We Americans may consider ours a classless society, but American culture belies our national myth of democratic equality. So does our fascination with dynasties and royalty, whether monarchic or capitalist. The Legion of Honor’s new treasure-trove exhibition, The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, coming after the inauguration of Charles III and the conclusion of the popular Succession television series (based on the Murdoch media empire), is thus timely and informative, an eye-popping spectacle of luxury goods—paintings, prints, ritual vestments, tapestries, vessels, and other artifacts. Created as state propaganda to legitimize an upstart dynasty, the artifacts still gratify the eye, while providing us moderns, half a millennium later, an object lesson in how power shaped and shapes official culture.
The Tudor Dynasty began in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, with the defeat of the last of the York kings, crookback Richard III. That battle ended the Wars of the Roses (1455-87)—a power struggle between descendants of cons of the Plantagenet Edward II (1312-77): John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340-99), his side symbolized by the white rose; and Edmund, Duke of York (1341-1402), his side symbolized by the red rose. Shakespeare’s history plays—Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI—detail the fratricidal conflict, with Richard III ’s villainy contrasting with the current enlightened patroness of the arts, Elizabeth I.
Henry Tudor (1457-1509), crowned Henry VII, was not in fact of the York line, but of the lowborn Welsh Tudors, one of whom had become the secret husband of the young widow of Henry V. Henry legitimized his reign as the de-facto head of the York side by marrying Elizabeth of York, and uniting the Lancastrian and York roses into the composite Tudor rose. Succeeding Henry (reigned 1485- 1509) were his son, Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), and then Henry VIII’s three children, Edward VI (r. 1547–53), Mary I (r. 1553–58), and Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603).
The exhibition, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, was curated by European art specialists Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, and comes to San Francisco in a somewhat abbreviated form due to covid and insurance factors that came into play after 2020. While it is large, it is not exhaustingly so; furthermore, the show is laid out chronologically rather than thematically, one or two galleries per monarch, making it easy to negotiate without time-tripping mental gymnastics.
In the catalogue’s introductory essay, Cleland and Easter note the backwardness of English art at the time: “When it comes to the visual arts, the English have a long- standing tradition of national self-deprecation. Writing at the end of the Elizabethan era, Richard Haydock lamented that the art of painting ‘never attained to any great perfection amongst us.’ Almost two centuries later, Horace Walpole apologetically prefaced his Anecdotes of Painting in England by acknowledging that its ‘chief business . . . must be to celebrate the arts of a country which has produced so few good artists.’” The most accomplished paintings in the exhibition are Hans Holbein’s the Younger’s portraits of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife, in 1536-7; her son, the young Edward VII, as a regal two-year-old princeling, in 1538; and the young German nobleman and humanist, Hermann von Wedigh III, in 1532; all three are masterpieces of detailed observation and human sympathy. Mention should also be made of a 1540 full-length portrait of Henry by Holbein’s workshop, capturing the young monarch’s outsized personality, every inch a king, and Paolo Torrigiano’s 1510-15 polychromed terra cotta bust of John Fisher, the ascetic Bishop of Rochester, beheaded in 1535 for refusing to recognize Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, a tour de force of sympathetic realism.
The homegrown English talent, working from a more conceptual, decorative aesthetic, produced striking works as well: Nicholas Hilliard’s iconic, bejeweled 1576-8 portrait of Elizabeth I captures the Virgin Queen as national symbol; and George Gower’s earlier 1567 portrait portrays the young, fashionable (and supposedly marriageable) Elizabeth as a paragon of female virtue and fecundity.
Those who might enjoy a deep dive into English Renaissance culture—and the human stories behind the artifacts— can delve into the scholarly catalogue, which traces the myths and symbols of Catholic and Protestant culture in England and the Continent (from which a prosperous England imported the best artistic talent); the role of religion at this crucial period; and, as always, the role of strategic marriages between members of transactional ‘frenemy’ aristocratic families.
