Flashback Friday: Symbols, Symbolism and My Lincoln Portraits

Blue Lincoln with Sunblock on His Nose

In art history Symbolism was an actual movement in which pictorial means were used to convey allegorical meanings. Throughout history, however, artists have used symbols and symbolism, especially in religious iconography.

 

To illustrate the difference between symbolism and representational art, picture a cave drawing of several buffalo images with a dotted line crossing a bunch of wavy lines. This representational piece is telling people where the buffalo are and how to get there. (They are across the river.) If one of the buffalo has wings and is flying above the herd, it might be some kind of early symbolic expression. ("The gods granted me an opportunity to take one.") If there is a large tripod-like creature lifting one of the buffalo and a screeching noise being emitted with a beam of light coming out disintegrating the other buffaloes, then you are looking at an early version of War of the Worlds. Later historians would then endlessly debate whether this was Realism or Fantasy.

All this to say that symbolism is as much a part of art as metaphors are to poetry. For example, in David Bowie's "Is There Life On Mars?" the line, "look at those cave men go" is not referring to cave men but to lowbrow brutes having it out in a bar fight, or possibly the alienated teenager is watching a movie of such. The words are not literal but rather metaphorical, as is Em Dickinson's line, "Hope is the thing with feathers" which Woody Allen turns around to indicate his own -- and modern man's -- existential alienation and despair with the title of his volume Without Feathers. Or he may mean he is exposing himself.

O.K., so this was a long intro to make a small point about my Lincoln paintings. My first painting, Blue Lincoln, was not really about Lincoln at all. I had read a quote somewhere that "you can't fight an international war and a civil war at the same time" and it resonated with me. I believe it was from the book Maximilian and Carlotta in which the U.S. could not defend Mexico against European incursion (a violation of the Monroe Doctrine) because it was in the throes of its own civil war. 

For me this was a perfect symbol of many lives today who are battling their own inner conflicts and have unresolved issues internally while simultaneously trying to carry on with their life purpose of service to the community, a cause or the world-at-large. Many people have been sidelined by internal conflicts who could be leaders of organizations in need of leadership.

The Lincoln image thus became such a symbol for me. The overarching internal conflict between good and evil, freedom and slavery, left the president blue.

The painting Lincoln II has a brighter background, but his features are ashen. The subtitle, Portrait with One Dying Eye, is a reference to the line from Dylan's "Hurricane." The wounded guy "looks up through his one dyin' eye, says 'What'd you bring him in here for? He ain't the guy.'" The song is ultimately about injustice, as noted in the second to last verse. "To see him obviously framed couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game."

And so it is that presidents themselves become symbols. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was not delivered in Arlington Cemetery, land that formerly belonged to Robert E. Lee, but rather at the Lincoln Memorial. Symbols have power. Symbols resonate.

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When I wrote all this 10 or more years ago I had an end in mind. Thursday evening there were more than a dozen art gallery openings slated and an all day gallery hop on Saturday. I wanted to encourage readers to take to the streets and see a bit of all this creative energy emerging here in the Twin Ports. 

At the time I wrote, "As you engage the arts, whether the visual arts, music, poetry or theater, it can be a rewarding exercise to engage the work in a deeper way. Look for threads that lead deeper into the mind of the artist or beyond to the culture-at-large."  

Of course some art is simply what it is. It's not always symbolic. Sometimes a sitar is simply a sitar. My work (no Lincolns, but several Dylans) was on display at Goin' Postal in Superior, along with perhaps a dozen other artists. Goin' Postal on Tower Avenue is still my "home gallery" to this day. 

23 Proverbs and Sayings from Africa

On Tuesday I shared some thoughts in response to the Old Testament proverb, "Iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. That night as I lay awake I began thinking about proverbs and sayings from other traditions. Wednesday evening I decided to visit websites with collections of sayings from various African nations and peoples. I found it fascinating. Here are some of my favorite gleanings. 

Algeria
A secret for two, soon a secret for nobody.

Benin
Silence is an attribute of the dead; he who is alive speaks. 

