Why the
Mural, and History, and Art Matter
Our affairs are critical, and we must
be dispassionate and wise.—POC Alexander Hamilton, getting better known these
days
If freedom of speech is taken away,
then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. —George
Washington, whitewashed blackguard
The
current controversy over the murals depicting The Life of George Washington at George Washington High School, in
San Francisco’s Richmond District, has called into question yet again the role
of public art in culture and politics. Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979), a
Russian-born WPA muralist who worked with Diego Rivera in Mexico, and, in San
Francisco supervised the creation of the Coit Tower’s murals, was asked in 1934
to paint a mural for the newly built high school celebrating its namesake. The 1600-square
foot mural has come under attack recently for, to put it bluntly, political
incorrectness, or a least insufficient political correctness for our
enlightened, finicky times.
It’s
unfair. Arnautoff carefully researched “this famous man, a committed defender
of freedom” but did not shrink from depicting, albeit relatively subtly (in my
opinion), ”the spirit of Washington’s time,” with its mistreatment of blacks
and American Indians, abuses that customarily were glossed over by the myth-besotted
patriots, and, indeed, just about everyone, eighty years ago. The current
thinking holds that Washington was a slaveholder and hypocrite, and thus no
liberator; a champion of Manifest Destiny (though the term did not exist until
Madison’s presidency); and that this tarnished history is too damaging to
high-school students of color—and maybe sensitive white kids, too? Several passionately
intense protesters, clad in black, naturally, at the July 15 panel discussion
on the murals at the ILWU labor hall in San Francisco even raised placards and repeatedly
shouted “Genocide!” Theirs is an intemperate position, ill-suited to a general
noted for his air of command and self-control; he was described by one
contemporary as “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady,
and calm.” Nor does it befit an artist who harbored strong leftist convictions,
but politically astute, who knew how far it was possible to go when.across the
continent, Nelson Rockefeller painted out Diego Rivera’s mural because of a
portait of Lenin that the artist radamantly efused to remove. He had just the
previous year counseled Bernard Zakheim, a prankish Coit Tower artist, not to
include in his mural a sickle and hammer, in vain. “Freedom in America is
understood in a special way.”Zakheim, later: “You were right, Mr. Arnautoff. I
teased the bulls too much.”
Nevertheless,
the San Francisco School Board decided on June 28, unanimously, on the
nearly-unanimous advice of a thirteen-person advisory group, the Reflection and
Action Working Group (RAWG), to have the murals “painted down,” erased, at an
as-yet unknown cost, but probably requiring a $500,000 environmental-impact
study, just for starters. Merely covering the mural with panels would cost an
estimated $600,000 to $845,000. Another writer lists the panel cost at
$825,000, with curtains costing up to $375,000; in either case, it’s way too
much, and totally unnecessary. Arnautoff’s mural, says the board, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization,
Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc. The mural doesn’t represent
SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered. It’s not
student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the
experience of the students.” “The majority of the group expressed that the main
reason to keep the mural up at the school is focused on the legacy of the
artist, rather than experience of the students, according to RAWG (I believe). “It’s
reparations,” concluded one of the board members, perhaps as dazzled by the
astronomical sum as any GOP lobbyist similarly working for a better, freer
world. Those postmodernist-victim shopping lists and breathless condemnations,
with the broadly inclusive, comical ‘etc.’ and poor syntax, constitute in no way a
reparation; they constitute a sop to symbolic retribution, and the punitive
eradication of a liberal statement irom the past is a colossal waste of money. (Can
we impeach?) Columnists ranging from the San
Francisco Chronicle’s art critic Charles Desmarais to —strange bedfellows
in here!—art historian Brian T. Allen in National
Review have weighed in for freedom of speech, the latter quite pointedly,
outing by name all seven ‘brainiacs,’ ‘bohemian yahoos’ and ‘anti-art fools’ (whose
identities I shall leave discreetly curtained, for now, noting that one of them
proposed renaming the school, such was his scornful disregard for “the great
George Washington,” to quote our ‘favorite president.’ Many of the school’s
alumni and teachers along with hundreds of artists and educators oppose this
artistic censorship, counseling either leaving the murals intact, and using
them as educational tools (which is my position); or, if the anti-muralists
insist on their pound of flesh, covering them (or the offending parts) with
panels, at a much lower cost, and thus doing nothing irreversibly shameful,
ignorant, and hypocritical, heaping national ignominy on the liberal, socialist
shithole of San Francisco. Lope Yap.