JOHN ROLOFF: Sentient Terrains
Anglim Trimble Gallery
Ecological concerns, once disparaged as the alarmism of elitist’ scientists, are now accepted as legitimate, as we edge closer to climatic tipping points. The Bay Area artist John Roloff has made environmentalism one of the cornerstones of his diverse art practice since the mid-1970s, when he finished his studies in art and geology and the University of California in Davis. “Ecology in an expanded frame,” i.e., an understanding of the interrelationship between human and natural processes. the “global metabolism,” has informed Roloff’s multifarious practice in sculpture, site-specific installations, and visionary conceptual works, which draw upon the fine-art ceramic tradition established in the Bay Area, its longtime political progressivism, and its aesthetic embrace of sociopolitical content(with and without overt polemics). The new show at Anglim Trimble, Sentient Terrains, showcases the artist’s considerable breadth and depth, even as it reminds us that late-Anthropocene-Era humans can no longer believe that dominating nature autocratically is our prime objective.
Modernist abstraction abandoned illusionism in order to create new realities arising from the relationships between shapes, forms and color. Conceptual art makes s similar claim on the viewer: to find meaning in material that may not be explicitly related, visually. This show, which is a kind of miniature museum retrospective, assembles four types of artwork: nine long vertical-format Meta-Site flags, digitally printed on satin; digital inkjet print assemblages and videos depicting various site studies and proposals, resembling scientific or architectural presentations; images on glass panels, set atop against wooden blocks, and leaning on the gallery walls; and ceramic sculptures set in long vitrines that depict wedges of seemingly excised landscapes, ruined and ravaged, but possibly regenerating.
If the exact content of the works is ambiguous to science or geology novices, the works are nonetheless visually compelling. The Meta-Site Flags, depicting the vascular facies between chemical substances— lava, orchid, chlorophyll, hemoglobin, hematite and ancient earth’s iron rain—have a heraldic banner look, due to the tall vertical format, with the elements grafted together by a spiky sawtooth cut suggestive of dovetail wood joinery. The site studies and proposals for the Great Valley Complex of California, a San Francisco Wharf Complex, and even the old Geary Street location of Gallery Paule Anglim (in 2001) situate specific regional locations within the wider context of vast natural forces and immense time scales. More immediately appealing are Roloff’s more pictorial works, including two large glass panels, both dated 1996-2023, bearing digitally printed black ad white images of historical or art-historical motifs .urban/Coal (Witness/Seance) conjoins and juxtaposes the face of a man in a red turban (by Jan Van Eyck?) with what appears to be semi-liquid coal slurry: carbon to carbon, dust to dust? Equally enigmatic and fascinating is Biotic Knight (Witness). featuring the full-sized image of a slenderly built knight in armor who, printed onto glass as he is, appears to hover in space, awaiting commands. Roloff’s geological tableaux—composed of ceramic, glass, silicone, and wood—are decidedly Romantic and surrealist evocations of blasted landscapes—and, with their shattered wedge shapes, fracture ship hulls. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823-4)—also known as The Wreck of The Hesperus, or The Wreck of Hope, comes to mind as an artistic predecessor, but so do the war-torn landscapes of the English war artist, Paul Nash (especially Totes Meer, Dead Sea). Roloff’s Vector Ship: Vascular Sea sculptures, set within plexiglass boxes like relics or artifacts, depict fragmented forms—both architectural and biological/botanical/human—arrayed along exposed wedge-shaped ridges that are here and there bisected by glass shards, and half-buried by snow or ash that has been sprayed red or black by explosions. They depict the horror of war and desolation, as well as its terrible beauty, dramatically, without melodrama.
Amazing show documenting the industrial architecture of the 20th and late 19th century in Europe and US. The Beckers' architectural archaeology was embraced by Minimalists and Conceptualists, but stands on its own as extremely skilful and thorough documentation of a lost world never previously considered aesthetically. I was introduced to their work by Sol Lewitt's piece in Artforum (?) back in the 60s or 70s. Today I was particularly taken with the Pennsylvania "tipple" mineheads, shot between 1974 and 1978, ramshackle scaffoldings constructed ad hoc, as needed—"Form genom funktion"—by small groups of independent coal miners. Catalogue available. Show ends April 2!
AMALIA MESA-BAINS
Archaeology of Memory, Berkeley Art Museum
Emblems of the Decade: Borders, Rena Bransten Gallery
The Trumpian Confederacy may be censoring actual, factual history (AKA Biden-Marxist fake news), but the socially liberal art world has embraced the populist, multiracial history of the United States.
