#sparkchamber 101121 — reconsidering history
Today is so-called Columbus Day. It is the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt. And your #sparkchamber editor is at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, taking in Titian: Women, Myth & Power, the awe-inspiring re-collection of the artist’s six poesie — painted poetries. “Between 1551 and 1562, Titian created a series of monumental paintings for King Philip II of Spain. Celebrated as landmarks of western painting, the six works envision epic stories from classical Antiquity. Titian reimagined these familiar tales, and used his modern style of painting to shape the future of western art.” The Gardner Museum is the exhibition’s finale, and its only American venue on an international tour including to the National Gallery, London, and the Museo del Prado, Madrid. “This exhibition explores each painting’s story, its drama, raw emotion, and complex consequences illustrated in each painting, reconsidering what the poesie meant in their own time and how they resonate now. Newly commissioned responses by contemporary artists and scholars engage with questions of gender, power, and sexual violence as relevant today as they were in the Renaissance.”
“Reconsidering” brings fuller context. Interpreting through a different set of lenses — with the hindsight of history, but equally important in any given moment — shapes, colors, clarifies. Change the filter to see a whole different picture. Which brings us back to so-called Columbus Day — “Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who stumbled upon the Americas and whose journeys marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic colonization.” What American children were/are taught in school — that Columbus “discovered” America — aligns with the feel-good tale of manifest destiny, of American exceptionalism. That we are superior, and whatever we do is not only justified, but inevitable, and morally right.
At issue is the “we” in that construct. “We” are more than just the white men of European — you know, white — descent who have stacked the deck in their favor. And the tunnel-visioned, one-dimensional, curated [and too often revisionist] telling of history serves to reinforce that status quo — further empowers and entitles the privileged, further minimizes, marginalizes, and excludes the everyone else. Recounting narratives from other relevant perspectives doesn’t “cancel” those in power, but it does shine a [usually harsh] light on their ascendence and dominance. Hence the whitewashing that underpins outrage against the 1619 Project, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and the removal of Confederate monuments from public places.
Since the murder of George Floyd, these raw wounds, exposed nerves have been brought to the surface; differences intensifying, reactions increasingly violent. It feels like a reckoning. Right here, in our own time, on the razor’s edge. It’s generally hard to see the forest for the trees, the meaning of the moment, when you’re in it. But we are most decidedly in it. And not for the first time. The story is as old as the nation, and it waxes and wanes in cyclical waves.
Birthday girl Eleanor Roosevelt, the longest-serving first lady of the United States [serving from 1933 to 1945 during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms in office] “was a controversial first lady at the time for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights for African-Americans. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention. On a few occasions, she publicly disagreed with her husband’s policies. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of World War II refugees.”
A strong woman, fighting for the rights of women, black, Asian, immigrant and refugee populations. More than eight decades ago. Equal rights. Equal access to opportunity. Being seen and heard, regardless of race, gender identity, age, ability, religious belief or spiritual practice, economic status, zip code, education level … whatever category you can think of to divide and exclude. This is always the struggle. History on repeat, intensifying each go-round.
There’s no doubt that these are consequential times. And each of us matters in it. History, they say, is written by the winners. The struggle to add voice to how this cycle of history is recorded is at issue. Keep the faith. Demand the truth. And strive to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice [Martin Luther King, Jr.].
p.s. A guide to survival and resistance: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
1.] Where do ideas come from?
The way we’re taught history — what is left out is just as important as what is put in that story. — Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project
Teach students to question. Every time you’re exposed to a narrative you’ve never heard before, you don’t have to believe that narrative, but it should cause you to question — what am I not being taught? — Nikole Hannah-Jones
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it. — Eleanor Roosevelt, controversial, forward-thinking first lady
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right. — Peter Marshall, clergyman
4.] How do you know when you are done?
“What do I ask of a painting?” said the British painter Lucian Freud. “I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.” All six of the poesie do exactly that. Charged with danger and suspense, they are about love, cruelty, loss and the paradoxes of sight. Titian’s astonishingly vivid naturalism [you believe in his inventions like no other painter] can make it harder to think of them as poetic imaginings with metaphorical meanings. And yet that’s ultimately what they are. They revolve around the transformative nature of erotic passion — a theme dear to the Greeks — and the negation of eros: death. — excerpted from Titian: Women, Myth & Power.