Linen and Memory

At the Museum we have been contemplating an exhibition we hope to mount in Fall 2016 on "Cloth and Kinship,"  associated with a traveling show of Chilean ariplleras, organized by poet and activist Marjorie Agosin-- applique works that highlight stories of the desaparecidos (disappeared people) and other human rights atrocities in Chile since the 1973 coup.  We have been especially fascinated by the power of textile to evoke memories of profound injustice and social rupture within family and extended kin networks, as well as the capacities of cloth to help sublimate or redress agonies of loss. We may be able to incorporate the remarkable community quilt, Unraveling Miss Kitty's Cloak, created by the African American artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, which I discuss in my book, The Accidental Slaveowner.

In this connection, I have been puzzling over a lovely piece of linen recently given to me and Ellen by my father's cousin Joan.  The linen, lined by a complex motif sporting winged lions, was given to her mother Celia (my great-aunt) by my grandfather Dr. Jacob Auslander when he returned from the Bukovina region in Romania in 1936, following his failed effort to convince his parents to emigrate from Radautz (Radauti), Bukovina to the United States.  The linen takes on particular poignant effects given the knowledge that, five years later, in 1941 my great-grandparents were deported from Bukovina, by Romanian officials acting in collaboration with the Nazis, to the killing fields of Transnistria, in the historical context of the Holocaust/Shoah. 

First, I hope to learn more of the cloth itself. Celia believed that Jacob ("Bi" as he was known in the family) acquired the linen in Vienna, which would make sense as his most likely route in and out of Bukovina (Bi had studied in Vienna and in 1936 had relatives and friends living there.). Or it may have been acquired within Romania  itself. The yellow linen has one each edge an elaborate device, perhaps a heraldic emblem, showing two winged lions facing a central device, perhaps an urn. Each of these sections is linked by a braided design around the edge of the cloth; a similar braided design forms a square in the interior of the cloth.  My aunt Judy (Bi's daughter) has similar linens which Bi had given her mother upon returning from Romania in 1936.

Perhaps the winged lion is itself a clue. The winged lion, an ancient symbol, is most commonly associated  in Christian traditions with St. Mark, who became the patron saint of Venice; the winged lion column monument of San Marco (St. Mark) is one of the best known icons of the city. Venice was a component of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the political entity into which my grandfather was born, so the emblem might have familiar in Austria during the period. By the time Bi re-visited his hometown of Radautz/Radauti in 1936, the region of Bukovina had been incorporated into Romania; I don't believe the winged eagle was an emblem of the Kingdom of Romania at any point, though.

I would love to know more about Bi's trip in 1936. A committed anti-fascist, he was politically astute and had long recognized the threat Hitler posed to Jews throughout Europe.    He very much wanted to bring with him, not only his parents, but also his young nephew, Dan Pagis, who at that point had lost his mother and who was being raised by Bi's parents; Dan would survive the terrors of Transnistia, 1941-45, then emigrate to Palestine, and go on to become one of Israel's most important poets.

Bi did report afterwards, my father and aunt recall, that there were several reasons his parents refused to emigrate. They refused to leave young Dan behind, and US immigration authorities,who would have allowed Bi to bring in his parents, would not allow him to bring in a nephew. Bi's father also asked rhetorically if Bi's wife Rebekah had servants in New York, contrasting the New York family's financial circumstances to the secure Bourgeois lifestyle of the family in Radautz.  I see from on line Passenger lists that Bi arrived back in New York, on September 1, 1936, on board the Aquitania, from Southampton, England.  He  returned without any family members.