Jr., the sole RAWG dissenter, and vice president of the GWHS alumni
association, as well as a progressive filmmaker and person of color, has
pledged to fight to save the murals. Lawsuits and injunctions are probably in
the offing. Stay tuned.
I
have opposed political censorship before, as in the teapot tempest over Dana
Schutz’s Emmitet Till painting (www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=4029), and I try to be independent from
art-world groupthink. L‘Affaire
Arnautoff contains so many delicious absurdities that slipping into my Henry
Fonda Man-of-Reason costume became mandatory. There are three salient points to
make about this imbroglio.
First,
let’s dismiss the notion that art should be judged on its politics (what it
says or enjoins) instead of its aesthetics (how it looks, makes us feel). This
is the old style-versus-content conundrum, which always seems to suggest that
we have to make a choice between saving the world and savoring it; we don’t. Art
is often enlisted in the service of power, as all good postmodernist children
know: and some of the best art ever made was commissioned by plutocrats and/or
scoundrels—the Medici, the Hanoverians, the Bourbons, the cardinals and popes, the
dynasties, etc.—to enhance their power and prestige. Nowadays we
enjoy the splendor of that art while ignoring the imperial or imperialist unpleasantnesses
that paid the artists, and we absolutely should revere the art, despite the complexities
of history and patronage. If you look at the Sistine Chapel and see only the
massacred Indians of the New World, blood transmogrified into aesthetic gold
and silver, you deprive yourself of “the greatest thing that’s ever been done,”
in de Kooning’s humorously worshipful words; but if you don’t know the sordid
history behind the wealth, or ignore it, you’re not a morallly sentient adult. (Michelangelo’s
High Renaissance frescos, let it be noted, have survived even the Reformation
addition of fig leaves by poor Daniele da Volterra, Il Braghettone, The Breeches-Maker.)
Much
other art sidesteps current affairs—like Abstract Expressionism, with its focus
on pure expression (and its contempt for the leftist propagandist art of the1930s:
”poor art for poor people,” in Arshile Gorky’s memorably dismissive aphorism),
its cult of the heroic individual, easily co-opted to serve as propaganda for
American-Way capitalism and consumerism. Rampant individualism vs creeping
collectivism worked in the Cold War; expect a reprise (not a reprieve) again in
2020, bigly. Some artists manage to bestride both worlds: Philip Guston
abandoned the elegant shimmering abstractions he made in the 1950s, loosely
based on Monet, during the Vietnam-era 1960s and 1970s, in order to revisit the
dark Klansman social commentary that he made in the 1930s. His stylistic epiphany
and conversion from heavenly formalism—from “adjusting a red to a blue,” as he
put it, later, wryly—to sinister/comic narratives like his excoriating drawings
of scowling, scrotal Tricky Dick—evoked passionate reactions in the art
congregation; he was assailed as a traitor by some, and as a visionary by
others. Politically engaged art and fine art are both valid; and both produce good and bad art: propaganda
on the one hand, decoration on the other.
As
to actual treason, remember that, in the late 1940s, before Life magazine discovered Pollock the Cowboy,
AbEx was seen not as red-blooded he-man stuff, but as the decadent, effete art
of communists, eggheads, and other bearded, bereted subversives, who might
be—who knows?—hiding military secrets in those blobs and squiggles. The
McCarthyite Republican senator from Michigan, George Dondero, deserves exhumation:
"Cubism
aims to destroy by designed disorder... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule...
Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms". In 1952,
Dondero went on to tell Congress that modern art was, in fact, a conspiracy by
Moscow to spread communism in the United States. This speech won him the
International Fine Arts Council's Gold Medal of Honor for "dedicated
service to American Art." When art critic Emily Genauer (future winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism) interviewed Dondero in the mid-1950s he stated
"modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it
does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, our
material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain
simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is
therefore opposed to our government and those who promote it are our
enemies." When Genauer pointed out the resemblance between his views and
those of the Stalinist Communists he despised, Dondero was so enraged that he
arranged to have her fired from her job at the New York Herald Tribune. (Wikipedia)
Second,
the mural is an excellent subject for education about art, culture, and politics.
