Search results for: art still has meaning

Feeling Materialistic

27 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in History Space, Living History, personal

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Chinese Export Porcelain bowl for the American market, 1790-1810. RIHS collection

Chinese Export Porcelain bowl for the American market, 1790-1810. RIHS collection

I went to Newport yesterday for a History Space program on material culture. I don’t know why I  was nervous, really, because I love stuff. I try not to accumulate too much stuff in my own life, and to be a careful curator, but really: beautiful objects make me really happy, and I love talking about “the thingness of things.”

Living history is fun for me for a lot of reasons, some esoteric and personal. I spent a lot of time in school thinking about images of America, and what they meant (it was the age of semiotics and Derrida) so creating living history personae and clothes and based on images and research is a way of making art of history, or else dressing up in funny clothes and enjoying loud noises.

Historical research is most fun when it asks questions– the journey is as good as the destination–and there are good questions to ask the things you carry with you or use in living history. (They’re probably good to ask if you’re in a mood to downsize at home, too.)

  • What is it?
  • When was it made?
  • Who made it?
  • What is it made of? Where did the materials come from?
  • Where did you get it? When did you get it?
  • How does it work, what does it do?
  • What does it mean to you?

If you can answer those questions, you’ll be a lot closer to knowing the why of what you have.

It’s the stories we tell about our objects that give them meaning: sometimes it’s who made or used a thing, sometimes the story has a meaning that you can’t tell from the object itself.

Think of this: I crossed the Pell bridge last night to come home, the road climbing into a storm cloud, the car lashed with rain and wind on a road surface daguerrotype-reflective and hard to read. The buffeting gusts on the car reminded me of the carpenter who didn’t like crossing the bridge to work in Portsmouth. Still, he told a story about crossing the bridge in storm on a motorcycle, with a girl riding behind him. The wind would rise, you’d both get scared, and she’d squeeze closer. He shivered inside his t-shirt as he told the story, with a tiny smile, and you knew he’d gone to Newport in that weather, on that bike, with that girl, on purpose.

You’d never get that story just from a jacket, a helmet, or a bike, but somewhere, there’s a object tied to that story.

Requiems and Reenactments

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Events, Living History, Reenacting

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Warning: Long reenactor-heavy content ahead.

Evan McGlinn for the NY Times. Click for slide show.

Evan McGlinn for the NY Times. Click for slide show.

My friend wrote on Tuesday about battle reenactments, and whether or not they’re appropriate or even, well, decent, in a way; she has been thinking about the Battle Road event, Patriots Day, and the Battle at Lexington Green in light of the explosions at the Boston Marathon.

She helped me remember the reading and thinking I had done this past fall when people at work asked if reenactments (and even museum exhibitions) glorified war, and when I started to wonder why, exactly, I was in this hobby. I read Vanessa Agnew on “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present” in Rethinking History 11:3, 299-312 (2007) and “Mobile Monuments: A view of historical reenactment from inside the costume cupboard of history” by Stephen Gapps, also in Rethinking History 13:3, 395-409 (2009). I’m still working my way through “Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment” by Simon During, again from Rethinking History, 11:3, 313-333 (2007). There’s a good bibliography at the University of York, but getting at these takes JSTOR or ProjectMUSE access; check with your local public or university library. For list of books about commemoration, History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration by Kirk Savage is an excellent starting place. To find out more about why reenactments differ on different sites, and to discover more about the sometimes-fraught relationship between the NPS and reenactors, you can read this on the role of reenactors at National Parks.

The article that resonated most was Gapps. He wrote about a variety of reenactment types, but what made sense to me as a member of two military reenactment groups, both part of the Brigade of the American Revolution, was his writing about the military reenactments. Gapps focuses on Civil War reenacting, and that is an area in which I’m not interested, but his central tenet rang true to me:

…the performance of history has been largely dismissed by cultural critics as a form of nostalgia, but … it actually has a significant role to offer – particularly as a form of public commemoration of shared remembrance of historical events.

Mr S between the Adjutant and the Dollmaker. Thanks to JacobMar1ey on flickr.

Public commemoration is a large part of the reenactments I’m involved with, but they work differently for participants and spectators, and for different kinds of participants. For a recent example, Mr S and I spent Monday morning in Concord at the North Bridge ceremony, and had two very different experiences.

He came back from the bridge and said, “I was really scared. For a moment there, crossing the bridge and seeing all the British forces, I had a sense of what it must have been like.”

On the North Bridge. Thanks to JacobMar1ley at flickr.