Cameroon
Lying can get you a wife, but it won't keep her.

Djibouti
A guest who breaks the dishes of his host is not soon forgotten.

Ethiopia
One who plants grapes by the road side, and one who marries a pretty woman, share the same problem.

Ghana
The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.

Kenya
A man who continually laments is not heeded.**

Liberia
Only when the tree is big and strong can you tether a cow to it.

Mali

The hyena chasing two antelopes at the same time will go to bed hungry.

Madagascar (The Malagasy peoples)

Those who rush things too much, without reflection, can be surpassed by those who take their time. 

Nigeria
The child of an elephant will not be a dwarf.

Rwanda
You hide the fact you hate me; I hide the fact I know.     (EdNote: Interesting.)

Senegal

A lobster loves water, but not when he's being cooked in it.

Tunisia

How lovely is the sun after rain, and how lovely is laughter after sorrow.

Uganda
Old men sit in the shade because they planted a tree many years before.

Zambia
When you show the moon to a child, it sees only your finger.

Zimbabwe

God is good, but never dance with a lion.

Bonus Tracks

Two men in a burning house must not stop to argue. (Ghana)

If you are on the road to nowhere, find another road. (Ghana)

 

The end of an ox is beef, and the end of a lie is grief. (Malagasy)
 

The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparations. (Nigeria)

Only the thing for which you have struggled will last. (Nigeria)

A riddle made by God has no solution. (Zambia)

** This saying reminded me of a poem I used to read to my children: Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burned.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Sarah Brokke at the DAI

Her colors are vivid and images striking. 

Check out Sarah Brokke's recent oil paintings 

on display in the John Steffl Gallery at the DAI

 

Related Links

https://www.duluthartinstitute.org/Embody

Information about Thursday's Artist Talk with Sarah Brokke, Marjorie Fedyszyn and Kristen Kaas

Interview with Sarah Brokke, 2013

Iron Sharpens Iron: How Cancel Culture Gets It Wrong

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another."
--Proverbs 27:17

This Old Testament proverb has come up more than a few times recently. It's amazing how insights from three thousand years ago continue to have relevance. 

The idea here, I believe, is that as we confront ideas different from our own, we're forced to think more deeply than we might otherwise do. These new ideas may even dismantle our beliefs or perceptions on a matter. The thing is, such challenges may also lead us to dig deeper to see if we've built our worldview on a firm foundation or shifting sands. 

What brought this proverb to mind was the following quote from philosopher/thinker Karl Popper:

"Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game." 

In science, ideas that get set forth are on the table to be probed. Conflicting ideas lead to new insights or firmer resolutions. To question is OK. The application of this principle goes far beyond the realm of science. 

Unfortunately, to the degree that universities stifle the free exploration of ideas, to that degree we have failed to equip our students with an essential skill: the ability to think. This is precisely what's wrong with our current culture of negation. 

Sometimes it is through talking things out with others that we figure out what we ourselves really believe. Healthy bull sessions in college dorm rooms help young people recognize  what is "bull" and what is not. 

On many college campuses conservative speakers aren't even permitted to speak for fear that riots will ensue. At Drew University, for example, "Some students ...are attempting to block a conservative, pro-life speaker from lecturing on campus by ripping down flyers and protesting the visit at a student government meeting... Others have circulated social media posts urging students to attend a November 3 student government meeting and ask them to block the conservative speaker."

Here's an article by the American Bar Association making the observation that it is primarily conservative speakers being barred or blocked from speaking on college campuses. The article by Stephen J. Wermiel & Josh Blackman is titled Thwarting Speech on College Campuses. 

Right now college campuses are debating just how much they should allow the free exchange of ideas. If we accept the idea behind Proverbs 27:17, this is a demonstration of weakness on the part of our schools. If they so fear the free flow of information in the marketplace of ideas, how will they ever deal with the realities beyond the borders of campus life?

The authors of The Coddling of the American Mind showed how this current development came about. C.S. Lewis saw the early stages of this development nearly a century ago. When writing my review of his book I cited his observation, "The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety." In today's schools we fear ruffling feathers. We want schools to be a "safe" place. 

