrations on paper are pretty striking.
The visual art is paired with objects from the museum’s collection, taxidermy specimens including exquisite maritime birds, and a hands-on opportunity that includes wildlife pelts for kids of all ages, courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Tissot very much wants to provide occasions for the general public, children included, that allow people not just to experience wonder or surprise, but that makes them ask questions, the very first step to become more engaged, be it in science or art.
Not the easiest thing to do, when your institution runs on a staff of 5, and is physically slightly removed from the tourist strip that is Bay Boulevard in Newports’ Historic district, if only by a few steps up a staircase, or a driveway that leads to plenty of free parking behind the building. That distance is enough to have people blindly walk by, not aware of what one misses. I, too, plead guilty of not even knowing about the PMHC, despite annual pilgrimages to Newport with the kids, who would have just loved, loved, loved this museum. (Here, by the way, is an online resource for maritime institutions nationally that you can visit, virtually in may cases. Use it as a teaser and then explore the real thing in Newport!)
Andy Kerr Owl Painting on Wood
Here is an interview where Tissot explains the plan for public programs. Still to come are a free Exhibit Art Talk on August 21, 1-3 pm about how nature is used as inspiration for art with artists Duncan Berry and Nora Sherwood. They also discuss the reasons why they focus on the subject. And on Sunday August 28, 1pm, Skyler Gerrity, Assistant District Wildlife Biologist, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, will be at the PMHC to give a presentation on How to live peacefully with our local black bears.
***
I RECENTLY LISTENED TO AN INTERVIEW with Heidi Zuckerman a young American leader in contemporary art, formerly a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Berkeley Art Museum. As CEO and Director of OCMA/The Orange County Museum of Art in California, she is building a new, ground-up project with Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thom Mayne, as well as producing podcasts featuring conversations about art. She talked about her three criteria for a successful institution that serves the public (other than free access which is only a possibility if you have a wealthy and generous donor base. One should be so lucky.) She listed:
1) looking back to look forward – have history as a guide.
2) be mindful of place – anchor yourself locally and within the specifics of your time (awareness of what Covid has done to us and institutions was one example she used.)
3) caring and sharing – be aware of the needs of the community you want to reach, and approach them, invite them, engage them where they are, rather than expecting them to find their way to you.
I was thinking that Tissot’s approach to her work – and partially what PMHC has done since its inception – really fits with these criteria, biding well for the institution. History is preserved, explored, taught; it is anchored in place, focussing on local needs, interests and struggles. (One of her biggest achievements, in her own words, for example, was support for an oral history program (Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai’i at Manoa) that taught younger generations of Hawai’ians about the devastation and horrors of previous tsunamis destroying the islands.) And she is a conversational partner, caring and sharing indeed, not just a representative of an institution, but voicing interest in her interviewer and taking time to discuss shared concerns about how art can be of help in education. She was clearly curious about who she interacted with, something that happens rarely in my reporting experience.
Let’s help keep the PMHC afloat!
***
THE NEWPORT Visual Arts Center, my last stop for that day, has seen its share of challenges as well. After admiring the Sustainable Feast artworks displayed in the Upper Gallery (selective images are posted below,) I was sitting down with Sara Siggelkow, OCCA Arts Education Manager, well known for her important role in Newport’s paper book arts festival, and OCCA Executive Director Jason Holland, who arrived in 2020 after 18 years of experience in various roles at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California.
The Covid pandemic had a huge impact on the institution given that educational classes and camps could not take place, and performances at the Performing Arts Center had to be canceled. At this point the institution operates with 50% of the original staff, a large decrease for an organization and a major upheaval for those who lost their jobs, some permanently, in a small community where the arts are likely not hiring for some time to come. Lay-offs are always difficult, but particularly jarring when alternative options are slim.
Holland emphasized how much flexibility is needed and day-to-day decision making required to adapt to new and ever changing circumstances. He was excited to be joined in this venture by a new Director of the Visual Arts Center. Ceramic artist Chasse Davidson who operated Toledo Clayworks from 2015 thru 2020, served as Toledo Arts Guild President 2014-2015, and has participated in the Newport Visual Art Center’s Steering Committee since 2020, will join the staff.
