Ray E. Harrell wrote,
>Ed,
>
>Let us talk about artists. Truth and Beauty. A mirror and an ideal.
>At Kyoto it is a mirror and a stone which seems a parallel but the
>Japanese will have to tell us about that. In America it was a dark
>mirror and a clear mirror with a hole in it that spoke of the reality of
>human existence in artistic terms. Reality cannot be directly
>expressed. It can only be hinted at in metaphors of words, paint,
>sound, movement and drama. Our art is a mirror of who we are in the
>world and can be read like the book of our souls. At the same time that
>reading creates the next generation. But let us talk of the evil when
>art is abused and ignored.
>
>Hitlers and Stalins are easy targets. They "prove," as sacrifices in
>singular ways, that no matter how prejudiced, bigoted or provincial we
>are, we are not responsible for the deaths of millions, and we are
>certainly not like or responsible for the tyrants, or are we?
>
>Is it not often the little bigots, the provincial, those who create and
>denigrate the "other" group or the objectification of the "opposite"
>philosophy, religion, company or cultural group, that creates the "foot
>soldiers" for the war that murders millions of people? (War has
>practically been constant in Europe for the last five hundred years. In
>this country it was not just the physical war but all of the aspects of
>colonialism that murdered 92 out of every 100 aboriginal citizens of
>this hemisphere not counting the diminished birth rate.)
>
>In this provincial context placing blame is like shooting fish. It is
>easier to blame the leaders we call up than to blame Mark Twain or L.
>Frank ("beloved writer of Wizard of Oz") Baum whose writings reinforced
>the prejudices of the pioneers who called out the army to murder women
>and children. Baum editorialized in his newspaper the day after the
>Wounded Knee Massacre:
>>"that our only safety
>>depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians.
>>Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in
>>order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more
>>wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures
>>from the face of the the earth.
>
>Baum opened this up for us so let us examine his "artistic truth" a
>little more closely. He wrote all of this when the "Indians" had
>formed governments, had legal systems, mansions and worst of all,
>prosperity in Oklahoma. In South Dakota, it was the greed of the local
>pioneers and the collaboration of the local taxpayers "Indian Agent"
>who shipped rotten beef and "untaught" a people, that knew plenty about
>agriculture, how to do it the approved wrong way. (Read the great
>Peace Priest Frank Fools Crow's story of this time told to Thomas
>Mails) Who caused this? The government? The government's response
>was from the bigotry and voting power of their male taxpayers. The
>females traded with the Indian women for cures for their children and
>for clothing and how to collect food from the wild prairie. ("Women and
>indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915" by Glenda Riley)
>
>After the massacre the American people used it as an excuse to disband
>all of the Indian nations and homestead the rest of the land. It was so
>illegal that much of it is still in the courts 100 years later.
>Artists collaborated in building these stereotypes but was it everyone?
>
>Some of the artists like Payne and Emerson wrote of the lies and
>injustice but most artists played up the terrible danger and the wild
>countryside made unsafe for the "poor" farmers by the "terrible"
>Indians. Contrast the wild countryside peopled by dangerous tribes
>with the Thomas Orchestra from NYCity making so many tours in the 1880s
>across the U.S. that the road to the West Coast became known as the
>Thomas Orchestral highway. The Wounded Knee Massacre was in 1880.
>There were thousands of opera houses across the country with 1,300 in
>the "wild" state of Iowa. Meanwhile in Oklahoma the government Dawes
>report said (as I have printed here earlier):
>
>>"The head chief told us that there was not a
>>family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own.
>>There was not a pauper in that nation, and the
>>nation did not owe a dollar. It built its own capitol, in
>>which we had this examination, and it built its
>>schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system
>>was apparent. They have got as far as they can go,
>>because they own their land in common. It is
>>Henry George's system, and under that there is
>>not enterprise to make your home any better than that
>>of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is
>>at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will
>>consent to give up their lands, and divide them
>>among their citizens so that each can own the land he
>>cultivates, they will not make much more progress."