While some see Arnautoff’s “Life of George Washington” as a counter-myth or
corrective to the semi-divine man-of-all-seasons status accorded Washington for
two and a half centuries by ordinary Americans (as well as the Confederacy and
American Bund fascists), I see it as a calculated correction by an artist who
had learned to be discreet and modulated. Arnautoff was persona non grata in the USSR for decades because of his having
fought on the White side of the Russian civil war; conversely, after his conversion
to communism in the 1930s, during the San Francisco General Strike, he was
investigated by the FBI for his links with Russia and his associations with
visiting cultural figures and more ‘out’ communist artists like Diego Rivera,and
other intellectuals in early 1930s Mexico City, all professed communists (as
much as artists can be, anyway). Arnautoff’s biographer, Robert W. Cherny,
repeatedly emphasized during his hotly disrupted ILWU slide talk that
Arnautoff’s murals were in no way disrespectful to blacks and American Indians.
On the Washington mural, he writes:
At a time when
the popular portrayal of California Indians sometime still depicted them as
”diggers”– the most primitive and degraded of North American tribes–Arnautoff
treated them with dignity, presenting the complex artistry of a woman’s
basketry and the man’s fox-skin quiver. He also depicted the meeting of Indians
and Spanish authorities as a meeting of equals, a sharp contrast to the
depiction of that event in the citiy’s “Pioneer Monument” (1894), which shows
an Indian groveling at the feet of a ranchero
and priest. (p.103)
That
monument was recently removed from Civic Center by the City of San Francisco,
and deservedly so. Cherney continues:
Arnautoff said nothing, then or later,
about his murals’ counter-narrative to that thenstandard high school treatment
of the founding fathers and Western expansion. Washington dominates five of the
six smaller murals but the centers of the four largest barrels are held by native
Americans, working-class revolutionaries, and enslaved African Americans. In
depicting Washington’s early life, Arnautoff centered the mural on native
Americans in war paint, surrounded by British, colonial, and French troops and
British colonists. In the facing mural, on the American Revolution, the center
belongs to five men in working-class clothing raising the flagpole. VA’s
portrayal of Mount Vernon puts Washington near the left margin in places
enslaved African Americans at the center, More prominent the several white
artisans on the right side of the mural.… Arnautoff’s’s mural makes clear that
slave labor provided the plantations’ economic basis. On the facing wall
Arnautoff was even more direct: the procession of spectral future pioneers
moves west over the body of a dead Indian, challenging the prevailing narrative
that westward expansion had been into largely vacant territory waiting for
white pioneers to develop its full potential. For Arnautoff,”the spirit of
Washington’s time” included not only the struggle for liberty and the founding
of a new nation but also chattel slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans.
(p.108)
The
murals are indictments of America’s failings; they are not as dramatic or
tragic as the Mexico City and Cuernavaca murals that Arnautoff helped Diego
Rivera paint, full of armored, mounted conquistadores
battling hand-to-hand with jaguar-costumed Aztecs wielding obsidian knives, or
tortured, lashed Indians at the missions, and thus, they are more ambiguous in
their sympathies to the casual viewer, unversed in art. They are on the side of
the oppressed, however, while simultaneously giving Washington his due without
sanctimoniously demonizing him for being of his time, not ours. As for the
sentiment that Arnautoff’s rather soberly painted D.I., Dead Indian, has been
traumatizing and triggering GWHS kids for eight decades, I would say that the
very nickname is evidence to the contrary. (By the way, the Arnautoffs lived
nearby, on 37th Avenue, and the two sons attended the school, as did
a granddaughter who wanted to be near the murals.)
Thirdly
and finally, the notion that adolescents are excessively delicate and need
protection from reality and history in this way is deeply repugnant and
patronizing. I shall not quote the anti-muralists, but even the most temperate
of them seem to assume that Americans are not able to handle the inconvenient
truth that people do bad things to other people in the names of God, justice
and empire—or mere self-interest. Life is violent, you say? Take a look at
American culture; Arnautoff’s stately mural, even with its hints of America’s
dirty hands, is no rival for the breathless farrago of mass shootings and
hypocritical, abusive drivel that bombards us, 24/7. Remember H.G. Wells’
bestial morlocks and elfin eloi in 802,701 AD The Time Machine? Given the challenges that we face today, we
cannot afford a younger generation trained to accept virtuous passivity; we
need revolutionaries with smarts and moxie, and considerable skill at critical
thinking—not just being unthinkingly critical as instructed at the Two-minute
Hate du jour.