I keep running into people who say they're abandoning social media because of the lack of freedom to express ideas without creating a backlash, or fearing as such. 

The bad behavior is not solely from the Left. There is lashing out from the Right as well, though on campuses these past five years I've heard more instances of protests from the liberal side. Needless to say, we have drifted far afield from what I believe is the higher ground of dialogue and the once-noble notion that "I may not agree with what you say but I support your right to say it." That principle is part of the wreckage brought about by cancel culture. 

Oddly enough, I was "cancelled" (or sharply criticized) for even mentioning the expression "cancel culture" because it this canceller said doesn't exist any more. "We're so past that," he said, while cancelling me for suggesting it.

These are strange times.  

Incentives Matter, Whether In Marketing, Economics or Politics

My April column in Business North was about the role incentives play in generating outcomes that businesses desire. Here's the beginning of the story, followed by a number of quotes about the importance of understanding incentives.

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Photo credit: Gary Firstenberg

Even though economics has been famously nicknamed “the dismal science,” there have been some surprisingly interesting books written about this topic over the years. One of these was the 2005  bestseller Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which went on to sell more than 4 million copies. When I read the book in 2009, one of the takeaways for me was the importance of incentives.

As a result, I did a Google search on the topic at the time and came across a blog titled Incentives Matter that dealt with economics. To my surprise, the blogger was a UMD economics professor originally from Brazil, Pedro Albuquerque. We met for lunch at Pizza Luce and I soon learned that a Nobel Prize was given in 2007 to a University of Minnesota professor, Leonid Hurwicz, for his recognition of the role of incentives in the field of economics and game theory.

Continue reading Here.

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Quotes About Incentives

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
~ Charley Munger

"The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows."
~ Emily Oster

"People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem."
~ Mitt Romney

EdNote: If this is so, why do we persist in doing it?

"The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country."
~ Thomas Sowell

"People in the political world have every incentive to say things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized groups have more and more reasons to say things that don't make any economic sense."
~ Thomas Sowell

"If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else."
~ John Stossel

And so it goes.

Homelessness In Duluth: Hiding In Plain Sight

For near six months I have been researching the issue of Homelessness in Duluth. This week the article I assembled appeared in Business North, a regional publication serving the Northland business community.

I had hoped to find a single cause for this problem and initially hypothesized that the primary issue was a lack of affordable housing. Quite a while before completing the article I saw two separate problems come into view. Affordable housing is one these twin peaks. The second is the social dysfunction caused by addiction and mental illness. 

My aim was to help shed light on what has been going on with the hope that there will be increased dialogue on these matters. 

It was surprising how many pronouncements there have been, both at the national and local levels, regarding "putting an end to homelessness." One of the most insightful discussions I had was with former mayor Don Ness, who essentially stated that politicians vowing to "end" or "solve" an issue like homelessness will only create frustration, because when the money is spent and the problem hasn't gone away it looks like failure. 

The better path, he feels (as I understand him) is to keep doing things to help matters improve, and to not assume it will ever be completely resolved. It's complicated, but we can't sweep it under the rug and it needs sustained attention. 

As regards affordable housing, this is also an immense problem that needs to be addressed. My aim these next several months is to get a better understanding of the obstacles we're facing as a city. Just because the problem is shared by many other cities does not mean we don't have our own unique contours. Duluth has succeeded at selling itself as "a place to want to be." Unfortunately, the housing supply is crimped, hence we see skyrocketing prices in the real estate market. The same goes for rental housing. 

If you have any thoughts you wish to share regarding affordable housing in Duluth (or the lack thereof) please leave a comment below, or send an email to ennyman3@gmail.com. 

IN PLAIN SIGHT

Homelessness in Duluth impacts everyone, even entrepreneurs. Here, businesses join the difficult conversation.

After spending days attempting to subdue profane shouting matches among customers, managers of a popular downtown Duluth cafe put away their tables and chairs for three weeks last month and only served takeout. It's one of many downtown firms struggling to address a problem that business owners believe has been downplayed by local government and law enforcement leaders.

