Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part 3

The third painting I intended to look at on my unpresented tour was by Albert Bierstadt, well-known for his majestic pictures of Yosemite (often with Indian villages or groups of Indians situated on the valley floor framed by the enormous granite cliffs on all sides) and for the finished painting "Last of the Buffalo," for which the De Young has a study:

"Last of the Buffalo" captures a moment as if it were a continuing and essential part of the life of the Plains, even as it states by its title that its evocation is, rather, of the notion that the Indians are passing away, like the buffalo, into a gone world.  Benjamin Madley in An American Genocide describes how the myth of the inevitable passing of the Indians was used as a way of justifying, sanitizing, and finally forgetting the acts of destruction by invaders that caused that "passing."

The painting I had wanted to look at, "California Spring," has been one of my favorites in the "Hudson River" landscape gallery of the De Young for many years, and I've frequently looked at it on other docent tours for its pastoral peacefulness, its situation in a part of the Sacramento Delta that can be visited less than an hour away from San Francisco, its tiny thumbnail of the state capitol building on the horizon, and the magnificent weather effects of the storm in the middle distance, backlit by the emerging sun.

But now there's another resonance in the painting for me: the realization that this European-style pastoral landscape can only exist because of the active destruction of the Indian-shaped landscape (and its sources of all that was needed to support the lives of the local Indians for thousands of years perhaps), first by the Spanish and Californio pastoralists who brought herds of cattle to the state, and then by the more systematic genocidal policies of the Californian and U.S. governments and their gold-hungry invading co-conspirators.

Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part 2

A few feet away from the baskets is the painting Sacramento Indian by Charles Christian Nahl (California's first significant artist, according to Wikipedia, and in the Madley book, the primary documenter of Indian life at the moment of its destruction), made for Milton Slocum Latham, a Southerner and Democratic politician who sat in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1850 and 1852 (when eighteen treaties with California Indian tribes that would have allocated land to the tribes were refused by the U.S. Senate under the pressure of white Californian politicians and newspapers).

The "Sacramento Indian" is portrayed as tamed, an essential distinction for the invaders who shaped the state of California and committed genocide in the first two decades of the state's history.  Wild Indians were categorized and treated as wild animals, with no more rights than other dangerous fauna (another painting at the De Young by Nahl depicts a hunter seated with a dead mountain lion lying before him, reminiscent of the Trump brothers on African safari, but also of the way in which animals and Indian are arranged deliberately in this painting).  The man's expression seems to capture something about both his own strength of character and the impossible danger of his position, even as he sits for the portrait with dignified stiffness.

Also in the museum is the wooden mantelpiece that must have dominated the interior of the Thurlow Mansion, taken over by Latham after Thurlow's bankruptcy, and evoking the brutal aristocratic life of an English hunting lord.

And another painting made not long after the portrait of the Sacramento Indian depicts the bustle of the Sacramento train station a couple of decades later, after the end of the period of systematic Indian genocide.  There are no Indians in this painting.

Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part I

I had two tours at the De Young Museum today, neither of which had any takers.  I took for the subject matter of the second, which goes by "Three Masterpieces in Thirty Minutes" on the marquee, the spectral shadows in the museum of the genocide of California's Indians.  Not a happy subject; but appropriate perhaps for Halloween because these presences have been occupying my own mind like pipe-banging ghosts since I started reading Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide about this crucial chunk of California history, missing in my own picture of the narrative until now.

I began my hypothetical tour by looking at this large early 20th century Pomo burden basket.  Woven tightly enough to hold water or cooking coals, California Indian baskets have been seriously (passionately) collected since just after the period of the extermination of almost all the Indians themselves.  Madley dates the genocide from 1846 to 1873, and sees a reduction in population over the period of something like 80%, a reduction to invisibility as far as most of us who live in the state were and are concerned.  The large burden basket has a fantastic optical banding of overlapping and crossing spirals around a monumental form.

Another vitrine contains a series of baskets that diminish in size down to a truly miniaturist scale, barely larger than a nickel.  Like the large burden basket, all of them were made from materials available in the immediate environment of California, prepared to be suitable to their purpose.  The baskets thus speak to the primary rationale for the particular egregiousness of the California genocide, as compared to the many massacres carried out over the rest of the North American continent: the "wild" Indians, because their ways of living on the land were so seemingly unsophisticated and invisible, were regarded as animals.  The justification of murder and slavery followed accordingly and quite explicitly.  And the end result?  An invisibility, the baskets aside, that allows contemporary Californians to still doubt the claims made by the remaining descendents of survivors of the genocide.   

David Lynch, the man from another place

David Lynch: The Man from Another Place by Dennis Lim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book, which I listened to on Audible as an accompaniment to the new Twin Peaks shows. It's defiantly middle-brow, in love with popular culture but unafraid to refer to any aesthetic or philosophic movement that might be a good point of reference for a reader (or group of readers in discussion) mulling Lynch's work over, clearly written and with a personal point of view. It's a keystone for me in thinking about the structure of art between 1974, when my English teacher Mrs. Greening put me onto the Theater of the Absurd, and the present. The other thing I really like about Dennis Lim's writing on Lynch is that it doesn't devalue failures (of different magnitudes and for different real-world and interior reasons) in describing the career of an artist -- a worthy antidote to our equally success-corrupted and failure-corrupted art culture of 2017.


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