Robin Host Crab Season 2022 Acrylic and Paper Collage on Panel
Bill Marshall Quamash 2022 Watercolor
Lisa Brinkman Sophia’s Garden 2022 Eco-prints of sumac, eucalyptus, and maple, cold wax and oils on raw silk canvas
I was fully familiar with the important role the VAC plays for Oregonian artists as a place to exhibit art. I knew much less about its role in education, beyond my general knowledge of summer camps and year-round classes. Both Holland and Siggelkow reported on their venture with the Oregon CoastArt Bus, a vehicle that literally brings art to the people, instead of people to the arts center. Or, to be more precise, brings the chance of making art and thus involvement in art to those who might be stuck in their communities due to lack of transportation, funding, or simply information.
Oregon Coast Council for the Arts is pleased to announce the creation of a new mobile arts-learning platform—The Oregon Coast Art Bus, which will bring creative learning projects to students throughout Lincoln County this summer and beyond. The project has been funded by the K-12 Summer Learning Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation and is designed to address the “opportunity gap” associated with educational challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Oregon Coast Art Bus’s summer initiative will focus on under-served youth populations. The Bus event will be free and families are encouraged attend.
The bus comes equipped with an arsenal of tools to introduce a theme, parks at the local library, or a box store parking lot, or a sports field, and everyone can come and participate. For the last round it was printing of nature’s bounty. Planned for the next round are geometric shapes. Struck me as a splendid idea, and I wonder how many counties in Oregon could copy that approach to help children find access to and grow an interest in art. Here is a detailed article on the project published in Oregon Arts Watch last year.
Looking forward, concerned with place and sharing and caring here as well. Art is in good hands at the Oregon coast. A sustainable feast with our continued support.
Artwork by a child participating in the activities offered by the Art Bus crew.
And finally a note to my regular readers: I will take the rest of the month off, an earned break!, see you in September.
Do you know that moment when you read something and all of a sudden things fall into place, finally a factual reason given that validates previous amorphous feelings? So it was when I read an essay by Brian Sawers in The Atlantic about the origins of trespassing laws, which I’ll summarize below. My inkling that trespassing signs are an expression of power structures more so than a desire to simply protect property, on land and water, was confirmed when I learned about the legal history.
Photographs today are of various fences, keeping people out, as it were.
As one might expect, the history is not pretty. But makes so much sense when you consider the consequences of the abolition of slavery. The criminalization of trespassing started in earnest after the end of the Civil War, starting in Southern states. Punishment for trespassing was seemingly race neutral, but it was very severe. Alabama, for example, applied a penalty of three months’ hard labor. Florida allowed 39 lashes in punishment for trespassing.
What was going on?
Labor control, that’s what was going on. The biggest problem, as the plantation owners and former slaveholders insisted themselves, was to force freedmen into work during the times of Reconstruction. Black Code laws, affecting the (former) slave population were suspended by Union commanders. Under them, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. So how would you get people to work if you lost those threats, in an economy that was based on hard field labor that no-one else wanted to do?
Simple, make it so that the former slaves had no independent access to food or others means of survival, so that they were forced to accept working conditions and substandard wages just to stay alive. Previously, slaves had been assigned small garden plots and permitted to forage and hunt on the plantation grounds, so that the owners could save feeding costs. It was theoretically possible for the 4 million freed slaves to go on living from the land, and selling surplus goods if foraging was successful. It had happened before – In the Caribbean Islands slaves from sugar plantations went to live in the hills, and the British colonialists had to import workers from Asia at great cost.
So hunting and fishing or grazing livestock on private land was outlawed, and labor laws and vagrancy statutes established that allowed courts “to sentence to hard labor “stubborn servants” and workers who did not accept “customary” wages.” The threat of starvation had to hang over laborers to force them into working the fields.
One problem? Most White people also used to hunt on plantation owners’ properties, and did not want to see their traditional rights to be cut. Racist solution:
“Planters proposed and state legislatures adopted a work-around to statewide laws where possible: Many restrictive laws were enacted county by county, singling out majority-Black ones. In some counties, the new laws had to be crafted even more precisely to limit their application to parts of the county with more Black residents. If the new laws applied in areas with white residents, advocates were vocal in calling on all landowners to allow their white neighbors to continue hunting and fishing without interference.“
Northern landowners were just too happy to follow suit soon thereafter, even though labor control was a smaller issue. They did, however, felt they needed to show who was boss and in particular felt that immigrants needed to be severely controlled. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, upheld a 1909 Pennsylvania law specifically designed to stop immigrants from hunting. The state went a step further and banned immigrants from owning dogs in 1915.