Homelessness has impacted the Twin Ports region for decades and remains a pressing issue for a number of social, humanitarian and economic reasons. In this article, BusinessNorth will focus on how homelessness in our region impacts the business community. To be clear, the majority of downtown offenses such as vandalism, panhandling and public intoxication are not necessarily started by people experiencing homelessness. Neither do the great majority of people experiencing homelessness commit crimes. But homelessness is a challenge in Duluth,  and one that affects the business community. People we spoke with downtown are frustrated by the impact this is having on their companies but were reluctant to speak on the record. As one business owner said, “It's problematic. We're empathetic, but it keeps customers away.”

Read the full story here:  In Plain Sight

Flashback Friday: It's Interesting, But Is It Art?

Ten Years Ago Today

Ken Burns' documentary Jazz has so much to say about so many things that a once through experience of watching is not enough. Race relations and the American experience are but one of the threads that weaves through this story about music and musicians. Another thread is how the reclusive edge of the avant-garde jazz scene bled into the broader culture in so many various ways.
 
Yesterday was the last episode in the Robert Hughes documentary Shock of the New, which the Duluth Art Institute so graciously shared at the Zinema 2 downtown. While watching this film series, which explores how modern and post-modern art came to be, I couldn't help but see parallels with the music scene. Many of the problems were similar. What is important? What is good? Who determines value? If the public likes it and it's popular, can it really be great? (This was Updike's complaint with Stephen King.)
 
When the narrator in Jazz put this out there I had to set it down in writing because of all that it conveyed. The basic truth, Artie Shaw concluded, is that popular music has little or nothing to do with musical values at all. “I still wanted to play music and the audience was saying, ‘Play what you’re playing. Over and over. We like that.’ They never could understand that what they liked was something I did on my way to getting better. That record that they liked… became a millstone, became an albatross around my neck.”
 
So yesterday, we watched the final installment of our series, which was really more like an addendum. The original series appeared circa 1980. This last piece was produced post-9/11 in 2005. Hughes' aim, he stated, was to discuss "what was good, what was bad and why it is important to know the difference." Just because something is novel and new doesn't mean it is vital or important or good.
 
To make his point he has us join him as he visited with Jeff Koons, whom he said was probably the most successful living American artist. Koons used to be a commodities broker before leaping headlong into the art scene. Koons is an American artist who built a reputation around reproducing banality it seems. It's hard to take him seriously, but he's audacious enough to suggest with a straight face that he is simply a modern equivalent of Michaelangelo. Certainly he's learned a thing or two from Warhol about how to capitalize on his chosen path.
 
It just so happened that a couple days ago someone shared with me a link to Morley Safer's 60 Minutes segment on Contemporary Art. And look who's in the limelight... It's Koons. His fifteen minutes evidently didn't end here. (Be honest, does this excite you or turn your stomach?)

In late March, in the midst of Hughes' film series there was a guest lecturer at UMD who presented his take on developments these past 150 years in the art scene. Greg Volk, an art critic and curator himself, gave a lively and thought-provoking overview from a bit more esoteric perspective. Volk's fascinations end in a space that was different from Hughes' final pronouncements and ruminations.
 
Volk's heroes are artists like Katharina Grosse, Ayse Erkman and Roman Signer. Each was following a path into uncharted personal territories without boundaries. But I couldn't help simultaneously hearing in my head Morley Safer's take: "Who are these people trying to buffalo?"

Hughes comes full circle back to draftsmanship and painterliness. His heroes in the end are very different: Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Paula Rego. "Painting is about stories," Hughes stated. He dislikes the fast art of modern times as much his distaste for fast food. And he finds sensationalism appalling.
 
What I liked about the way our series was presented was that each week ended with a little discussion period which sometimes had almost as many insights as the films themselves. A couple weeks back one of the points made afterward was that all these various movements from Cubism and Dada to Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art were helpful for artists today in that they were now free to pursue their inner vision in any direction they wanted. As Duchamp once pointed out, however, only posterity will decide what was important. Right now, we're standing too close to the oyster.

 
What's your take?