Two years later, Bi did successfully facilitate the emigration to America of Marta Edith Klinghofer, his niece, daughter of his sister Tsuli.  She arrived in New York on September 12, 1938 from France, and I believe traveled to Canada before returning to the US; she lived for a time with my grandparents in Manhattan. During the war she worked for the Voice of Freedom radio, broadcasting in Romanian, and then married and had children. It may be that during his visit in 1936, Bi laid the groundwork for Marta's journey to America.  (Marta's birthplace in the 1938 manifest is listed as the village of Storojinet, but I believe that by the late 1930s her family was in Czernowitz, the cultural capital of the Bukovina region, before Bukovina was riven by the Molotov-Ribbentrip Pact. )

I wish I knew more about what befell our family during the deportation period of 1941-1945. There are chilling documents now available on line, at  http://radauti.blogspot.com/2009/09/ghetto-and-hostages.html    displaying telegrams sent by Romanian security officials in 1941 in Radautz, detailing their efforts to round up the local Jewish population. One telegram, dated July 2, 1941, orders that six Jewish leaders of the community, including my great-grandfather Isaac Auslander (listed as a "wholesaler") be confined to the Boys Boarding School as hostages.  My understanding is that by Fall 1941 most of the Jews of Radautz had been forcibly deported within railway cattle cars across the Dneistra river to the Transnistria river.  Dan Pagis, who survived the deportation, never spoke explicitly of what befell him or the rest of the family during these terrible years. Conditions on board the train car are hinted at by one of his most famous poems,

WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

----

The unfinished final line remains, of course, one of the most uncanny absences in the literature of the Holocaust.

Bi's sister Tsili, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, told me that she knew little of what precisely  happened to her parents and to Dan during the Transnistria period; the one thing she recalled is that like her, her mother had a deep fear of going into air raid shelters, and that she attributed their common survival to this anxiety.

It is clear that conditions for deported Jews in Transnistria were horrific, characterized by labor camps, starvation, mass shootings and death marches.  It appears that both my greatgrandparents survived the war, although I believe my great grandfather, in a severely weakened condition, died soon after he returned to Czernowitz or Radautz; Marta's parents and brother survived, spending much of the war period in Czernowitz (in part because Marta's father was a Doctor and his skills were valued) before being forced into Transnistria. They later emigrated to Israel.

I hope to learn more about these heart-breaking historical episodes and about the evocative linen that has inspired this inquiry; I would be most grateful for any help or guidance readers might be able to give.

Family Symbolism in Ed Ruscha's Standard?

I recently participated in a "Close Looking" conversation at the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University) on their visiting exhibition of Ed Ruscha's work, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, led by Joe Wardwell and Andreas Teuber and facilitated by the Rose's education director Dabney Hailey. We talked at length about Ruscha's 1966 painting "Standard," or "Standard Station", one of the postwar era's most familiar (and widely reproduced) works of art, and the work from which the exhibition's polyvalent title  ("Ed Ruscha: Standard") is derived.

Ed Ruscha  Standard Station, 1966.

We talked about the 'drive by" quality of the image, the ways in which one could read the image as glimpsed from a vehicle speeding by on Route 66. We also touched on David Bunn's observation that "there are no landscapes without bodies"-- given that in this landscape there are no evident human bodies. But then a colleague creatively observed that the five fuel pumps could in fact be read as a stand-in for human bodies, comprising  a nuclear family of two parents and three children. The two larger pumps on the right could be read as parents, the three smaller pumps to the left (separated off from the 'parental' pumps' by a support pole) in turn could be read as children. The far left pump lacks a (presumably phallic) hose, and thus could be read as "Mother", while the large pump next to it has a pump and thus might be read as "Father"; in turn, the next, smaller (child?) pump lacks a hose and thus could be read as "Daughter", while the final two smaller pumps each have hoses and thus could be read as "Sons."  Thus another possible resonance to the overarching sign about the pumps, "Standard": this is indeed the normative, idealized American nuclear family.

For those in a Lacanian frame of mind, the hoses could be read as instances of the Phallus, signifier of masculine agency within the context of the modern domestic sex-gender system--all the more appropriate given the deep cultural linkages between automotive travel, corporate industrial might, and fantasies of American masculine mastery.

This reading intuitively strikes me a quite promising, and it would be interesting to know what Ruscha himself would think of it. (In interviews, he has noted that the widely interpreted association of the sign "Standard" with the normativeness of dominant American culture is not one he had been consciously aware of while creating these works, although he is open to that line of interpretation.)