Privatizing the outdoors is, of course, ongoing.
Here is an overview of some of the implications for all of us.
Occasionally, there are small victories. In a small community close to where I live, for example, the 400 acre lake in the middle of Lake Oswego, was cut off for decades from public access by the rich homeowners surrounding the water. This April, a judge ruled that Oregon’s public trust doctrine applies to Oswego Lake, and the public therefore has a right to access the lake through public parks, a sudden reversal in a longstanding battle. If it isn’t about economics, it’s about privilege. Let’s not have the plebs disturb our view, or come close to our gardens…
You might remember what I wrote about foraging and prohibited access in an earlier blog. Here is Alexis Nelson and her co-host, Yara Elmjouie, introducing us to trespassing laws in a quick video.
And for music today there is Wind in Lonely Fences by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. And First Light from the same album, AMBIENT 2.
WE LIVE IN AN ERA where the necessity to decarbonize the world’s energy has become quite clear, even if the oil and gas-based industries fight tooth and nail against abandoning fossil fuels. To mitigate a climate catastrophe, we need to turn to other, sustainable modes for generating the energy that we need. Renewable energy, solar and wind sources, might be our best alternative, but they are facing enormous obstacles, political resistance by the fossil fuel monopoly being one of them. But they also are linked to very high installation costs, a lack of infrastructure, particularly adequately sized power storage systems. Electricity generation from natural sources does not necessarily happen during the peak electricity demand hours and given the volatility in generation as well as load, storage is a huge, but expensive component. Lack of policies, incentives and regulations have not exactly encouraged investment into these alternative sources either.
No surprise then, that we hear renewed calls for nuclear power as a reliable, “clean” source for energy, often accompanied by the promise that the old days of large, risky plants and unsolved storage problems of radioactive waste are gone.
As if.
I attended this year’s Hanford Journey, a day focused on environmental clean-up. Hanford was an integral part of the Manhattan Project which produced plutonium for the first atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and released massive toxins into the ground and Columbia river where it operated. The event, sponsored by Columbia Riverkeeper and Yakama Nation Environmental Restoration Waste Management (ERWM,) made abundantly clear that nuclear waste still presents a clear and present danger to our environment and the people who live near the rivers and polluted land. We don’t even have a handle on the current dangers, and yet people are advocating for increased use of nuclear power. Some are even claiming it is our ethical obligation to promote it as the only way to combat a climate catastrophe and promising that everything will be fine with the arrival – coming soon, if you invest in us! – of small modular reactors.
I was visiting as part of a film crew exploring the possibility of making a documentary film about the current state of nuclear power development. The interest in the topic had evolved straight out of our last films, Necessity (Oil, Water and Climate Resistance//Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line) which revealed the particular vulnerability of tribal nations to environmental pollutants. (An ArtsWatch review of the films by Marc Mohan can be found here.)
Both Hanford Journey sponsors were quite helpful in providing an opportunity for all of us to learn about the history of the clean-up efforts, view the site from boat, and talk to and hear from people who are involved in the struggle. The Yakama Nation ERWM program engages in oversight of this process and issues affecting Hanford Site natural resources. Their involvement includes participation in technical, project management, policy meetings on response and natural resource damage actions, as well as oversight of cultural resource compliance. The Columbia Riverkeeper’s mission is “to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it, from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean.” The organization uses legal advocacy and community organizing in numerous conservation efforts.
Map of the Hanford Site —- Simone Anter, Staff Attorney, Columbia Riverkeeper
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, with a sense of purpose and hope delivered by multiple speakers, honoring the legacy of tribal environmental leader Russell Jim and promising to continue his mission of Hanford clean up to ensure the safety of future generations. Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section, talked about the history of the people indigenous to the region and their relationship with the river, the price they paid from the exposure to life-threatening pollutants and the governmental hesitancy to fully keep clean-up commitments.
Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section
Laura Watson, Director of the Washington Department of Ecology, evaluated how few resources are spent and how many more are needed. “The Hanford site is and remains one of the most contaminated sites in the world, and is probably the most complicated cleanup that’s ever been undertaken in human history.” Many more talked about what the situation meant for them and their families, past and present.
Kids were playing in the water, families and friends gathered for group pictures, lunch was served.
Puyallup Canoe Family
I met Ellia-Lee Jim who had been selected to be Miss ’22-’23 Yakama Nation, and chatted with Denise Reed, Puyallup and Quileutea cultural coordinator, who wore beautiful items she made with cedar weaving which she also teaches.
Ellia-Lee Jim
Denise Reed and her cedar woven hat and belt
Multiple nonprofit groups, including The Hanford Challenge and Heart of America Northwest, were on-site to educate and encourage us to become involved with ongoing advocacy efforts. A major issue right now, for example, is the Department of Energy’s attempt to reclassify high-level waste at the Hanford site to low-level waste which will allow cleanup shortcuts and unsafe disposal.
Brett VandenHeuvel, the soon-to-be-former Executive Director of the Columbia Riverkeeper (Lauren Goldberg will be his successor on August 1,) drove us from the Mattawa event site to the river, where boats, run by Tri-City Guide Service, took us out onto the Columbia and to the B reactor — one of nine plutonium reactors built at Hanford. (There was also a hike out to White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach National Monument to view the H, DR, D and F plutonium reactors, which I had to miss.)
Archeologist and ERWM advocate Rose Ferri was our guide on the boat, helping to understand the history of the Hanford Reach, one of the few remaining stretches of river where chinook salmon spawn in significant numbers, a stretch of 51 mile, to be precise, the last remaining free-flowing portion of the 1,212 miles of the Columbia.
Rose Ferri
The National Monument contains an insane number of species overall – details can be found here – all of whom depend on being protected from toxic and radioactive pollution from the Hanford site. Because Hanford is off limits to visitors, the land has been undisturbed for years, a buffer zone between ecological disaster and agricultural industries, beautiful in its sparsity.
THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE has been operating since 1943, after the forced removal of the people who lived on the 580 square miles on which 9 reactors were built. 1855 treaty rights to use the land for fishing, hunting and gathering, signed by the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Wanapum, were often not honored. During the 40 years of plutonium production, cesium and iodine were generated, and chromium, nitrate, tritium, strontium-90, trichloroethene and uranium, among others, leaked into the soil and seeped into the groundwater.
There were some single-shell underground storage tanks for the most dangerous liquids, but the rest flowed freely. The last reactor was shut down in 1987. Clean-up began – theoretically – in 1989 when the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State signed a Tri-Party Agreement. Only in the year 2000 were 2,535 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in the K Basin along the Columbia River transferred into dry storage. In the following years treatment and immobilization plants were constructed, but will only be fully operative in 2023 from last I heard. Weapons grade plutonium was transferred to South Carolina.
In 2013 we learned that the single-shell tanks leak, and 4 years later one of the PUREX tunnels containing highly radioactive waste partially collapses. Ignoring these warning signs of potential catastrophe, the U.S.Department of Energy decided on a new interpretation of which kind of waste requires most stringent storage requirements in 2019.
“…. “high-level nuclear waste” (HLW) under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) that would exclude some dangerous waste traditionally considered HLW from stringent storage requirements. For over 50 years, the term HLW, as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (AEA) and the NWPA, required the disposal of this most toxic and radioactive waste in deep geologic formations to protect public health. Energy’s new interpretation opens the door for less robust cleanup and the possibility of more waste remaining at Hanford.” (Ref.)
The Tribes and their allies continue to fight for a comprehensive, fully funded, thorough clean-up. Events like Hanford Journey are one way of getting informations out into the public, and familiarizing those of us who are able to attend and experience the landscape, with the history and the scientific consequences of delayed or compromised action. I wish that information could be even more widely spread.
***
I DROVE BACK TO RICHLAND, WA, across the Vernita bridge ,
and passed by a long stretched mountain, Lalíík, or Rattlesnake Mountain, that I had just seen from a very different perspective. I had been told it was the tallest treeless mountain in the world, sacred to Tribes in the region. It is designated a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), a property that “is eligible for inclusionn the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) based on its associations with the cultural practices, traditions, beliefs, lifeways, arts, crafts, or social institutions of a living community.“(Ref.) At least that sacred mountain had been cleaned up with funds from a 2010 Recovery Act.
