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
>
>
>