 I am tempted to speculate that there might even be an implicit linkage within this image (and the many variations on the theme Ruscha has created) between biological reproduction and the reproductive capacities of the commodity sign in a capitalist context.  Here we may have a protoypical modern, "standardized" family in which the parents have reproduced themselves in the form of their children, at several different symbolic levels.  Each of the pumps, after all, sports the name and image of "Chevron" the most famous product of the Standard Oil Company. Under the modern schema of commodity aesthetics it is in the nature of one brand to beget another, ultimately subsuming all human experience under the arch-signifier of the endlesely-fecund commodity fetish. Thus, direct representations of human bodies would be superfluous in such an image: the logic of reproduction under modern capitalist conditions is entirely enframed with the capacity of the brand emblem ("Standard", which appropriately spans the scene) to spawn subsequent iterations of itself under subordinate brand emblems ("Chevron"); hence, we have before us the perfect family under modern capitalism, waiting, as it were, to glimpsed, and desired, by other families speeding along down the very highway made possible by the petrochemical industry.

42, baseball, and mythic time

 Over the weekend, my colleagues Bobby Cummings, Keith Champagne, and I had the chance to go see the newly released film “42” (opening on the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers) with the predominantly African American student Living Learning group, “Students of the Dream.” Afterwards, as we talked over the movie,  I found myself thinking about the structure of the film in light of anthropologist Bradd Shore’s classic discussion of baseball symbolism, developed in Chapter Three of his book, Culture in Mind:Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

To begin with, Shore argues that baseball, more than any other sport, dramatizes and mediates core tensions between American communitarian and individualist values.  This is enabled by the curious asymmetry of the game (odd numbers of players, odd number of innings, the striking contrast between a sole player at bat and the entire fielded team that he faces, and so forth) and by the unusual quality of temporal experience during the game, ungoverned by “clock time” , so that a game in principle could go on forever, in an eternal Field of Dreams. These qualities, among others, make baseball especially well suited to metaphorical or mythical reflections by Americans on the nature of  American society.  The emphatically pastoral and agrarian dimensions of the game, played in a “park” and resisting the industrial tyranny of clock time, lend it a generally nostalgic air, generating associations with an endless summer of youth regained, located within a reassuring annual cycle of rebirth each spring.



“42” initially challenge, and then returns to, this standard cultural logic of nostalgia for the era of youthful innocence. The film initially presents the game, in the immediate postwar period, as illustrative of the national affliction of racism. During a rendition of the National  Anthem, the camera pans through the line of players, coming to rest on Robinson for the line “Land of the Free,” to highlight the failed national promise. Taken as a whole, though, the film presents baseball as cure for that which ailed us.  In that sense, the film allows us all a return to a dreamed-of national childhood.  At one point, Dodgers team executive Branch Richey overtly thanks Robinson for in effect redeeming baseball, for giving the sport he loved as a boy back to him.  Significantly, images of boys are prominent in the film; from the African American boy to whom Robinson tosses a baseball from a train (who grows up to be a Major League player) to a white boy who initially joins in his father’s racist jeers at Robinson, but who then pauses, his face transformed, as he recognizes Robinson’s grace on the field.  Through baseball, in effect, we are all returned to pre-Lapsarian era of national innocence.

Elsewhere, Shore has noted that baseball is especially illustrative of  American cultural tensions between home and away. The ultimate goal is to hit the ball out of the park, escaping all confines of one’s environs, in order, paradoxically, to return “home.”  Such a tension is nicely evoke in the film final scene: Robinson, having hit the ball out of the park, lopes around the bases, and rounding third, finally heads, larger than life, for home.  As in all rites of passage, upon returning out of the liminal zone, everything is the same, but everything is different. As his foot touches home plate, he is once more back home, but his home, our national home, is an abode transformed.