The whole story concerning Hanford and the depth of its operational impact on the Tribes of the region can only be understood if you have a glimpse of what it implies for their culture, never mind their existential dependence on non-toxic fish. Is that incorporated into the narratives that are officially told? I was about to find out.
***
THE REACH MUSEUM in Richland, WA, is a beautiful new structure with a mission statement that asserts inclusivity. Open since 2014, it offers various exhibits, with a permanent one on the Manhattan Project and the Hanford enterprise among them.
The staff is super helpful and friendly, the grounds are gorgeous and represent the beauty of the region. You are greeted outside with lots of affirmative information about the “clean” source of power that is nuclear energy.
You are also immediately made aware by historic photographs of trailer parks (and a real trailer) during the peak employment years of Hanford, that the region benefitted economically during times of hardship due to work opportunities. Some 50.000 people arrived at this remote region, families included. Not a mention though, there, whether these opportunities of housing and work were available to the indigenous inhabitants who were driven from their land by the Manhattan project.
The website for the museum is richly informative and emphasizes a desire to tell stories from differential perspectives and acknowledges their Native American partners “who historically used this region—a gathering place of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Wanapum people, and the Nez Perce Tribe who cared for this land since time immemorial.”
As far as I could see, one statement poster, in a gallery that, overall, lays out the developments, successes and trials of the Manhattan Project (Gallery 2,) speaks to tribal presence. Acknowledging expulsion, but not going into anything further.
The focus is on the war effort,
the feats of engineering,
and the impact on Cold War developments.
Overall, a well designed, informative exhibition with a combination of local and (inter)national historical information.
To their credit, some safety considerations are mentioned, however mostly regarding the workers in an environment that was experimental in its newness, with less attention to the continuing concerns. The printed and easily accessible materials in this room were quiet about the continuing poisonous legacy and unsolved problem of long-term nuclear waste storage, however, unless I missed something, which was of course entirely possible after a long, intense day.
What would Albert think?
If you check out the educational resources on their website, the topics of Shrub – Steppe and Geologic Past are fabulously covered. In detail, comprehensive, engaging. The topics of the Hanford Legacy and Columbia River Resources are announced to be coming soon. Given the centrality of those topics as well as the controversy attached to them, in some ways, I wondered why they have not yet been designed. Your guess is as good as mine.
I have no intention to diss a museum I rather liked. I am fully aware how hard it is, particularly during this pandemic, to keep small institutions alive, much less current. But my question about how information about the continual danger of toxic environments, long-term storage of radioactive waste and un-remediated injustice of treaty betrayals reaches the mainstream, remains. This is particularly important now that calls for renewed efforts and investments into nuclear energy are getting louder. It might, or might not be a solution to our energy woes – decisions have to be based on knowledge of all the facts, though. Columbia Riverkeeper and tribal ambassadors work hard and, undoubtedly, effectively in many regards to spread the word. It is time, that the rest of us follow suit.
A shoutout! An accolade! Kudos! Applause! Today’s photographs are dedicated to all who have worked behind the scenes to participate in, prepare for and support Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project in ways large and small.
Maryhill Museum
Beyond the involved community partners there are staff, there are people who host artists in residence, there are folks who compute and design the technical specs of the structures under the windy conditions of the bluff, there are drivers willing to transport the frames. Three Cheers!
Their numbers pale, though, in comparison to the number of people who, across the nation, have become involved in contributing to another part of this fiber art celebration: the yarn bombing of the museum site and creating remembrance poppies for Stonehenge, a World War I memorial that is part of Maryhill Museum.
Crafted squares echoing Romanian folk patterns decorate the outside of the museum, repository of many donations from Queen Marie of Romania, delivered during her visit for the inauguration of the museum in 1926. Queen Marie’s gift of Romanian textiles provided the basis for a collection of Romanian folk dress that now includes 400 items. The creation below was still to be hung at the museum entrance when I visited.
I think Queen Marie (2nd from left) would approve!
Yarn bombing on trees and structures in the surrounding park also pick up the Romanian folk theme, as well as that of poppies to which I will come shortly.
Louise Palermo, Curator of Education, putting finishing touches on the yarn bombing.