>
>How is it that those Indians loved opera and ballet and that in a short
>time the first five prima ballerinas in America's modern companies were
>American Indians? Something wrong here? An Osage Prima Donna in the
>Metropolitan Opera before Indians could vote or were considered adults
>under the law or could practice their religion? Unbelievable? So
>where are they now three quarters of a century later? There are some
>of us, but the money necessary for the study abroad and the development
>of the talents was stolen by the citizen pressured government who
>appointed Guardians to "shepherd" the Indians wealth because we were
>spending it on art, dance, music lessons and study abroad. (Check the
>Osage Denny MacAuliffe foreign editor of the Washington Post for the
>first hand story of this. It was his Grandmother who was murdered to
>strip the wealth from these "wasteful" Indians. Or maybe they just too
>damned competitive with the local "talents." One of which was J. Paul
>Getty.)
>
>Where did these stereotypical stories, myths, paintings and later movie
>roles come from? It was the artists, the illustrators, the commercial
>art of the day in a country that deified business. How is it that
>reality seems so at variance with these images? Consider the book
>filled with newspaper bigotry (art in America) from upstate New York
>called "Pagans in our Midst" which makes taking the humanity of the
>illustrators from the local communities around the Iroquois difficult.
>Or the sculptor of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the NY Museum of Natural
>History with the great Bigot on horseback while the Indian and Black
>walks on either side. I'm sure that Indian could have put Teddy on the
>ground with his horsemanship but that was not the point the artist was
>making.
>
>One might parallel Wagner's disdain for the Jew's musical talent with
>his hiring a Jew to conduct the premiere of Parsifal. Or the rise of
>the American Black whose talent fills the theaters, orchestras, opera
>houses and ballet companies of America in just 42 years from the end of
>segregation. Not to mention the sports figures and the CEOs in
>companies and governments. What was it that held them back? Whose
>images provided the justification for the heel on the neck of the
>African American until they excelled in WW II? Artists earning a
>living maybe? It has been so difficult to truly mirror North
>America's checkered reality that even so tepid a commercial product as
>the musical South Pacific almost lost their lease when they put in a
>song complaining against the American citizen's racism against the
>Polynesians. It is not generally known that the Jews and the Gypsies
>were so denigrated in 10th century Europe that they were hunted as game
>in some countries.
>
>Not so long afterwards and up through the 19th century, the Art of
>Europe was filled with Gypsies but none more so than the music and yet
>Bizet's Carmen opened with the critics complaining that Carmen was made
>human when the Gypsies clearly weren't so. The story was that Gypsies
>stole children when the reverse was actually societal policy in
>countries like Switzerland and elsewhere.
>
>This image led directly to Hitler's destruction of 75% of their
>population at Dachau and yet the NYTimes Critic in 1994 said that my
>inclusion of that fact in a production of Carmen, told from the Gypsy
>viewpoint for the modern audience (like Bizet did for the 19th century
>French audience) was strange, even nonsense!
>
>It was good that I had built the idea with the Romany representative
>from the UN, the same man the NYTimes used as their authority, otherwise
>the production would have failed on that idiot statement. But the
>critic was the one who was gone in a short time instead! You can't beat
>networking!
>
>But the blame is in the attitude, the inhumane artistic expression of
>life, the negation of the closeness of individuals and the inability to
>see and face our alienation and loss of empathy when the "other" pleads
>for our help and we walk away self-satisfied in our correctness. The
>mirrors (Art) that would tell them, (the ancestors) and us, who they
>were, who we are, were and are still covered with clouds.
>
>The Aztecs had a name for this cloudy mirror and his great but
>destructive beauty, they called him Tezcatlipoca and he was the
>equivalent of the Spanish Jesus. But he was the power of the night,
>(black robes), the beauty of the night and the greatest Trickster.
>Unlike the horror movie demons, he was intensely beautiful, omnipotent,
>omniscient, creative and his city was said to be the first great planned
>"municipal" city of such beauty that the Conquistadors wept when they
>realized that the people would destroy it rather than give it up to
>Spain. (To the Spanish the destruction of people was economics but the
>destruction of Art was barbaric in the mind of Cortez.) To them the
>City belonged not to men but to all of the Gods and men could not
>possess it.
