The Art of Vilification

In the last day or two Rolling Stone magazine has been taken to task by many observers for publishing a cover photo of accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Some major magazine sales outlets have refused to sell the issue.

At root is emotionalism, which, although it is understandable, must be tempered in a society that claims and expects to be governed by the rule of law. The operative term is accused. In the American justice system a person stands innocent until proven guilty. But Dzkokhar Tsarnaev has been judged by the court of public opinion. In that court, he’s already guilty.

If Rolling Stone should be taken to task, it would be more justifiably because the magazine is pandering to public vilification of this accused bomber, not by putting his photograph on the cover but by underlining it with the words “The Bomber.” The magazine has already judged him guilty, like much of the public.

That the photo has caused such outcry seems disingenuous. Perhaps the outcry is because Rolling Stone is more often thought of as a popular culture magazine than a serious commentator on hard news. Perhaps it is because the photo is not the usual image of a bedraggled prisoner awaiting trial that has become a standard form of public vilification, often of those not yet judged to be guilty but, like Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, awaiting their day in court.

Taken merely as subjects of current interest, accused and convicted criminals, murderers all, are frequently featured on magazine covers. It is a stock device of longstanding for Time magazine in particular. In 1943 Time featured a heroic portrait of Russian dictator Josef Stalin and named him its Man of the Year. More recently, in 1999, Time featured the smiling faces of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They look like fresh-faced teenagers, but they are better remembered as the Columbine High School shooters. Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Timothy McVeigh, the list goes on, foreign and domestic—all have been featured on magazine covers.

This instance of featuring a killer, accused or convicted, is not a one-off for Rolling Stone. In 1970 Rolling Stone put mass murderer Charles Manson on its cover; Life had done the same the previous year. Does putting Dzkokhar Tsarnaev on Rolling Stone make him a “rock star,” as some have commented? My guess is that it doesn’t have that effect for most viewers, any more than putting Saddam Hussein’s smiling face on the cover of Time made him into a kindly father figure.

 

The old saw is that a picture is worth a thousand words. What those words are must be conjured up in the mind of the viewer. Rolling Stone’s use of this particular image of the accused Boston bomber feeds the imagination of different people in different ways. Those who have already judged Dzkokhar Tsarnaev guilty find the image too positive, too apparently innocent. The art of vilification demands a darker vision.

Casual Racism

As several states raced to find ways to disenfranchise minority voters in the days following the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Voter Rights Act, the Paula Deen debacle put paid to the notion that some sort of sea change has occurred and racism is no longer an issue in the United States. Racism clearly is still an issue. TV celebrity chef Deen’s tribulations have entertainment value in today’s scandal-driven media, but her missteps belie deeper societal problems. Racism has moved from the blatant to the casual.

For example, in June the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2012. When minority buyers and renters show up, “This study finds that
 minority homeseekers whose ethnicity is more readily identifiable experience more discrimination than those who may be mistaken for whites.” The study notes that discrimination has diminished, but it has not disappeared in communities across the nation. Researchers included more than 8,000 tests in a nationally representative sample of 28 metropolitan areas.

Folks like the doyen of Southern comfort food will smile in your face, but don’t turn your back. Sure, Paula Deen probably wouldn’t pick up a handy butcher knife and stab you. But there are subtler ways for casual racists to damage those who are not like them. Like the minority homeseekers in the HUD study, you simply will be shown fewer properties or have a harder time getting an appointment. The racism is still there—less obvious, not gone.

“I is what I is,” Deen lamented with faux folksiness in a tearful Today Show interview. Well, Miz Paula, you might as well have trotted out that old saw, you know, about how “some o’ mah best friends is black folk.” Uh huh. The real problem is, you is a racist. Personally, I would rather Deen had said something along the lines of “I am working on overcoming the racism in which I was raised, but sometimes stupidity drops out of my mouth before I can stop it, and I’m sorry.” That might, or might not, have been a more honest response. After all, Miz Paula also added, “I’m not changing.”

For sensationalism seekers, a real apology wouldn’t have been as entertaining as Deen’s weepy self-justifying meltdown on national television. But it would have gone further to rehabilitate Deen’s image. And a more responsible, less emotional approach also would have acknowledged that racism, though less ardent than in prior years, still exists—and still negatively affects every American regardless of race and ethnicity in some way. Sadly, deny or defend are more prevalent strategies among casual racists, as we are now likely to see in issues of voter discrimination as well, following the High Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act.

Why I Paint

Detail from a recent painting.

My walls are full—some might say overfull—of paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs. Many of the paintings are my own. I rarely sell one, though I give one away now and then when I think it won’t be taken amiss. I certainly don’t need to paint any more paintings, and I don’t think I’m much good at painting in any case. So why do I paint?