Traditional Romanian dolls celebrating spring, called màrtisors.
***
Imagine being a committed pacifist, a Quaker, desiring to build a utopian Quaker community in the middle of nowhere, setting a faux French mansion on the top of a windy bluff towering above the river, and not a Quaker shows up. Imagine tearing down an inn you built in a small hamlet that burned, in order to establish a full-sized Stonehenge replica as a memorial to the futility of war. All based on the wrong idea that you somehow took home from a 1915 visit to England, that Britons used Stonehenge as a spot for bloody sacrifice to the Gods of war.
Imagine the realization that local stone is not up to the task and so you improvise with slabs of reinforced concrete, made to look lumpy by lining the wooden forms with crumpled tins. That’s Sam Hill for you, the visionary and founder of Maryhill Museum, a man who promoted modern roads across the Pacific Northwest and who made a fortune with utilities and railroads. Unstoppable in pursuing his dreams, a strange brew of steely pragmatism and utopian ideas. Providing us with a remarkable legacy.
Stonehenge was the very first War Memorial to World War I in the United States, finalized in 1929, with an altar plaque dedicated already in 1918. Hard for me to find echoes of pacifism in the original plaque:
To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.
Back to our unsung heroes, though: the nameless volunteers. They have knit and crocheted countless poppies, remembrance symbols for the fallen, poppies which are now attached, sown on by hand(!) by yet another group of supporters onto netting covering the stones around Stonehenge. Needed to defy the harsh winds on top of the promontory.
Vonda Chandler, a long standing volunteer at Maryhill was a major support and inspiration for this project, at least one name I was able to glean. Another was Gavin McIlvenna, the Society of the Honor Guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-founding President, who sent an email to the President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, receiving coast-to-coast responses, and some even from Belize.
The museum posted on Facebook as did Maryhill’s Curator of Education, Queen of the Poppies, Lou Palermo, activating a wide-flung net of contacts in the museum and crafts world. Bravo!
Lou Palermo, Curator of Education, Maryhill Museum
This is the current state of affairs, with more packages and boxes arriving daily, a treasure trove of fiber art, poppies filling each parcel. All in need of unpacking and mounting….
The symbol of the poppy has its origins in a poem written by one of the soldiers in the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a brigade surgeon.
The war-ravaged landscape of Western Europe sprouted these flowers, really a plant classified as a weed, red like the blood that had been so senseless spilled. And the emotional impact of the words, soon published in both Europe and the U.S., had people on both sides of the Atlantic decide to wear fabricated poppies as a sign that the fallen would not be forgotten.
In Europe, Anna Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. Here is a detailed, moving description of her single-minded efforts with archival photographs of many of the original creations. Millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
On this side of the Atlantic we had calls for remembrance as well, although people wear the poppies on Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, vowed to wear red poppies and to produce and sell them for proceeds supporting returning war veterans. Michael’s autobiographic writings and a time line of the adoption of the symbol across the world can be found here.
***
I was looking around at the landscape so beloved by Sam Hill, Mt. Hood visible from Hill’s last resting place slightly below Stonehenge. Thinking about the fact that wars, and the horrors and loss they inflicted, are not a thing of the past. They have continued across the world, often in places foreign to us and thus more easily ignored but for the soldiers and their families who fought them. Got physically or psychologically maimed in them. Died in them.
We now see a war again, on Eastern European fields that sprout poppies, in Ukraine. Even that war, just a few months old, has already slipped from our attentional radar, as much as we are preoccupied with political upheaval and judicial assaults closer to home.
As the outpouring of fiber art poppies for the museum project confirms, that is not the case for the many volunteers for whom these symbols likely have personal significance. They honor the dead. They miss the dead. They cannot escape the trauma instilled by war that trickles down across generations. Louis Menand’s words come to mind, describing what significant memorial art does:
“It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die.”
***
On the walkway leading up to Maryhill Museum’s front doors you can spot a sculpture by James Lee Hansen. The bronze is part of his Missive series, which depicts tektites, small meteors, on the front, with some abstract embryonic form on the back. The series incorporated ideas from a book, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision(1950), which advanced the theory (scientifically debunked since) that cataclysmic events in our solar system changed Earth’s orbit and axis and caused numerous catastrophes that were recounted worldwide in mythology and religion. The sculptor himself wrote the stanza above, talking about a missile. (He has a book New Totems and Old Gods a well as another one, Missive Poems, related to this series.)