One of the pre-eminent artists involved in this paradigm shift is the Bay Area’s Amalia Mesa-Bains, who has championed Mexican identity and culture since the 1970s. and is the subject of a major retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and a related show—an installation and a set of digital collages on canvas— at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery. These shows follow a suite of recent museum retrospectives by a quintet of distinguished artists of color: all with ties to the Bay Area: Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Dewey Crumpler, Carlos Villa, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Mesa-Bains, an author, educator, and curator as well as an artist, works in a variety of forms, butt is best known for her multimedia installations. These theatrical assemblage environments conjoin old glamor photographs, postcards, toys, figurines, vintage furniture, shells, ceramic fragments, candles, crystals, mirrors, pearls, broken glass, draperies, gold leaf, dried leaves, rocks, sand, dried flower petals, branches and soil. ‘Voice-over’ quotations are inscribed over the imagery in collages, and in her installations, on the wall, or handwritten in the scattered materials on the floor.
These bricolage shrines to the dead—which commemorate strong-willed culture heroines like the seventeenth -century scholar-nun Sor Inès de la Cruz and the actress Dolores Del Rio—draw on the Mexican tradition of the ofrenda, a home altar created during the Day of the Dead to welcome the visiting souls of deceased family members. Photos of the dead honoree are displayed on the wall surrounded by crucifixes and images of the saints and the Virgin Mary; below, the ancestors’ favorite foods and drinks, along with candles, mirrors and yellow marigolds (cempazuchitl, a flower the Aztecs associated with death) complete the offerings. The Berkeley retrospective features almost sixty works from Mesa-Bains’ long career, including ofrenda along with shrines, altars, codices, and digital-collage prints. The wealth of information may seem daunting, but the artist’s homages are poetic and associational rather than literal and historic. I was particularly taken with the ghostly imagery that seems buried within the antique mirrors; the effect is achieved by abrading the silvering behind the glass surface and fixing the image of the saint or scholar in question so as to appear floating within the vaporous aperture: historical memory confronts the viewer like an apparition.
Mesa-Bains’ profusely decorated shrine installations center on items of antique furniture reflecting the artist’s studies of history, religion, culture, identity, and myth, which merge and collide, illuminating the conditions of the present.
A woman’s vanity or dressing table is the central focus of the anti-Freudian Venus Envy, Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End. In this examination of the virginal role model traditionally inculcated in adolescent Latinas. Surmounted by boudoir cloud of white satin ruching, the white table supports a clutter of artificial pearls, frame photos of young women, perfume bottles and Madonnas, with a suggestive seashell on the floor, but intimations of mortality intrude: a gold and silver skull peep from the half-opened drawers, and revealed in the mirror is the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatlicue, one of whose aspects, Cihuacōātl, "snake woman,” is associated with deaths in childbirth.
Sexual purity is again the subject in The Virgin’s Garden, featuring a hand-painted, moss-bedecked armoire or wardrobe, its half-open door revealing clothing and books inside. Inspired by a fifteenth-century German Renaissance painting, a copy of which is displayed nearby, the piece examines the hortus conclusus, or closed garden, the traditional emblem of female chastity—and especially of the Immaculate Conception— dating from the Song of Solomon: Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up…. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
The liberating education of the female mind during eras of male repression is the subject of The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The seventeenth-century colonial-era Mexican nun and intellectual, who had educated herself in her own library, which came to include four thousand books, hosted a salon in her nunnery of for other learned women; wrote poetry and prose in Latin and Nahuatl on religion, love, feminism and the misogyny and hypocrisy of the dominant male order in a “philosophical satire” entitled Hombres Necios, Foolish Men; and was punished, predictably, for her transgressions by being forced to sell her beloved library and return to traditional duties, dying in 1695 at the age of forty-seven, of plague while tending to her Hieronymite Order sisters. (Octavio Paz postulates that entering a nunnery was the best option available for ambitious, independent women at that time.) Sor Inés’ imagined work table, adorned with books, lamps, musical scores, and manuscripts, is flanked by a small stand being an Aztec figurine, an oil painting of a bespectacled inquisitorial grandee; and a heavy leather-upholstered chair lighted by large candlesticks, all painted gold. Stands of hair lie on the seat of the chair, suggesting the punitive shearing of tresses, or even the pulling out of hair in despair. (A twin of this chair appears, in silver, in the artist’s show on the US-Mexico border at Rena Bransten.) In the mirror above the desk Sor Inés appear, among her books, beneath a radiating pattern of fracture lines in the glass. These cracks were due to an art mishandling error, but the artist, perhaps remembering Duchamp’s embrace of accident in the Large Glass, liked them for their suggestion of a radiant intelligence, albeit one silenced by social duress.
