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Visual Art: Books:
Día
de los Muertos For the 11th consecutive year, the Maude Kerns Art Center is honoring the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) with a series of altars and a juried exhibition of artworks by a dozen artists spanning the country from New York City to the West Coast.
If the range of media and styles is wide, so is the span of moods evoked by the various pieces shown. The Mexican celebration of Nov. 1-2 has ancient, complex roots. Combining pre-Hispanic and Catholic customs, it is distinctive for its festive and playful atmosphere, without a trace of morbidity. Death is accepted without fear as one of the natural cycles of life. Rituals shared by the culture at large help mediate one's encounter with death and channel personal feelings into a communal experience with family members, friends and neighbors. Importantly, no age is excluded so children may acquire a healthy attitude toward death. This celebratory mood, at once earthy and spiritual, playful and reflective, is present at MKAC. Appropriately, the venue is a church building — the oldest standing in Eugene, now decorated for the occasion with garlands of brightly colored calveras (skulls) created by the Jefferson Middle School Spanish-1 class and a variety of papeles picados (cut paper), including some the colors of marigolds by Eugene artist Jill Cardinal. Cardinal's other displayed works depart in form from traditional Mexican models but retain much of their spirit. Of her two altars, the one dedicated to her mother is personal and intimate. The other, created in 2002, is a community altar: a large papier-mâché church replica painted pink with blue and yellow accents. People are invited to pin on it messages or names of departed loved ones. "My mother had never talked about my father after he died," Cardinal said. "When I lost my second husband and father of my children, I started making informal altars or shrines. This gave me a way to continue talking about him and relating to him. Then I realized there was a whole tradition of doing altars. I called MKAC and made an altar for my husband and sister. It had an interactive part, a tree where people could hang tags on. It got hundreds and hundreds of tags! I realized there was a need because death is so unritualized in our society. So the following year, I made the community altar." Gaily painted in bright pastel hues, Cardinal's tiny wooden boxes and her miniature papier-mâché altars, which she calls "home altars," almost always feature folksy, earthy, idiosyncratic representations of the Virgin Mary, as does her lovely gouache icon, Our Lady of the Dandelions. "The archetypal mother is a recurring theme of mine," Cardinal said. "I had an intense Catholic childhood. Now I'm striving to provide an earthy grounding to that spiritual image. I think the Virgin Mary needs earthiness." Michael Gonzalez' (Trinidad, Calif.) three delightful wall pieces, all entitled Personal Power Place, similarly unite earthiness — in execution and choice of materials — and spiritual intent. In both form and function they are a combination of miniature church and bird's house, created out of redwood or mahogany and recycled copper. All comprise three parts. "Above is a bird's house that symbolizes the ethereal, the mind, the future," Gonzalez said. "The middle part is the most important because it represents the present. At the bottom, a box for mementos represents the past. I always put a little copper something in there with my signature on it." For each compartment door, Gonzalez devises a different, ingenious copper latch. A very different mood prevails in Kurt Brian Webb's (Palatine, Ill.) three woodcuts collectively entitled War: Dance of Death, the strongest artwork in the show. A perfect economy of bold, precise cuts endows the pieces with a quality of expressiveness that greatly enhances the satirical content. In these black and red stylistic parodies of war propaganda, red Death, lithe and supple, flirts with a stiff, none-too-bright Soldier. She teases, dances seductively, wraps herself around him, clearly enjoying herself. Webb sharpens his general message about the true purpose of war by reproducing in the background news articles about the current war in Iraq. Webb's piece is powerfully complemented by Tina Schrager's altar, which is dedicated to the people killed in the war in Iraq. Inspired by the Normandy graveyards from World War II, with their endless rows of simple white stones, Schrager (MKAC exhibitions coordinator) used a thousand empty bullet casings to represent the dead American soldiers. Schrager's installation is extremely striking in its sobriety and directness. The symmetry of its overall composition, the starkness on the top tier of row upon row of bullet casings erected on black cloth over a white altar structure, the simplicity of the lower tier with its simple bowl containing the remaining bullet casings flanked by red votive candles, the general economy of means — all contribute to give the piece a formal classicism that befits the tragedy of lost lives. Above the altar, Schrager placed one the most expressive of Picasso's numerous versions of The Weeping Woman (La Femme qui pleure), painted in 1937 following the surprise German bombing of the Basque city of Guernica that killed much of its civilian population. Hanging from the ceiling, streamers of origami cranes provide a message of peace. Two more altars deserve to be mentioned. Los Amigos de los Sobrevivientes, a local organization that provides materials and psychological support to victims of torture, built an altar dedicated to immigrants who lost their lives crossing the US-Mexican border. The altar conveys its social and political message with an elaborate, traditional display of ofrendas (offerings) of squashes, corn, fruit, bread loaves, tortillas, sugar skulls, drinks, flowers and votive candles spread over a three-tiered altar surmounted by paintings and flanked by smaller side-altars. Arches of bamboo entwined with flowers surround the altar. For a personal, traditional Mexican altar, turn to Rocio Kimberley's sumptuous display dedicated to her two brothers. Brightly colored, woven cloth cover the tall three-tiered altar and side altar. Offerings include religious symbols, personal mementos and photographs. The traditional calaca (skeleton figure) appears as a lady in elegant hat and dress. For a take on traditional playful Day-of-the-Dead imagery, you may look to Eugenean Erin Wilson's woodcut, Sweet, with its two skeletons dressed for a wedding, whereas Dottie Korn-Davis' (La Mesa, Calif.) mixed media pieces give the purely playful a new twist. In Sheepskate, a roller skate is surmounted by a shoe fitted with cranium and vertebrae sprayed with festive pastel colors. Antennae give the assemblage a crustacean look. Faithful to its own tradition, MKAC opened the exhibit on Friday with a family-friendly fiesta that included music by John Crider & Friends, dance by Ballet Juvenil Azteca, beer from Steelhead Brewery and delicious food — Schrager's own Cuban-style black beans and Mexican rice, as well as dishes contributed by Café Yumm! and Chapala Restaurant. Docent-led tours for school children will be available for the next three weeks. I highly recommend a visit for all age groups.