The film steers rather clear of the political in any direct sense, emphasizing Jackson’s fierce individualism. At one point, he snaps at his guide and protector, an African American journalist,  that he doesn’t like depending on anyone.  There’s hardly any allusion to the political pressures in the late 1940s pushing for desegregation in baseball or elsewhere in society; rather, this is a morality play of individuals, of Robinson’s stalwart discipline, Richey’s ethical grit, and a few white teammate’s salty (if belated) decency, out of which emerges the collective glory of the team in the 1947 pennant victory, and by extension the restored glory of the republic.  And that is the mythic, paradoxical alchemy of baseball as a ritual system: transmuting individual achievement into collective glory, without necessarily engaging fully with the domain of the social, beyond the borders of the park itself.

Other thoughts on the the symbolism of race, the nation and regeneration in the film?

Museum Statement on Accessibility

Following the lead of other museums,  the MCE has been working on developing a statement on accessibility, to help guide our efforts to accommodate diverse publics, including persons with special needs and disabilities.

Here's our current draft. We welcome comments and suggestions from interested parties:

MCE Draft Statement on Accessibility

Draft  2/5/13

The Museum of Culture and Environment (Central Washington University) is committed to making its exhibitions,  programs, and services accessible to everyone,  including those with special needs. We seek to accommodate a diverse range of learning styles and to engage multiple senses and educational approaches as visitors engage with exhibition materials and public programs. 

The Museum, located on the ground floor of Dean  Hall, is accessible to wheelchair users and other visitors who need to avoid stairs. Service animals are welcome in the Museum,

Working  closely with our Advisory Committee on Accessibility, we explore new forms of assistive technology to deepen the museum-going experience for all. The Museum is working towards developing audio guides, available through assistive devices or mobile phones, for all interested visitors, including visually-impaired visitors. 

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We anticipate that our advisory committee or working group on accessibility will include students, staff and faculty members, and perhaps off campus reps as well.

Literary Landscapes and Multiple Points of View

Frame from A Sense of Place, on
Cascadia Chronicle

At the Museum of Culture and Environment and at Cascadia Chronicle, we have been grappling over effective geospatial means of representing and evoking multiple points of view on a given landscape.  Within a GoogleEarth-type virtual environment, The Sense of Place poetry project (edited by poet Kathy Whitcomb)  in effect sticks virtual pins on varied landscape features in Washington State; clicking on these brings up a poem inspired by that location.  The GoogleEarth platform allows users to navigate themselves through the landscape of Washington State, and click at will on varied poems, identified by author.

[For those with GoogleEarth loaded on their desktops, access the site at:

http://www.cascadiachronicle.com/pages/senseOfPlace/google_earth/current/senseOfPlaceGE.html

Yet how to represent diverse literary or popular commentaries on any given landscape site?   And how to evoke sensations of moving through a landscape, so that the perceptual frame is not simply static at any given moment? (This is, it seems to me,  a limitation with the current GeoStories platform being developed by National Geographic:

http://www.geostories.org/portal/

As promising as it is in many respects, GeoStories is still presents a static, map-based vision of landcape. 

The GoogleEarth flyover effect, which gives the viewer the sensation of flying over a landscape from various heights, has struck me, Kathy, and our technology editor Marco Thompson as potentially more promising, and perhaps especially appealing to younger users; the flyover is an aesthetic register well beloved by many of our students, who spend a good deal of time flying over and through the landscapes of Skyrim and many other landscape-organized video game environments. 

In our current exhibition, "Voices of the River: Life along the Yakima," the Museum commissioned   Marco to develop a flyover sequence down the Yakima River, from its headwaters to its confluence with the Columbia.

 In sequence, five poems about the Yakima River appear on the screen over the riverscape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Q0uKni86flo

Xavier Cavanos poem projected 

 

 

The Beta version currently projected on the wall, partially framed by a wall design feature evoking the basalt walls of the Yakima River Canyon (designed by Theater scene designer Marc Haniuk) has attracted a good deal of  audience response thus far. 

Some people love being able to read the poetry while seeing the landscape unfold around and through the semi-transparent text; others find the configuration too distracting to appreciate the poems fully. Some express a desire simply to watch the landscape in motion, without having to engage with the poems.  We'll keep on tweaking it during the run of the show, and see what version is most effective.