While he had been on the bridge, I was in the gardens with the public thinking, Those poor British soldiers, while I listened to the crackle of candy wrappers and people giggling about their dogs. The crowd spread out on the hill that leads to the Concord River, festival-style, and I was appalled that they came for entertainment to what I thought of as a truly ceremonial and commemorative event. The NPS rules about engagements and casualties suddenly made a lot of sense.

My friend wrote specifically about how reenactments can never portray the reality of fear and horror that is war. She is right. NPS agrees: Even the best-researched and most well-intentioned representations of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare. The activity and logistical support for modern battle reenactments is inconsistent with providing a memorial atmosphere. There is something about reenactments that I cannot fully embrace even as I love them. I have a difficult relationship with “patriotism,” as I have a difficult relationship with America, and much as I have a difficult relationship with my family and friends, whom I also love dearly, though rarely demonstratively.

Naked Raygun, Chicago.

I have been grappling with the concept of America and history and the meaning of American symbols—semiotics—since I started making art. I came of age in the punk years in Chicago, stapling photocopied collages to telephone poles. Reagan was president, nuclear war seemed imminent. I made sculpture and installations about American architecture and literature, as a way to explore American history. I remain skeptical about the political process, even as I engage in it.

So why am I a reenactor? It isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, personally—intellectually—it can be difficult to fully embrace sometimes. Recently, with online discussions of gun control and the relationship between rifle/black powder clubs, the NRA, and reenactors, it has been difficult to grapple with all of the different points of view and to be true to one’s beliefs. Most of the time people don’t air their opposing views. Some of us do, as one writer noted, hold our noses and pay our dues. I knew this going in.

But reenacting, in a way, is an art form for me, a very personal one, one that this blog is part of.

Another friend avoids the military reenactments and sticks to living history through museum work. Mr S enjoys the farm work as much as the battles, because he likes working hard. He likes the physical experience of both; he likes the people, too, and whether he’s chopping wood with the hat maker or crossing the bridge with the adjutant, the shared experiences mean a lot to him. For me, the most profound experiences of women’s history have come at the farm, probably because that is the truest means of reaching the past for a woman I have yet to discover. Can I find that moment in military reenacting? Perhaps, by working hard at recreating the army follower experience.

Unlike monuments, reenactments have the potential to create more open ended and contextual historical commemorations. (Gapps, abstract)

One thing I do not like about the battles is the public. I stand on the public side of the rope line, and think, “Those are my people out there, on the field.” The public—the predatory photographers, the hooting guys, the texting teens, the snacking people—seem so out of place to me. I know it’s entertaining, but it’s somewhere between real and not real, and I can’t forget that it is often about something that was real.

Photo by Evan McGlinn for NY Times. Click for slide show.

Photo by Evan McGlinn for NY Times. Click for slide show.

Mr S hears spectators yell, Get those British bastards! but that doesn’t mean he likes to hear it. It’s not just because we have friends among those enemies, but because they represent men who, just like the Americans, were scared and wounded, hungry and dying. They were here doing their jobs in a place claimed by the British Crown. Does that yell miss the point of the reenactment as commemoration? Is it simple boorishness? Does the comment show the relationship between reenactment and spectator to be too close to blood sport?

Or is the problem that some of the military reenactments fail to adequately contextualize the ‘battle’ as a commemoration or demonstration? Does narration help? We discussed this in the car on the way home from Battle Road: amplified narration and role-playing can deepen the experience for visitors and reenactors alike. What are the better ways to present history for the public? (We’re not suggesting narration for Battle Road: we were comparing notes on different events, and the different perspectives we have from two sides of the rope line.)

I think it’s encouraging when reenactors, even some who might be stereotyped from a distance as old guys who’ll never change, ask themselves questions about what they do, and how, and why. Questions are where we start, and conversations. I’m glad my friend started a conversation. We won’t all like or agree with every statement, but we have to keep talking.

Rhode Island’s Early Veterans

30 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in History, Reenacting

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In the process of helping to create a year of programming based on “Rhode Island at War,” and as a member of a re-enacted Revolutionary War regiment, I hear and think a fair amount about the need not to glorify or romanticize war. I don’t always hear a counter point about remembering what war means, and still less about remembering the men who served. “We’re not glorifying war, are we?” someone asks, and feels they’ve done their duty.

That’s not enough, not really. What about remembering the effects of war, beyond treaties made and boundaries changed, the effects of fighting a war on the men who serve? An organization I belong to, the Brigade of the American Revolution, is dedicated to recreating the life and times of the common soldier of the American War for Independence, 1775-1783. I mention this because what I think is most important is the adjectivecommon. Officers get fancier uniforms and better food, larger tents and nicer equipment. There were also far fewer of them. We have more diaries and letters from officers, more personal effects and portraits. What we do have for the common soldiers, aside from the amazing and idiosyncratic journal kept by Jeremiah Greenman of the 2nd RI, are records.