>
>These are all artistic realities. The Gods were metaphors. The
>metaphorical reality of the Aztecs was essentially an Artistic world
>view something Cortez could not comprehend but when the great Albrect
>Duerer saw them he could comprehend both their monetary value and the
>metaphor:
>
>>"These things are so precious that they are valued at 100,000 guilder.
>>In all the days of my life, I have see nothing which touches my heart
>so much
>>as these for, among them I have seen wonderfully artistic things and
>have
>>admired the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed, I do not
>know
>>how to express my feelings about what I found there."
>("Cronica de la Nueva Espana", F.S. de Salazar)
>
>At once the Aztecs, (the Romans of the "New World") understood
>subtleties both economic and mathematic that the Europeans of the time
>couldn't even imagine. (The Spanish hadn't translated the concept of
>zero from the Moors by the time of Cortez while the Mayans had been
>using it for centuries. "Connections II" PBS) The Art was even more
>incomprehensible. Quetzalcoatl, whose symbol was the water clear
>mirror with a hole in it, was the opposite of the smoked mirror, the
>power of artistically true words, the breath, music but, like the
>library at Alexandria, the libraries at Tenochtitlan and Chitzan Itza
>were burned by the powers of the night and the clouded mirror. Who
>justified there superiority? Even in the 20th century an Indian bull
>fighter friend of mine was grilled by the Spanish as to his lack of
>culture for "falling to Cortez" and destroying their city.
>
>In Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries it was the great cultural waves
>that created a new war every 25 years. The Baroque Princes, the
>Classical Emperors and the Romantic Freedom Fighters murdered millions
>while their minions in the "New World" imitated their examples. The
>artists justified this and created it with their images and ideals.
>Their disconnect from the grief endemic to these cultural waves and the
>rise of technology was truly awesome. It reached the heart of the
>bizarre with the Philosopher Kierkegaard saying in the middle of a war
>that the people had become too jaded, too soft, too intellectually banal
>to care enough to have a war. (Yes he was an opera critic, as Nietzsche
>fancied himself a composer.) This from the founder of Christian
>Existentialism.
>
>The churches and ballrooms of Seville, Florence and Vienna were covered
>with the gold and silver melted down from the Art Works of the Palaces
>of the Americas. (Duerer's "wonderful artistic things") The gold
>turned from art to money went everywhere. Opera began in Florence
>with the initial capital derived from the rape of this new land.
>Duerer knew but aside from this quote hidden in an obscure text, unlike
>Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he stayed culture bound in his
>work rather than confront the immensity of the death of close to 100
>million people that their countries and continent might florish.
>
>The lack of this artistic record is a betrayal of the "Mirrors of
>Europe" to the elementary premise of their art. They went for "beauty"
>and ignored truth in return for gold. How we miss the images of this
>time being given instead the petty bankers, aristocrats and city streets
>that would later make, Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, Hitler and Stalin
>believe they could get away with their outrageous ideas. Jackson did.
>
>The later grotesqueries of Auschwitz "Freedom through Work" seems
>incomprehensible because we see the pictures of bodies and emaciated
>children and yet if that photographic mirror, that record did not exist,
>or if it was placed in a positive context, as Hitler had planned, then
>we would think differently of it, if we thought of it at all. All
>because of the artists.
>
>Have you experienced history coming terribly alive when visiting a place
>like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? The ancient works,
>ripped from their moorings, are like great cries of grief. Their
>competition between warring realities placed in single rooms together is
>unbearable when seen too often. The headaches, the search for allergy
>causing mold and a struggle to find the reason for the strange physical
>symptoms are rarely ascribed to the works themselves. But at least much
>of the horror is recorded even when being justified for some petty
>tyrant or mob's place in history.
>
>Compare it to the horror of the mountain of silver at Potosi in Bolivia,
>where over six million men, women and children were worked to death by
>the Spanish and where the traditions continue even into the present with
>no UN sanctions or protests in the Streets. Two years ago they had a
>"charming" artistic pictorial in National Geographic. Its formality
>reduced the horror to "natural history." It is amazing the attitudes
>that well articulated images can diffuse or propagate.