Recommended
Reading What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America BY THOMAS FRANK. HENRY HOLT, 2004. HARDCOVER, $24. Made in Texas: George W. bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics BY MICHAEL LIND. BASIC BOOKS, 2003. PAPERBACK, $14. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet BY JAMES MANN. PENGUIN, 2004. PAPERBACK,$16. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? deals with the vexing issue of why the people who stand to lose the most from the current, arch-conservative administration can be its most ardent supporters. The administration focuses on cultural issues to create an artificial divide between "regular people" and a "liberal elite" by claiming that the wealthy Republicans in power are part of the common people. Meanwhile, they switch the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and further impoverish the poor. Carefully maintained debates about moral and religious issues such as gay marriage, abortion and school prayer build on moral outrage among middle and working class people and mask economic policies, which damage the majority of the population. Frank describes a new generation of "sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life." The right could not have accomplished this feat without plenty of help from the media it mostly owns but denounces as "liberal," thus cleverly shifting the perceived political center further and further to the right, Frank notes. His analysis is sharp, and he does not stoop to caricature. He also faults the Democrats for having abandoned a class politics that resonated with people, thus allowing the Republican party to switch from an economical debate detrimental to them to a cultural debate they can manipulate. In Made in Texas, Michael Lind resorts to history to explain the radical departures in Republican policy wrought by the current Bush administration that make it differ markedly from, say, that of the first Bush president. What Lind calls the "Texanization of the American right" is characterized by a bellicose foreign policy at odds with previous Republican administrations, colored by southern religious fundamentalism and informed by the archaic conception of a social order based on white hereditary power and wealth fueled by exploitation of both human and environmental resources. Whereas Reagan and Bush senior had to rely on a broad Republican coalition, the new, "southernized" Republican party of Bush junior, according to Lind, is far more representative of the South's conservative oligarchy. Its pillars are big businesses and the religious right (as opposed to mainstream Protestantism). Its intellectuals and the authors of its foreign policies are the neo-conservatives who became allied with fundamentalist Christians over a shared concern about the welfare of Israel. Lind's last chapter, which outlines his own "solutions" can be skipped without much loss. His book is most useful when the author limits himself to history. James Mann'a Rise of the Vulcans is an excellent, fascinating book that retraces and examines the political careers of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, who themselves dubbed their team the Vulcans. I cannot recommend this book enough. Among other things, it brings to light how the war in Iraq was one of the team's goals long before 9/11, an event that provided the means to receive public endorsement for the war. To better understand the most powerful man in America, Dick Cheney, read John Nichols' book, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press, 2004). The book contains an abundance of useful and clarifying information, though you may find its tone a little flippant. No contemporary political education can be complete without acknowledging Machiavelli's foremost disciple of this election, Karl Rove. Two books are edifying: Bush's Brain by James Moore and Wayne Slater (Wiley, 2003) and Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid and Carl M. Cannon (2002). These books remind us that many among the most powerful Republicans in the White House learned the tricks of their trade from Richard Nixon, including how to deal with the press, then further refined them. Nixon himself might have repudiated Bush's alienating foreign policy, however.
