Eating Our Spinach: Contemporary Art Futures in California
1999; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1999.0057
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo2 1 6 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 portraits of local characters, most notable among them a friendly Jewish merchant and his family, who fascinate Stevenson and who elicit his genial but telling condescension. One thing leads rather sleepily to another until the final chapter, where we are promised an account of “how the days passed and what pleasure we took in them.” But having roused himself to a belated reckoning, Stevenson con fesses that “the greater part of our life at Silverado [was] passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there is among the hills” (The Silverado Squatters, in Hart). Doubtless, you will require the extraction of some futher morsel of meaning from this brief excursion through my past and Stevenson’s prose. I assure myself that the insider/outsider distinction will be of some use, principally I suppose to those who number themselves among the former. As to the significance of the differences between my insider’s view and Stevenson’s outsider’s view of California, con sider first the evident disparity of talent on display. That done, reflect that it is frequently the privilege of the outsider to witness promptly and clearly the complex “truth” of a place, precisely because s/he is relatively free of the distortions and myopia that afflict those who feel at home in the mingled scene. Forrest G. Robinson is Professor of American Studies at the Univer sity of California, Santa Cruz. His books on the American West include Wallace Stegner (with Margaret Robinson), In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America, and Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain and The New Western History: The Territory Ahead. E a t in g O u r S p i n a c h : C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t F u t u r e s in C a l if o r n ia M e r e d it h T r o m b l e As I chopped crinkly, gray-green kale for dinner last night, I cal culated that it was at least 10 years ago that my physician first admonished me to eat greens. I didn’t so much as sniff a leafy veg etable for at least 2 years, then I sampled chard at a friend’s house; at some point I learned a great recipe for spinach salad with oranges. Ten years later, I was cooking my first kale, and I realized that for the C a l i f o r n i a d r e a m i n g 2 1 7 past year I would have qualified as a “moderate” eater of greens. Intellectually , I believed in spinach and its cousins, but it took years to make them part of my life. This halting process is a parable for the changes transforming California art from a practice grounded in the European tradition to the hybrid expression of a polycultural state. Mu l t i c u l t u r a l i s m : D o w n a n d O u t . . . Artists in California will spend the coming decades in cities where everyone is a “minority.” California’s bubbling, oft-ridiculed mix of radical psychology, politics, and art resulted, in the 1990s, in the attempt to face this future known as “multiculturalism”— a baggy term whose meaning holds people, histories, theories, and institutions reacting against the hierarchies of modernism and moving toward a culture which distributes power more evenly. The energy of the waves carrying multiculturalism across the surface of the art world is now diminishing, as it must. This is not to say that equal opportunity and appreciation of difference are now established, but that the en trenched power structure is sturdy and can absorb a tremendous bat tering. Yet, in time the generation now in charge will retire; students conversant with the dialogue of difference will mature and assume curatorial, teaching, and administrative...
Referência(s)