In Cascadia Chronicle (which I co-edit with colleague Kathy Whitcomb) Marco has developed visual essay I scripted, comparing how Woody Guthrie and Sherman Alexie very differently narrate the Columbia riverscape, with particular reference to Native American absence and presence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=H2K66pscpZ0

(or, again if you have GoogleEarth loaded, see it at:
http://www.cascadiachronicle.com/pages/geospatialTours/guthrieAlexieTour.html

The visitor can also access a longer, more conventional photo essay I authored on the same topic:

http://www.cascadiachronicle.com/pages/photoEssays/current/markAuslander/current/woodyGuthrieShermanAlexie.html

Still from the Columbia River flyover tour, illustrating
line from Sherman Alexie's Powow at the End of the World":
"past the abandoned reactors of Hanford."

Both the Yakima River and Columbia River projects are organized in a linear fashion; the viewer encounters different perspectives on the river in sequence. In the case of the Columbia River piece, this involves multiple trips up and down the river, encountering how the same riverscape looks very different to the two artists --technological triumph over a vanished Native American presence in Guthrie's case;  a millenarian vision of a reclaimed Native American presence for Sherman Alexie). But perhaps it would be best to get away from an exclusively linear representation and to give viewers, in a more interactive vein, the choice of moving between various subject positions. Perhaps there could be a slide bar on the side of the unfolding landscape in motion, so that the viewer could move between "Anglo" , "Mexicano"  and "African American" literary representations of the same landscape-- and perhaps also have the option of clicking on or toggling to an "Un-narrated" landscape tour. 

And yet, even that approach wouldn't full convey the dynamics of multiple consciousness that so often characterize our experiences of landscape. We can, after all, more or less simultaneously experience a landscape in terms of dominant and subaltern perceptual frameworks. How might we be able to evoke that fluid multiplicity of consciousness of place?

In turn how could we effectively "crowd source" these diverse stories of place, so that the members of the public could upload and share their poems and written reflections on a particular river or landscape site, and edit and organize the developing virtual landscape in a way that would let visitors explore very different contemplations of a commonly encountered place?  Perhaps we will need to move to Augmented Reality platforms, involving mobile handheld devices with screens, to more fully convey multiple points of view on a given landscape feature?

Salmon Woman by John Hoover

In January 2013, in conjunction with the visiting exhibition "FashionStatement: Native Artists and Pebble Bay" as well as our exhibition "Voices of the River," we are delighted that we'll be displaying John Hoover's marvelous sculpture "Salmon Woman" (1987).

My exhibition label is as follows.
----------------

John Hoover

1919-2011

born Cordova, Alaska

American, Aleut/Unangan, Russian

Salmon Woman

1987

Old Growth Western Red Cedar, oil pigment, beads

Loan of the Hoover family

According to the legends and sacred stories of many indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Salmon may present itself in an animal or human form. In some stories, after Salmon leave behind their physical fish bodies in the upper reaches of rivers, to serve as food for human beings and animals, its spirit can swim invisibly back to the Pacific; under the ocean the Salmon people gather in their human forms.  For the Native peoples of Southeastern Alaska, a beautiful woman manifests herself at the heads of salmon-spawning streams so salmon will return year after year to those same waterways to spawn.

This elaborate version of Salmon Woman was created by John Hoover, an artist of Aleut (Unangan) background. Look closely and you can identify the many animals who draw sustenance from the annually returning Salmon: Bear, Sea Lion, and Seagull. Out of the human woman’s body emerges two large salmon, representing her bountiful gifts of food.  Salmon Woman’s womb is decorated with red beads that symbolize her eggs. Notice that the same red beads were also used to create the the eyes of the woman as well as the eyes of the other animals, thus symbolically binding these forms together.

Coastal First Nations people have harvested cedar trees for millennia, honoring the wood’s versatility and its spiritual significance.  Coastal Tlingit and Salish Shamans were protected by cedar guardian figures, and cedar trees have long been understood as imparting long life and health to communities that honor them.  Carved out of old growth Western Red Cedar, sometimes dating back centuries, Hoover’s work highlights the regenerative gifts of the cedar tree, celebrating cycles of growth, loss, and rebirth.