>
>Today's Colombian Drug Lord's ancestors were the English and Yankee Drug
>Lords who made the entire Chinese Culture their customers in opium in
>exchange for "tea for home." In America the Delanos (of Franklin Delano
>Roosevelt) buried their shame and guilt in the palaces of the New
>England Barons hidden in Atlantic Coast enclaves of the super
>wealthy. The Art and beauty of their houses in no way mirrored the
>darkness of their souls. The Mirror for them was Tezcatlipoca. The
>Artist as the Trickster, the liar.
>
>And finally:
>Should I write about Germany, Russia or North America in the present?
>Simply examine seriously the 100% Artistic employment in Nazi Germany.
>The membership in the Nazi party of Artists that have been honored into
>the late 20th century and who contributed to the positive image of the
>accomplishments of Hitler and his government. We love to be told of
>the bad art of the Nazis but how about Herbert von Karajan, Elizabeth
>Swartzkopf, Irmgaard Seefried, Walter Gieseking, Karl Orff, Anton
>Webern and on and on. All artists nurtured by the Nazi Art Ministry.
>As I mentioned earlier Strauss himself even followed it for awhile.
>Webern suffered in spite of his patriotism but he would have suffered
>here as well for basically the same reasons. This greatest of the
>abstract dodecaphonists was unpopular with the "powers that be." But
>there was a belief in all of this that their art would endure and they
>believed in the vendication of history. But for the bulk, if they were
>competant or better, they worked.
>
>Consider instead the case of the American Indian composer Jack
>Kilpatrick here in America about the same time frame. He was highly
>praised by conductors including Stokowski's statement that he was one of
>America's greatest composers. He also was a scholar of Cherokee texts
>and poetry and wrote several books on it. America basically ignored his
>music and he made a living as the Dean of Music at Baylor University up
>until his death. As a traditional Cherokee, any property that is not
>sold or given away by the time of death is considered the property of
>the spirit and is burned.
>
>Now, we have these interesting quotes by prominent musicians and the
>scholarly texts and translations but the music is silent and will always
>be. Cherokees always believed in Intellectual property and still do.
>There was said to be 1,600 works of songs, symphonies and operas. That
>time in American and Cherokee history is gone. The Europeans almost
>lost J.S. Bach through their neglect, the Americans have yet to learn
>that lesson. I don't think they ever will, they still tear down their
>architectural masterpieces for money and put up the architectural
>equivelent of black velvet animal paintings in their place.
>
>But Ed, you must study this if you want to know the effect of art and
>the danger of the abuse of artists for the world. I would highly
>recommend the Kater book "The Twisted Muse" as a good place to start.
>Then the Jefferson book on Elizabeth Schwartzkopf. After that you
>might start on the Herbert Read books and just go from there. You could
>be the exception to the Neo Classic "clear cutters" at work in the
>present.
>
>And then we might have some discussions on the value of professions
>whose goals are the elevation of the human soul, the preservation of
>cultural treasures, the balance of the environment with human activity
>and the fulfillment, happiness, freedom and prosperity of the
>individual.
>
>Regards
>
>Ray Evans Harrell
>
>Edward Weick wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Ray:
>>
>> Being a musician is a full time job whether paid
>> or not and angry artists are often quite
>> destructive. Since they control the mirrors they
>> often contain a destruction that is truly
>> genocidal all in the name of their own view of the
>> world "winning" a kind of artistic 'losing."
>>
>> I find this a little bothersome because it makes me wonder
>> who might qualify as "destructive" or "genocidal" artist.
>> Somewhere, in the dark recesses of their minds both Stalin
>> and Hitler fancied themselves to be artists. Stalin wrote
>> poetry and Hitler wanted to be an architect or painter.
>> Both were failures, though perhaps not in their own minds.
>> Were the prisoners of the gulag and the death camps victims
>> of failed self-styled artists? Or perhaps you mean Hitler
>> and Stalin were influenced by artists -- Hitler by Wagner,
>> for instance.
>>
>> When I think of destructive true artists, Van Gogh comes to
>> mind. But then he destroyed himself, not others.
>>
>> Ed weick
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