This short article provides only a small sample of Mesa-Bains’ work, which also includes codices and digital collages addressing, among other things, the friction at the US-Mexico border (also in the San Francisco gallery show) and the artist’s recovery from a serious car accident through traditional curandera treatments. Two large sculptures, however, require mention. Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories depicts Mother Earth as a voluptuously curvy woman, perhaps a sister to those zaftig Neolithic Venuses, but here covered in moss inscribed with Aztec glyphs for fertility, reclining on a carpet of verdure, admiring herself in a large, ornate hand mirror. It’s an environmentalist/feminist take, of course, with perhaps a poke at property-as-theft rights, of traditional love goddesses inspecting themselves, with the pre-eminent version being Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus. A specific landscape, that of the Rio Grande, is the impetus behind What the River Gave to Me, the title of which must surely allude to Frida Kahlo’s elegiac 1939 painting, What the Water Gave Me. Mesa-Bains’s large sculpture reconstructs the river demarcating the border between the United States and Mexico as a luminous channel cutting through mountainous terrain carrying irregularly blue glass globes or bubbles, each bearing the name of a person who completed the perilous crossing, an illegal or undocumented alien now, but perhaps someday one of the “job creators” that we so fervently revere.
An edited version of this appears in TheDemocracyChain.org: https://www.thedemocracychain.org/dcheng0722
It’s a compendium of his past history, of his European artistic heritage and his love for working class people and his love of indigenous history. You know, I mean, it's all there. And his idea of progress and change, that it's not scary. For him, the idea of change is moving forward all together within this piece. To me, [the forbidding Aztec goddess] Coatlicue [at the center of the mural] is not just the earth. Coatlicue is the cosmos. In all its beauty and humbleness and its scariness, you know, which he does not shy away from. So, it it's really like, it is an exuberant, magnificent, life-affirming piece. — Yolanda López, Chicana artist and activist
Yeah, it is magnificent, it is beautiful. But it’s also really complex because it’s Rivera’s vision of this American continent shaped by similar historical forces, the Indigenous past, colonial history, but also this confidence in innovation and technology. Like a lot of his work, for me, this mural is, it’s just super optimistic: if we emphasize what we share more than what divides us, across ethnic or class or political borders, if we empathize, you know, we might actually achieve greater harmony, greater equality. It’s a utopian idea, of course, but it’s a very powerful one. —James Oles, curator of Diego Rivera’s America
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Her images on the paper appear in a space that is undefined evoking a sense of mystery that invites the viewer to linger trying to discern what's beyond the edges. In Place 6, a solitary rower is centered on the paper in such a way that you think you can hear the quiet gentle rhythm of the oars in the water. One wonders is the background clouds or trees on the shore? Where has the individual come from and where they are going? Are there others?
Inspiration is taken from photographic collections in books and online archives, with figures and transportation conveyances seemingly from another time and a place that once was, though the artist has noted that recent works are motivated by stories of recent war, trauma migration and loss.
Gale Antokal was born in New York, New York, and received her BFA (1980) and MFA from the California College of the Arts in 1984. In 1992 Antokal received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University in the Department of Art and Art History. Antokal held several visiting artist positions and teaching positions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor of Art History at the Lehrhaus Institute, and the American College in Jerusalem. She was an affiliate faculty member in the JSSItaly program in Civita Castellana, Italy in 2015.
A World Free of Plastic Imagined exhibition aims to call attention to and expand our understanding of the issue of plastic pollution through the lens of Bay Area artists and inspire each of us to consider how we can all engage on this increasingly critical issue to secure the wellbeing of our planet.
In a contemporary culture of consumption, the negative consequences of the excessive use of plastic are real and harmful to the environment and our health. If the current pattern is to continue, it would have damaging effects on our ecosystems and threaten the stability of the ocean life. Imagine if we could reverse and change this pattern.