In considering the men who served, and what happened to them, we are fortunate to have, in the transcribed Records of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a “list of Invalids resident in the State of Rhode Island, who have been disabled in the service of the United States during the late war, and are in consequence thereof entitled to received a monthly pension during life.”  This list was assembled after the Congressional act passed June 7, 1785 establishing pensions for wounded veterans.

The list includes the soldiers’ names, monthly pay, age, rank, and Regiment (or Corp or Ship) in which they served, as well as the disability and its causes. The range is moving, and all the more so because the injuries often make real the simple facts we absorb as early as grade school: Washington’s soldiers had no shoes. Here is Joseph A. Richards, Corporal, age 37 in 1785, who served with the Rhode Island Regiment commanded by Jeremiah Olney. “Loss of part of all the toes on the left foot, by reason of severe frost when on the Oswego expedition, commanded by Col. Willet, in Feb., 1783; also a wound in the knee in the battle of Springfield, June 23, 1780.”

Richards is not the only man to have suffered from frost on theOswego expedition. Oswego! I had to look at a map; the last time I’d heard Oswego named was in Room Service. Oswego, as geographically-savvy readers will know, is a port city on Lake Ontario, home to a fort held by the British throughout the revolution, despite being challenged by the Americans. Let us take a moment to consider how far from Rhode Island Oswego, New York actually is (about 330 miles), and that Corporal Richards would have walked there, and that the action in Oswego took place in January and February 1783, and that Oswego is in a region well-known for snow fall.

Other disabilities call to mind the shabby condition and privations of Continental Soldiers. Benvil Laroach, born in 1746, Sergeant in Olney’s Regiment, lost the use of his left arm “by reason of a fall from a sleigh when on public service, after clothing for troops, from Saratoga to New Winsor, in January 1783.” Washington’s soldiers were dressed in rags. January of 1783 is very nearly the end of the war, and this disability resulted from a fall while going out to get clothing for the troops. This is dull business, but very necessary.

These are but two examples of young men, men who would have been just 30, or thereabouts, when they enlisted. There are older men, too, and we forget that men of all ages served. An excellent additional resource is the Regimental Book, Rhode Island Regiment, 1781 Etc. recently published by Bruce MacGunnigle, Cherry Bamberg, and the R.I. Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.

William Parker, age 69 in 1785, Private in Olney’s Regiment: “A very bad rupture in the groin, occasioned by a fall, when on a march from Red Bank to Mount Holly, in November, 1777, together with the infirmities of old age, which renders him incapable of obtaining a livelihood.”  1777 is the year of the Defense of the Delaware, when Washington’s army tried desperately, and ultimately failed, to keep Philadelphia from falling to the British. The march from Red Bank to Mount Holly was a retreat following battles at Red Bank and Fort Mifflin on the Delaware River, when the army headed to winter quarters. The following summer, at the excruciating Battle of Monmouth, George Bradford, serving under Colonel Israel Angell, received the wound that caused his disability: “A lame arm, occasioned by a wound received in the battle of Monmouth, June 28, 1778, which fractured the bone and renders the arm weak, and the wound has several times broken out, per certificate from Dr. Mason.” Bradford would have been about 21 when wounded.

When I think about opening an exhibit on June 28, the 234th anniversary of the Battle of Monmouth, and celebrating the opening with cake and punch, I have a sense of unease. How can we celebrate such a miserable anniversary, of a lengthy and confusing battle fought in heat that reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a battle that got Major General Charles Lee a court martial, and resulted British official losses of 65 killed, 59 dead of “fatigue”, 170 wounded and 64 missing, and American losses of 69 killed, 161 wounded and 132 missing (37 of whom were found to have died of heat-stroke).

Bradford was but one of 161 wounded, out of an estimated 11,000 American soldiers.  Losses were fewer than in a comparable Civil War battle because of the inaccuracy of smooth-bore muskets in the Revolutionary War period. That the men lost were a smaller percentage of the whole force makes them no less important, or meaningful, than any other loss or casualty in battle. To die of heat stroke in battle is still to die in battle; to suffer for the rest of your life from a wound received while collecting clothing for troops is still to be wounded and disabled. Let us take a moment to remember all the soldiers present and past, their sacrifices great and small, and thank them for all they have done for those of us lucky enough to remain in the comforts of home.

(from the work blog, because writing for two blogs this week is proving challenging)