James Lee Hansen Missive (1976)
I don’t know about missiles bringing life. Perhaps they might, if arriving from outer space. Seems to me they bring death, and death only, when launched by our own planet’s warmongers. The many, many contributors to the poppy project for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project remind us of this.
Let their remembrance be a force for peace.
Let the rememberers be recognized.
————————————————————————
THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
It was early Saturday morning, heat already rising before 8 o’clock, when I drove through an eerily empty industrial landscape, filled with discarded machinery along railroad lines, dusty and bleak. Then came a long stretch of undeveloped acres of sage grass and sand, endless pylons stretching upwards into a pristine sky.
Eventually I arrived at the gate of the park that has been on my bucket list, yet another site of the Confluence Project’s art installations that, in their words, “connect people to the history, living cultures, and ecology of the Columbia River system through Indigenous voices.”
The gates of Sacajawea Historical State Park, a 267-acre day-use park at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers near Pasco, WA, were still locked, but the sign informed me that you had to pay for access and warned of contact with birds, since avian flu has been making the rounds. A friendly caretaker let me into a green oasis of mature trees, surrounded by sparkling water, filled with bird song and not a soul in sight. I know, Saturday at 8 a.m. Probably a haven for picnics, family reunions and splashing kids come noon, for those who can afford the Discovery pass on land that was a traditional (free) gathering place for the Plateau tribes for 10 000 years. Until the Nez Perce War of 1877, that is, after which large gatherings at the confluence of the Snake River and Columbia River were no longer a possibility.
The site, a land spit reaching out into both rivers, is of historical note since Lewis & Clark and their Corps of Discovery camped there for 2 nights in 1805 amongst gathering tribes, led to the place by a young Lemhi-Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who served as translator, guide and life saver to the expeditions because of her ability to secure plant food when hunting was scarce and her function as token to announce peaceful intentions – the presence of women was a sign that it was not a war party. (I am using the spelling that is now assumed to be the correct one, but left it as is in the name of the park. I am also hoping to write about how she and her role is perceived by Native Americans at a later point, having learned that it is complex.)
In any case, fast forward to 1927, when colonial settlers, the railroad and saw mill industries were firmly established in Pasco. The Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington, an organization with the purpose to “preserve the history and perpetuate the sentiment relating to pioneer days in the State of Washington, including historical sites, documents, records, and relics,” decided to celebrate the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea’s contributions by placing a marker with granite slabs and river stones and build a park around it.
They planted trees, (with later WPA funded development adding over 200 shrubs and 500 trees, American and European sycamore, Norway and silver maple, sweet gum, American linden, black and honey locust, oak, black cottonwood, Lombardy poplar, Russian olive, blue spruce, and several species of pine among them.
Four years later, the group deeded the property to the State Parks Committee, and the transfer initiated more building and improvements. Central to the park named for her is the Sacajawea Interpretive Center, built in in Art Moderne style 1938/40. The museum features interactive exhibits on the Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea and the Sahaptian-speaking tribes of the region, and was still closed when I visited the park. Interpretative signs across the park as well as objects and structures outside inform about some of the history of the site.
I had come for something else, however: Maya Lin‘s seven Story Circles, which invite us to understand the site from a very different perspective, that of those driven from it.
I had just arrived in the U.S. in 1981 when the controversy around Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial erupted. Opponents referred to the wall as an “open urinal,” suggested, for an inscription, the words “Designed by a gook,” and described Lin’s memorial as “a black gash of shame.” The National Review referred to Lin’s design as “Orwellian glop.” Tom Wolfe and Phyllis Schlafly called it “a monument to Jane Fonda.” Ross Perot said that it was “something for New York intellectuals.” (Ref.) Her design, sunken into the ground, consists of black granite slabs inscribed with the names of the dead and missing, but her critics managed to dilute the powerful work, with Veteran organizations, her supposed allies, caving: representational statues were added later, although at some distance. I was in awe how such a young woman could hold her own against powerful force; I was also taken by a design that made you not look up at a sculpture in admiration of particular persons or actions, as so much of the German memorial scene at the time consisted of.
