After six months, I finally have internet at home again. Granted, it's satellite internet (no cable out here, and I'll be damned if I ever get stuck with dial-up again), but I can finally post blog entries and do MFA work (and shop and all of the other e-wonders) without possibly getting in trouble at work for doing so. It's a brave new world, folks.
MFA Paper
April/May 2008
“…How we understand space is affected by how we understand time. What was here is inseparable from what is here: it must all be considered together, without recourse to nostalgia or amnesia.”
[1]Perhaps living in a place like Gettysburg naturally causes one to become more responsive to landscape. As a child I would go to the Civil War battlefields here and see thousands upon thousands of people stare across a field, studying every rise and dip in the landscape, every tree and rock, as if these things themselves contained the essence of the horrific events of 1863. In very few other places would one see a phenomenon such as this. Since childhood I seem to have been drawn to other areas prized for their landscapes for one reason or another. I have lived in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, known for inspiring artists from the Hudson River School, and now I work in and reside near Cooperstown, NY, best known for baseball (“invented” by, ironically, Abner Doubleday, who fought for the Union at Gettysburg and has a monument there) but also for the beautiful Otsego Lake, headwaters of the Susquehanna River.
Each of these places is visited by tourists for different reasons, and an interesting future project for me would be to investigate and record how areas become and are maintained as grand tourism centers. At the moment, though, I am focusing my energies on understanding Gettysburg specifically, as a center for history and memory. Jim Weeks, an American history professor at Penn State University, has written a crucial book on the subject of Gettysburg as a marketer of memory. In Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine, Weeks outlines what few have taken the time to study: the history of Gettysburg after the battle. He explores how those in charge of maintaining the battlefields and town over the years have created a unique blend of the sacred and secular. Nearly 150 years after the battle, however, the marriage is not complete. States Weeks, “In his most famous speech, [President] Lincoln said the living could not hallow the Gettysburg battlefield any more than the dead who fell already had. Successive generations ignoring those words have met with frustration over a work that defies completion.”
[2]The current method for achieving this unattainable completion is the idea of restoration. Media projects over the past few years, including Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, Michael Shaara’s blend of historical fact and fiction in the book The Killer Angels, and the Ted Turner-produced film Gettysburg have invigorated a new population of battlefield-seekers (and Civil War reenactors) who wished to see the landscape in its historical setting. What did the soldiers who fought on Little Round Top or at Pickett’s Charge see in 1863? In an effort to reflect the current theme of what Jim Weeks calls “heritage,” the Gettysburg National Military Park Commission (GNMP) has begun an effort to restore the landscape as much as possible to how it appeared in July of 1863. This plan will, for example, “remove 576 acres of ‘non-historic trees’ but restore 115 ‘historic’ acres of trees and 160 acres of orchards (using ornamental rather than fruit-bearing trees).”
[3] These actions inspire Jim Weeks to ask, “If all agree that certain ground is hallowed, does it need to have its historical integrity restored? Moreover, is there not a difference between preserving land to remember an event and transforming the land to look like it did when the event occurred?”
[4] The question becomes all the more pertinent, and complex, when one realizes that this restoration process does not include the removal of the nearly 1,400 monuments scattered across the battlefields, making Gettysburg the most monument-filled battlefield on the planet.
“Monumental architecture and sculpture rarely hold their own against space or time. The feeling of reverence sought by monument makers is not easy to come by in our irreverent society.”
[5] Lucy Lippard’s words ring very true – Maya Lin is the only artist working today that immediately comes to mind who has produced effective contemporary memorials – in regards to the plethora of marble and bronze sculptures at Gettysburg. The heyday of monument-building on the battlefields was between 1885 and 1910 (although the construction of them continued throughout the 20th century), building to a point where certain areas of the landscape truly look like oversize versions of the rural cemeteries the post-war battlefield plans were modeled after. Politics played a major part in the size and placement of monuments, as each regiment and family members of important generals fought to ensure that their respective sculptures were as imposing and impressive as possible. However, as a child in Gettysburg I spent very little time studying the monuments; I was far more interested in the landscape, especially the grand boulders of Devils Den, and the striking expanse of fields that became the setting for Pickett’s Charge. Monuments only interested me if they permitted me to achieve an overhead view of the landscape surrounding it, such as the tower on Little Round Top or the massive, two-story Pennsylvania Monument on statue-laden Cemetery Ridge. Returning to the battlefield this year as a 29 year-old, I noticed that other visitors had a similar relationship to the monuments. Rarely do they now inspire the kind of reverence which was intended when they were created; they simply become oversized, expensive information tablets – they fought here, he died there – or convenient backdrops for group photographs. They are an archaic method of remembrance, overly laden with nostalgia and taken seriously by practically no one in either the art world or society in general.
So now, perhaps absurdly, I am using a photographic process that many would agree to be archaic in order to create images in which I can erase the equally antiquated Gettysburg monuments from the landscape. I am utilizing liquid emulsion to create black and white photographs of the Gettysburg battlefields and monuments on thick sheets of glass. Then, I scratch the monuments off of the glass using an X-acto knife, leaving a transparent silhouette of the statue. What remains is the landscape surrounding the statue. When I first started performing this act, I asked myself the question, how would if affect the Gettysburg landscape and its interpretation by the public if the monuments were no longer on the battlefields? The intention was partly to complete the job of the restorers, taking their restorations to limits that they may sometimes consider but would never act on, for fear of repercussion. However, I soon realized that the erasure of the monument from the image actually returns the viewer’s gaze to the space the monument once occupied. The figures become ghosts (fitting, since Gettysburg has a lucrative market involving ghosts and ghost tours these days), permeating the landscape and invoking loss, time, and memory. The images also invoke photographs taken at the battlefields, using glass plate negatives, directly after the battle by photographers such as Matthew Brady.
It must be remembered that the monuments I am scratching out of my photographs were made by artists. Local, little-known sculptors as well as famous artists are both represented by memorials at Gettysburg. The North Carolina monument, completed in 1929, was sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who is best known (for better or worse) for sculpting the giant portraits at Mount Rushmore. The sculptures, especially the portrait statues and equestrian monuments, are direct throwbacks to ancient Roman art and architecture, and while this may have been significant imagery to American culture during the 19th century, it has since lost much of its import. When it comes to monuments in contemporary culture, it seems that less is more. States Lucy Lippard, “some of the most impressive ideas for monuments have dealt directly with the fact that absence can be more powerfully evoked than presence.”
[6] She cites examples such as the large hole that Claes Oldenberg had dug behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, creating a negative space to offset the monumental, mausoleum effect of the museum itself. In scratching out the monuments from my photographs, I wonder what the general public’s response will be. Offended? Amused? Indifferent? Will the erasure affect how the viewer interprets memory, history, and the landscape? I am hopeful that my works will add to a crucial, post-modern conversation about these issues.
[1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 116.
[2] Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 225.
[3] Ibid, 191-192.
[4] Ibid, 194.
[5] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 107.
[6] Ibid, 110.