This free-standing sculpture also powerfully evokes the multiple levels of existence that inform the traditional understandings of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast: the visible realms of water, land and air, as well as the continuous traffic between visible and invisible domains of the universe.

John Hoover was fascinated by spiritual transformations between human and animal manifestations, a prominent motif in tradition-based Native American art of the region. If you would like to see more examples of John Hoover’s work, in the Museum the lobby you will find a permanently installed, John Hoover carving, “Man who Married an Eagle” (1971). This carving is structured as a triptych that reveals a hidden mystery, the protective outer doors represent an Eagle in birdlike shape, while the inner surface depicts human beings morphing in and out of bird form. 

Mark Auslander

Correcting Mis-impressions re the Post

I've gotten a number of inquiries around the country from scholars curious about the Washington Post article,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/researcher-finds-slaves-quarried-sandstone-used-to-build-smithsonian-castle/2012/12/12/381c1762-44a5-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story.html

which reports on my research on enslaved labor in the making of the Smithsonian Castle building.

As is perhaps inevitable in a quickly written story, there are some inaccuracies in the Post article, or at least the potential for misunderstanding on a few points. Among them:

• The assertion that enslaved African Americans did not physically construct the Castle building.  Actually, I think it quite likely, given the Washington labor market from the late 1840s-early 1850s, that some enslaved people did work on the building's physical construction, as they did on hundreds of other buildings in antebellum Washington, including the Capitol and the White House. The point is we don't have direct historical evidence for enslaved labor on physical construction, mainly because so many Smithsonian records were lost in the great Castle fire of January 1865.  We do have stronger evidence for enslaved people working at the Seneca quarry, where the sandstone used in the Castle was quarried. But that doesn't mean we can rule out the use of slave labor in building the Castle.
• Many readers seem to have been left with the misimpression that people at the Smithsonian were not supportive of this research. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Smithsonian Archives staff, especially archivist Pamela Henson, has always been great--sharing ideas and tips and putting in extra time to locate documents and files. It is a wonderful professional archives, a joy to work in.  As I link to in my paper, the Archives has great virtual exhibitions highlighting  the contributions of people like Solomon Brown and Lou Purnell (Air and Space).  And senior Smithsonian administrators have always expressed great interest in and support for this research.  
• The article mentioned that SI officials hadn't called back back to comment, but that may be simply because the reporters were working on such a tight deadline; as is usual practice, a newspaper likes to publish about a scholarly paper the moment the paper is published.
• There was line in the Post article about Smthsonian officials "allowing" me access to documents; I don't know where that line came from. The Archives is of course open to any serious researcher-so nobody would ever not be granted access to historical documents.
• I was quoted as saying that the at the highest level, the Smithsonian hadn't yet begun a 'truth and reconciliation' process about legacies of slavery as such at the institution. When I talked to the reporter, I did emphasize that there are many areas across the institution, especially the Institutional History Division and  the Archives, where people for years have been working hard and bravely to bring the diverse history of the institution to light, especially African American contributions. 
•  It is true  that so far as I know, there has been anything equivalent at the Smithsonian to the US Congress' resolution on the role of enslaved people in building the US Capitol (which included the labor of enslaved men in quarrying building material); Brown University's Committee on Slavery and Justice;  The College of William and Mary's Lemon Project; or Emory University's Transforming Community Project, which led to the January 2011 official statement of regret, by the university Board of Trustees for the university's "entwinement" with slavery.  Something like that is yet to come at the Smithsonian, as it is yet to come at so many major American civic institutions.   As I noted, I do think there is great openness at the Institution's highest levels to working in that direction.  I recognize that such a process will be more challenging at the SI than at private institutions; having said that,  it would serve as a kind of national model for how such honest and healing public conversations about slavery and historical accountability could be conducted. 

I certainly hadn't expected this much public attention to a short piece in an academic journal. The major thrust of my research is actually on race, labor and science at the Smithsonian in the post-slavery period.  I'm hoping to explore the many remarkable stories of African American staff at the Institution, concentrating on the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The legacy of slavery in DC, Maryland and Virginia is part of that story, but by no means the whole story!