Lin’s reaction and her path forward were captured some years back (2009) in a terrific essay based on interviews by Portland writer Camela Raymond in Portland Monthly. By the year 2000 Lin had turned to the Confluence Project, a series of six outdoor installations at points of historic interest along 300 miles of the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the State of Washington. A collaboration with other artists, architects, landscape designers and the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest, it served her interest in what she calls “memory work,” aimed, in her words, at inspiring reflection of the past, rather than simply mourning what’s lost. In some ways it is a project concerned with restoration instead. Finished projects include, at this date, Cape Disappointment State Park, the Vancouver Land Bridge, the bird blind at Sandy River Delta, Chief Timothy Park, and the Story Circles that I was now seeing for the first time.
“Seven cut basalt circles are laid out in the park and etched with texts taken from tribal stories, Lewis and Clark’s journals, and Yakama elders that explore the native cultures, language, flora, fauna, geology, and natural history of the site. Each of the circles graphically describes a different aspect of this place: the types of fish, native plants gathered, traded goods, the geology of the place, the mythic creation story of the place and at the southern-most tip, a listing of all the tribes who came through the area placed within the only form, not of a circle but of the imprint of a traditional long house that was the architectural form used for their lodge-style meetinghouses.”
What is most striking is how little these structures command attention and how much they have you focus on the environment as a whole. Whether sunk or elevated, they are “down to earth,” blending with the land, reminding us of peoples for whom the connection to land is central to their beliefs and culture and for whom the forced removal from their land is a central trauma across generations.
They allow room to be exposed to other factors shaping the environment as well, the industries and man-made structures that surround what was once a site for tribal gathering, exchanges, trade and celebrations. They make you move around, from one circle to the next and around them, to read the inscriptions (in language that did not rely traditionally on the written word,) with each move opening up different vistas. You will see pelicans, fishermen, the local bridges and, lucky me, wild turkeys in “let’s impress” mode.
It is a hallmark of all of the sites I have seen so far that they combine the beauty of an idea or a work or art with some functionality, always educating about what was encountered at the time of the Corp’s arrival, from the perspective of those displaced. The fish-cleaning table at Cape disappointment is a central concept to all the Salmon people, but it can – and is! – also be used for the actual gutting. The bird-blind at 1000 acres has the names of the bird-, fish and animal species encountered by Lewis & Clark at the time engraved on its walls; these walls consist of open slats, though, that allow the environment, the river, the woods, the sounds of the birds to be present for your senses, speaking to continuity.
The erasure of memory that is often concomitant to the forced dissemination of a people is given a counter weight in this land art. The Confluence Project goes beyond that link to the past, however. They have an incredible education library that connects to detailed information for each site. For Sacajawea State Park, for example, you can learn about the history and the environmental concerns from multiple compilations. Besides sections for History and Ecology there is much material on Living Culture, informing about indigenous life ways, sovereignty, tribes today and offering an interview collection.
You can also learn about the consequences of the structural hierarchies that resulted from settler colonialism extending into the present. Here is just one example, from a Confluence podcast featuring three Indigenous scholars and activists, Bobby Conner, Emily Washines and Deana Dartt, discussing the memorializing of history. I learned that the scientific assessment of acceptable toxicity levels of the water in the Snake and Columbia river (both polluted by run-off from the nearby Hanford nuclear reactors and threatened by an underground plume of radioactivity,) is based on the amount of salmon consumed by non-Native Americans. That amount is a minute fraction of what tribal members consume whose diet and culture centers around fish. Toxicity rises to levels that induce cancer and other health problems for this previously healthy population whose dietary customs, driven by economic necessity as well, were not factored into the equations.
It is not all about the past. It is about the long shadows reaching into a present which has not been freed from structural and systemic factors that affect the very existence of the tribes of the Plateau. A shift from White to non-White perspective incorporated in the way that the Confluence Project and Lin’s art tell stories alerts us to the connections across time. We have to show up, though, and listen. If necessary, on a Saturday, early in the morning, spared all distractions.
I was driving back home along Highway 14, parallel to the river, renewable energy sources in sight, but also the dams that so dramatically altered the landscape and the life of its inhabitants. It is a blessed landscape, with all its harshness, in need to be, at least, protected, at best restored in ways that make living here long-term sustainable. For all.