The exhibition brings together a group of artists to send a strong message about the damaging impact of plastic pollution our planet through photography, mixed media work, assemblage, installation, and painting. Some works in the exhibition approach the issue creatively by documenting, repurposing, and reusing plastic waste. A number of works bring together arts and science to communicate critical data about plastic pollution, shine light on solutions aimed to mitigate the crisis, and help inspire change.
The result is an impactful visual narrative that aims to educate, raise awareness, and offer a provocative look at the impact we each have on our world, and a reminder that small individual changes can bring about major and necessary change.
Duane Michals: The Portraitist
Crocker Art Museum
It’s an era of celebrity worship—and, with Instagram selfies, of democratic self-aggrandizement—so the timing of this large exhibition of Duane Michals’ photographic portraits of our cultural royalty, with a few commoner friends and relatives thrown in, could not be better timed. “Portraits,” curated by Linda Benedict-Jones, and presented by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, features more than 125 photos—“recently discovered by the artist in his New York apartment,” according to the museum press materials. Old and young familiar faces—musicians, actors and actresses, artists, writers— appear, but seen in unfamiliar ways: personally, and idiosyncratically interpreted.
Michals, a self-taught photographer, has had a long career photographing for publications, but came to art-world notice in the early 1970s with Sequences, a book of narrative sequences of staged/posed photos that married age-old themes—youth, love, loss, old age, death, transfiguration—with the spare, cool, minimalist aesthetic of that period. These multi-shot mini-stories might be stills from a movie made conjointly by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, preceding by two decades CIndy Sherman’s famous fake-film stills. Influenced by writers as well as artists, including Balthus, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Eakins, René Magritte (whose memorable multi-exposure portraits are on view), and Walt Whitman, Michals, who, born in 1932, and an exact contemporary of Andy Warhol (whose portraits are also included) balked at the limitations and superficiality of ‘pure’ photography. (Warhol famously embraced superficiality.) He defiled the sanctity of the pristine photographic objet-d’art by jotting ironic or even at times elegiac inscriptions about the subjects on the prints in a distinctive spidery, ultra-thin handwriting. Michals: “My writing grew out of my frustration with photography. If I took a picture of you ... it would tell me nothing of you as a person.... Sixty percent of my work is photography and the rest is writing.” Like some other celebrated photographers (e.g., Walker Evans, and Andre Kertesz, who appears in Michals’ homage to Hockney), he ventured beyond photography into painting as well, repurposing old tintypes with geometric motifs in oil paint.
It’s extremely difficult to sum up a six-decade career in a few hundred words, but certain themes are present throughout the portraits, which are, like good portrait paintings. as much about the artist as the subject: a respect for individuality; a recognition that life is transient, yet miraculous; and a delight, sometimes whimsical, sometimes ironic, in the power of the imagination and the ambiguities of reality—hence his interest in creative personalities. Michals writes of his subject, the Romanian absurdist playwright, Eugene Ionesco: “Always hovering over his writing is the melancholy of our essential loneliness, and yet he found ways of illuminating this through a filter of humor and satire.” This might be Michals’ credo as well. He annotates another ‘imaginary’ portrait with these octogenarian words of wisdom:
I’m a miracle. We’re walking, talking miracles. You probably gave to be on your death-bed to realize that you’re a miracle, just when it’s too late. But it’s possible to know now, saints know now. If there’s some way that we could understand that being alive is not simply a matter of consuming things and using deodorants. It really is a matter of being a walking, talking, once-in-a-lifetime offer in the universe that’s never going to happen again.