BOOK NOTES (Oct. 28 – Nov. 24 '04): It's book award season again, with nominees announced for both the Oregon Book Awards (Nov. 18) and the National Book Awards (Nov. 17). Oregon Book Award (OBA) finalists: Poetry: David Biespiel (Wild Civility), James Grabill (An Indigo Scent After the Rain), Henry Hughes (Men Holding Eggs), Christopher Johnston (Violent Homeland), Lisa M. Steinman (Carslaw's Sequences,). Novel: Tracy Daugherty (Corvallis, Axeman's Jazz), David Farris (Lie Still), Michael Curtis Ford (Salem, The Last King), Kris Nelscott (Stone Cribs). Short Fiction: Scott Nadelson (Saving Stanley), Marjorie Sandor ( Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime). Gen. Nonfiction: Ellen Morris Bishop (In Search of Ancient Oregon), Lauren Kessler (Eugene, Clever Girl), Elinor Langer (A Hundred Little Hitlers), Jewel Lansing (Portland), Jeffrey St. Clair (Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me). Creative Nonfiction: Paul Collins (Sixpence House), Brian Doyle (Leaping), Ariel Gore (Atlas of the Human Heart), Bette Lynch Husted (Above the Clearwater), Karen Karbo (The Stuff of Life). Drama: Shelly Lipkin, Louanne Moldovan, Sherry Lamoreaux (Vitriol and Violets), Gay Monteverde (The Arabian Nights), Steve Patterson (Altered States of America). Children's Literature: Michelle McCann (Luba), Marie & Roland Smith (B is for Beaver), Andrea U'Ren, Mary Smith, Leah Wilcox (Falling for Rapunzel). Young Adult Literature: Nancy Osa (Cuba 15), Susanna Vance (Deep). …National Book Award finalists: Fiction: Sarah Shunlien Bynum (Madeleine is Sleeping), Christine Schutt (Florida), Kate Walbert (Our Kind), Joan Silber (Ideas of Heaven), Lily Tuck (The News from Paraguay). Nonfiction: The 9/11 Report, Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World), Kevin Boyle (Arc of Justice), David Hackett Fischer (Washington's Crossing), Jennifer Gonnerman (Life on the Outside). Poetry: Donald Justice (Collected Poems), William Heyen (Shoah Train), Carl Phillips (The Rest of Love), Jean Valentine (Door in the Mountain). Young People's Literature: Deb Caletti (Honey, Babe, Sweetheart), Pete Hautman (Godless), Laban Carrick (Harlem Stomp), Sheila P. Moses (The Legend of Buddy Bush), Julie Anne Peters (Luna: A Novel). Readings, Lectures, Book Signing: Poet Major Jackson (Leaving Saturn) at 8 pm Oct. 28, Knight Library Browsing Room. …Essayist Phillip Lopate (Waterfront) at 7:30 pm Oct. 29, Valley Library, OSU campus, Corvallis. …Shirley Tallman (Murder on Nob Hill) and Carola Dunn (Mistletoe and Murder) at 5 pm Oct. 30, Tsunami Books. …Carol Ann Bassett (Organ Pipe: Life on the Edge) at 7 pm Nov. 3, REI, 306 Lawrence. …Gary Moulton (Editor, The Journals of Lewis and Clark) at 8 pm Nov. 4, 182 Lillis Hall, UO. …Carola Dunn, "Inextricably Entangled: Plot, Character, Setting" at 6:30 pm Nov. 4, Baker Downtown Center. …Richard Melo (Jokerman 8) and OBA nominee Ariel Gore at 7 pm Nov. 5, Feinsteins' Museum of Unfine Art. …Bob Welch, "The Making of American Nightingale," at 7:30 pm, Nov. 5, Eugene Public Library. …Fiction writing teacher Jessica Morrell (Writing out the Storm), workshop from 10 am-4:30 pm Nov. 6, 1210 SE Oak, Portland, $70. (503-287-2150). …Eric Hansen (The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer) at 7 pm Nov. 10, Knight Library Browsing Rm. …OBA finalists Marjorie Sandor and Tracy Daugherty at 8 pm Nov. 11, Knight Library Browsing Room. …Shirley Tallman, Carola Dunn at 5 pm Nov. 11, Tsunami Books. …David Sedaris at 7:30 pm Nov. 11, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, $30. (503-227-2583). …Thomas P. Hoop (The Jihad Virus) at 11 am Nov. 13, The Book Store, 1000 River Rd. …Essayist, poet Paisley Rekdal (The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee) at 7 pm Nov. 16, Eugene Public Library. …Roddy Doyle (Oh, Play That Thing) at 7:30 pm Nov. 16, First Congregational Church, Portland, $13. (503-227-2583). …Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent) at 7 pm Nov. 17, Knight Library Browsing Room. …18th Annual Oregon Book Awards at 7:30 pm Nov. 18, Scottish Rite Center, Portland, $25. (503-227-2583). …Andy Friedman, Ty Connor at 9 pm Nov. 19, Sam Bond's Garage, $5. …Children's author, illustrator Chris Van Allsburg at 11 am Nov. 20, First Congregational Church, Portland, $13/$8 students, seniors, $5 children (503) 227-2583).
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