Archaeology: The Future Looms– Coming to Principle Gallery
We’re all so clogged with dead ideas
passed from generation to generation
that even the best of us don’t know the way out
We invented the Revolution
but we don’t know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn’t part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king
—Marat, act 1 – Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (1963)
What do we carry with us into the future? What do we leave behind?
Do we haul our best intentions, and our idealism? What about our creativity and sense of history– do they get hauled forward? Or is it all left to molder among the shards of pottery, rusting machine parts, broken toys, plastic bags, and other souvenirs we leave to the future as monuments to today?
Do we take with us our worst impulses and lack of responsibility, dismissing history and forgetting all that is buried in the past? Do we continue to drag the dead ideas of the past with us?
I don’t know.
Those are some questions that sometimes come to mind when I look at some of the pieces from my Archaeology series. These questions seemed to pop up even more with this new small painting (10″ by 10″ canvas) from the series. There is something in it, something I can’t quite identify, that makes it feel as though there is a decision to be made about our future. I am sure the current political environment comes into play in my thinking but it feels as though it goes beyond even that. As though outside of a natural calamity — giant meteor strike, supervolcano eruptions, or all the land masses of the Earth suddenly sinking to the bottom of the oceans– we have a chance to determine what the future holds. That we get to decide what those things are that we deem to be necessary for our survival and not mere souvenirs of a lost past.
Huh– that’s more thought than I wanted to expend this morning.
Anyway, this painting is titled Archaeology: The Future Looms and it is headed to the Principle Gallery this coming Saturday, September 28. I will be there to give a Gallery Talk beginning at 1 PM. Check out yesterday’s post to see the painting (Point of Contact) that will be awarded to one lucky attendee. It’s usually fun so I hope you can make it.
For this Sunday Morning Musical selection, here’s a somewhat fitting song, Souvenirs, that is sung by here by the late, great John Prine. The song was written by Steve Goodman, who also wrote The City of New Orleans, recorded most famously by Arlo Guthrie. Most people have little knowledge of Goodman or his wonderful songwriting since he died in 1984 at the age of 36 due to leukemia.
Redtree Times 