Some noteworthy ‘straight’ portraits—aside from shots of Meryl Streep and Barbara Streisand at the beginnings of their careers—are Veronica Lake, past her glamor-girl peekaboo era in the 1940s, in middle age, laughing at a hotel restaurant where she once worked, while a customer seated behind her booth reacts in surprise; Toshiro Mifune, standing beneath a leafy park canopy of foliage, caught talking, and rather less superhuman than usual, by Michals’ shutter; and a young Carol Burnett, demonstrating the extreme flexibility of her “Freaky Fingers.” Michals examines the human condition in “Self-Portrait as if I Were Dead,” a double-exposure shot of the artist contemplating, with equanimity, his sheeted body on a morgue gurney; and affecionate portraits of departed friends and lovers. Michals’ enjoyment of mirrors, reflections and the theater of self-presentation shines forth in his five-photo sequence of Tilda Swinton as Sibyl, as she progressively removing the veils covering her face; Swinton again, in the Magrittean “Mr. Backwards Forwards,” as an “androgynous phantom” in a man’s suit who rotates her head 180 degrees to look into a handheld mirror, from which she regards us indirectly, like Perseus avoiding Medusa’s gaze; the film director François Truffaut, standing in a darkened hotel room, silhouetted against the window, reflected in two mirrors on adjacent walls; Ludmila Tcherina, the ‘older’ ballerina, Irina, in the 1948 film classic, The Red Shoes, peering at us from a handheld mirror against a rain-streaked view of Paris; a triple view of the artist Ray Johnson and his storefront reflections; Joseph Cornell, reduced by the camera to a Giacomettian wraith; the author Joan Didion, her features seen through openings in a sheet of cut paper (or is it a photographed photograph?), with her face framed by the shadow of her head and shoulders. Notable for their good-natured kidding are: two images of Chuck Close, seen up close and from afar; two photos, shot years apart, of Sting resembling a young Danny Kaye, and Danny Kaye, an old Sting; and René and Georgette Magritte, holding hands, the clasp unseen behind a tree trunk. Susan Sontag, also photographed here, as a young prodigy, wrote, “All photographs are memento mori,” but some achieve the status of immortal “privileged moment[s]” that join “the image-world that bids to outlast us all.” Some of them are miracles.
"I’ve
never grown blasé about the fact that a painting can actually summon
people to the present moment; it seems like a form of magic”, Eva
Bovenzi writes. She titles this exhibition “Present Perfect” in a nod to
the capacity of art to bring a viewer to the Now.
Bovenzi’s visual vocabulary is poetic and entirely her own. Her
paintings are fresh and original, yet also read as timeless iconic
forms. Having studied sources as varied as Spanish manuscript painting,
Romanesque and Byzantine frescoes, Tantric images and Native American
ceremonial objects, Bovenzi describes herself as “in the tradition of
artists who have tried to give visible form to the invisible”. Her work
deliberately evades an easy verbal summary, gesturing towards the
ineffability of experience.
Alluding to the shapes of shields, sentinels and masks, Bovenzi's images
are bold, emphasizing physicality—yet their materiality is countered by
luminescent veils of color that seem to expand past the structures that
contain them. Constructed with matte, fluorescent and metallic colors,
the surfaces of the paintings alternately absorb and reflect light,
adding a subtle depth and movement to the work.
Eva Bovenzi’s art simultaneously suggests solid and void, presence and
emptiness, stillness and movement. Mysteriously emblematic, the work’s
sheer beauty offers the viewer an experience of transcendence, inviting
the present to become perfect. — https://www.pastineprojects.com/project-09
Motherland Kyiv monument (1981), dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the Second World War. Its base is the Kyiv WWII Museum’s Hall of Glory, inside which one can find the names of over 11,000 soldiers and workers who earned the title of Hero of the Soviet Union or the Hero of Socialist Labor during the war engraved on massive marble slabs. The statue itself is 62 meters tall and is made entirely of stainless steel. For more information: [https://destinations.com.ua/news/big-cities-life/915-the-observation-platform-at-the-motherland-monument-in-kyiv]
For the last five days as this is written, everyone who understands the gravity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been riveted to the news. Most Americans — with the exception of the insensate, incensed Trumpist right — are rooting for the Ukraine resistance. Fox News wavers between attempts to blame Biden for the situation and, forgetting its decades of anti-green tirades funded by petrodollars, asks why isn’t the US energy-independent? Rhetorical questions based on false premises and predetermined conclusions are, of course, the demagogue Tucker Carlson’s infuriating stock in trade.
The outcome is far too early to predict. A few days ago, the massive advantage of the Russians in troops, material, and high-tech weaponry seemed to be the decisive factor. Now, after a determined, heroic resistance by Ukraine by its menfolk ages 18 to 60, armed with Molotov cocktails, light arms, and Javelin and Stinger missiles, the Russian blitzkrieg has slowed. (The fiercely independent Cossacks apparently survive in the Ukrainian DNA.)