The easy answer is that I still enjoy it—when I don’t hate it. Painting challenges me. I never seem to be able to create the image in my head on canvas, but I’m often pleasantly surprised by what does appear. And if I’m not pleased, I can paint over it. A good number of my paintings have other, less successful works lurking beneath the surface. I like pushing paint around. Attacking a canvas is a visceral aesthetic. Often I do so to the accompaniment of rock music played loudly. Painting can be a total-body workout, feet shuffling like a boxer’s, hands slashing paint, mind running this way and that, contemplating moves like a chess player.

Mid-19th century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art and therefore art writ large. The Académie was the embalmer of traditional painting standards: historical, religious, and mythological subjects, portraits, all carefully idealized realism in somber colors and no visible brush strokes.

Then along came the Impressionists, who liked color and everyday scenes—and visible brush strokes. Perhaps they also rebelled against the Académie because at mid-19th century the advent of photography was threatening to make realistic painting obsolete. Once freed from the constraints of the Salon, painting boarded a speeding train toward Modernism, which pervaded the 20th century. That was the train I got on about a half-century ago.

I’ve never entirely settled on a style of painting. The images I create veer toward Modernity but are as likely to be sidetracked by Impressionism. Put two of my paintings side by side and one might wonder whether they were created by different artists. My only defense is that, yes, they probably were. Each time I load a brush and approach a canvas, I am someone a little bit different from the person who last painted in my shoes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I make no judgment about whether I am foolish; I only know that I am not consistent. At least, not in painting. But I like doing it anyway. It’s good exercise.

Little Resurrections

Diana

Resurrectio in Latin is a universal concept of coming spiritually or physically back to life after death. It is the central theme of the Christian Easter, which will be tomorrow this year. I don’t believe Jesus physically arose from the dead, but I do believe in resurrection both in the larger spiritual sense and in the everyday sense. Everyday, or little, resurrections are acts of will.

Two days ago my mother-in-law, along with several family members, took the ashes of my father-in-law to sea off the coast of southern California. My father-in-law was 86 when he died a couple of weeks ago. Twenty-two years ago, their daughter Diana, my wife of 23 years, died at age 43. It struck me this week that if I lived to my father-in-law’s age of 86, my life will have been divided equally between the years before and after my beloved wife’s death.

When Diana died, so did I. So did her parents and others. And so did our children: our daughter in college at the time, our high school son, and our three-year-old son. Since that dreadful moment of loss, we have lived on, as others have done following moments of spiritual death. Our lives are acts of resurrection. Each day, we will ourselves to come back to life.

“Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground,” wrote Jessamyn West, an Indiana Quaker and author of The Friendly Persuasion. “Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.”

Life, for me and I suspect for many others, is a series of little resurrections. By writing this reflection today, Diana, and my father-in-law, live on. And in this little resurrection I also am free to live again.

Houdon and the American Collective Memory

Recently my family and I embarked on a spring vacation road trip that included spending time in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. The trip was, partly by intention and partly by accident, a kind of civic education tour. One persistent memory for me has become the artistry of Jean-Antoine Houdon, the French neoclassical sculptor.

Houdon (born at Versailles, March 20, 1741 – died in Paris, July 15, 1828) excelled at portraying with classical realism the great figures of his day. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art I encountered his bust of Benjamin Franklin, which stands at the center of small rotunda gallery. Franklin did not sit for Houdon, who apparently drew on memories of having seen the American statesman at various times when Franklin was representing the fledgling United States in France from 1776 to 1785. A 1778 marble version of the bust can be viewed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Houdon exhibited a terra cotta version at the French Royal Academy Salon in 1779. (A 1778 terra cotta bust of Franklin can also be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

Houdon actually met Franklin in 1783. The Philadelphia marble bust dates from 1785 and is the most detailed. It has become the iconic portrait in the round of the American statesman. At eye level one can almost imagine standing before the great man himself.

Houdon’s plaster bust of George Washington stands in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Franklin invited Houdon to visit the United States, specifically so that Washington could sit for the artist. However, in the National Gallery the more remarkable images may well be two busts of the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, whose ideas helped shape the thinking of many of America’s founders. Voltaire was a favorite model for Houdon. The two marble busts in the National Gallery show Voltaire with and without a perruque (wig) but both with a wry smile, consistent with Voltaire’s fame for his wit.

At Monticello visitors can see Houdon’s bust of Thomas Jefferson, a terra cotta-patinated plaster on a marble plinth. Jefferson met Houdon while the former was minister to France from 1785 to 1789. Before leaving France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jefferson acquired ten or twelve terra cotta-patinated plaster busts of figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Voltaire for Monticello. Jefferson also sat for Houdon himself and brought back several plaster versions of his own bust to give to friends.

Houdon worked from life, portraying the noteworthy figures of his day with extraordinary skill and accuracy, thus giving future generations the images that form the American collective memory of its founding generation. What a marvelous gift these images are for today and for the future.