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered this message
on social media: "I need ammunition. I don't need a ride."
Putin has agreed to negotiate with Ukraine without preconditions while simultaneously brandishing nuclear weapons against Ukrainian allies. He retains a single military ally in his vassal state Belarus; it is there that the negotiating teams have now met (let us not get our hopes up for a quick settlement). Contrasting with this bluster is the quiet, determined courage of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the onetime comedian and actor (and Jeremy Renner lookalike) who has rebuffed attempts to spirit him to safety: “I need ammunition. I don’t need a ride.” Already he has been compared in Western media to Winston Churchill standing up to Hitler, and the gladiator Spartacus taking on the slave-holding Roman Empire. Is Putin now playing the nuclear madman (as Nixon thought himself clever to do, once upon a time)? Or is he just engaging in KGB/GRU brinksmanship — being "smart,” in Trump’s words, pulling off this daring coup attempt at the low cost of only a few “two-dollar sanctions?”
I had originally intended to write a brief précis of Ukrainian history leading to the present crisis, but, silly me, the complexity of the area’s history defies an easy synopsis. Putin’s claims that Ukraine was never a real nation; that it was founded by a diplomatic error on the part of Lenin after The Great War; and that Ukraine was, is and will always be an indissoluble part of Mother Russia and that the Ukrainians and Russia are “one people” are absurd. Why decimate your own people? All national origin stories tend to be vastly over-simplified myths in any case. Both Russians and Americans suffer from propaganda gone viral — from a 24/7 barrage of “fake news“ (Trump) and “alternate facts” (Kelly Anne Conway) — and fear of facticity. The opposition to critical race theory and the censorship of “disturbing” books are arguments for ignorance and serfdom.
Vasily Vereshchagin, “The Apotheosis of War,” 1871. Courtesy of Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, dedicated “to all great conquerors, past, present, and to come.” Pyramids of skulls refer to Mongol “shock-and-awe” practices of 1220. — Wikipedia
Ukraine, a vast, Texas-sized steppe bereft of natural barriers but rich in agricultural soil and industrial resources, has been fought over for centuries by various regional powers. Think of Anselm Kiefer’s painted panoramas of mud occasionally mixed with the blood of indigenes and invading armies. Ukraine entered history with the creation of Kievan Rus (more properly in Ukrainian, Kyivian Rus), a Slavic/Baltic/Finnic empire united by a Norse or Slav Prince Rurik (d. 879). His descendants, the Rurikids, ruled the geographically blessed “small city on a hill” sitting on the Dnieper River astride several trade routes, for approximately four centuries, from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Russia takes its name from Rus, as does Belarus. Vladimir the Great (r. 980-1015) was the Constantine of the Rurik empire, converting it to Christianity — for aesthetic reasons:
Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are Vladimir the Great’s current namesakes. Dynastic quarrels (including the 1015 familicide of Syvatopolk the Accursed), the increasing power of clans, and constant warfare weakened the principate, which fragmented into twelve principalities that succumbed to the Mongol (or Tartar) invasions of 1223 and 1237-42, becoming tribute-paying vassals of the Golden Horde. Kyiv was sacked by the Mongols in 1240, ”reduced almost to nothing,” in the words of one witness. It was Mongol rule, however, that created Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moscow, which threw off the “Mongol yoke” centuries later, in 1480:
Viktor Vasnetsov, “The Invitation of the Varangians.” Rurik and his
brothers Sineus and Trevor arrive at the lands of the Novgorod Slavs.
Vladimir I of Kiev (c. 958-1015)
The massive protests in Russia against Mr. Putin’s “war of choice,” in President Biden’s words, serious matters to a dictatorship, give us a flicker of hope that Putin’s time may be ending. If Ukraine can stay in the fight, and create another military morass similar to Afghanistan, and the eight (or is it now seven?) oligarchs turn on the Vozhd so as to render him and his imperial fantasies void, then Russia may escape becoming an irrelevant declining power. The future is calling. For the moment, remember that after 9/11, people all over the world claimed to be Americans. Right now, we are all Ukrainians. Glory to Ukraine!
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