Bill Radawec
July 31, 2008
BY AMY JOAN BOWMAN
SPACE
JULY 31, 2008
You Are Here, an exhibition at SPACE, responds to that most basic question: Where am I? Curator Robert Raczka presents the work of 11 artists using a variety of media to address the complexity of place in the human experience. Despite that variety, You Are Here is cohesive. The artworks share subtexts. For example, the artists' autobiographies creep into their work, suggesting the influence of personal experience on our idea of place.
Clayton Merrell and Melissa Kuntz evoke landscapes of their respective pasts through paint. Merrell uses abstraction and a palate of tawny reds and deep blues on shaped canvases to summon the spanning desert landscapes of the American West. The paintings of Kuntz (who's also a frequent CP art reviewer) feature not New Jersey's shoreline, but its ubiquitous coastal motels. Rendered with photo-realistic sharpness, the cropped images reveal patterns of beach architecture often overlooked.
Prajna Parasher and Liana Dragoman, meanwhile, deal with the act of remembering a place. Dragoman's floor installation "Lines as Sites -- Repositories of Lost Imaginings" is composed of wood blocks, cardboard, newsprint and flickering light-boxes arranged in a flowing pattern. The organic associations of the materials and design suggest an early memory of place. Parasher's lush, ephemeral ink-jet prints are composed of paintings and collaged film frames that recall her childhood in India.
Another commonality among the works is fragmentation. The technique is used both formally and conceptually. But instead of highlighting incompleteness, You Are Here strives to create cohesion from our fragmentary existence.
Take Carin Mincemoyer's playful series of "model landscapes" and Nayda Collazo-Llorens' thought-provoking installation, "Restructured Topography." Mincemoyer molds her 21 miniature landscapes on empty plastic retail containers. The transparent, tray-like models incorporate natural elements like dirt and sand. Wall-mounted at various heights, these organically tactile landscapes explore our perception of nature as a contained entity.
Collazo-Llorens's site-specific installation, meanwhile, is the highlight of the exhibition. Using scientific data from the Bermuda Triangle, she plots random points and darting, criss-crossing vectors across walls and windows. The lines approach a central vortex in the gallery's rounded-glass corner. Her work beautifully conveys the complexity and patterned randomness of incident.
Curator Raczka's own photographic work, "Meadville, Pennsylvania, March 13, 2007," is a series shot during a walk he took one night, installed horizontally and in chronological order. The disjointed images rely on each other for context, but the arrangement implies a filmstrip narrative.
Michael Sherwin's video projection "Strange Attractors" is a shifting, pulsating triptych that depicts a day in two minutes using videos of natural landscapes appropriated from science Web sites. Striking time-lapse images of the North and South poles anchor the piece, as other images fade in and out. The video's composition suggests the interconnectedness of place despite the fragmentary process used to create the work.
The most literal expression of the show's title is Carlos Rosas' video installation "Location: Pittsburgh, PA, Latitude: 40.45726, Longitude: -79.973499." Rosas's fragmented images of Pittsburgh are intercut with a live feed of the gallery. As in "Strange Attractors," surveillance is a subtext. But Rosas presents it as novelty, acknowledging the inherent excitement of seeing oneself on a TV screen.
Bill Radawec
2008
Out of the Blue, the Turn Around
Acrylic on Masonite
Bill Radawec's five acrylic paintings titled "Out of the Blue, the Turn Around" depict the cloud trails of United Flight 93. He captures the fleeting marks of the doomed plane as it turned around over Cleveland, Radawec's hometown. In the gallery, a surveillance camera placed at navel height is angled downward. This juxtaposition suggests the heightened surveillance and loss of privacy since 9/11.
Lastly, Mary Jean Kenton's mixed-media drawings refer to her farm in Washington, Pa. Kenton incorporates poems directly within the compositions. Conceptually, the work fits the exhibition. But the use of Microsoft Word to print the text prevents Kenton's words from having the aesthetic weight they deserve.
You Are Here could itself use more informative wall-texts. Nonetheless, the common threads of autobiography, fragmentation and surveillance connect each artwork to the fabric of the exhibition, even as they compete with each other.
You Are Here continues through Aug. 9. SPACE, 812 Liberty Ave., Downtown. 412-325-7723
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July 30, 2008
Hollyhock and Chuck Taylor Converse have in common
1917 - 1921
1908Ð1941: Early days and Chuck Taylor
Wikipedia
In his late 30s, Marquis M. Converse, who was previously a respected manager at a footwear manufacturing firm, opened the Converse Rubber Shoe Company (also known as the Boston Rubber Shoe Company) in Malden, Massachusetts in 1908. The company was a rubber shoe manufacturer, providing winterized rubber soled footwear for men, women, and children. By 1910, Converse was producing 4,000 shoes daily, but it wasn't until 1915 that the company began manufacturing athletic shoes for tennis. The company's main turning point came in 1917 when the Converse All-Star basketball shoe was introduced. Then in 1921, a basketball player named Charles H. or "Chuck" Taylor walked into Converse complaining of sore feet. Converse gave him a job. He worked as a salesman and ambassador, promoting the shoes around the United States, and in 1923 his signature was added to the All Star patch. He tirelessly continued this work until shortly before his death in 1969. Converse also customized shoes for the New York Renaissance (the "Rens"), basketball's first all African American pro basketball team.
Hollyhock House
Frank Lloyd Wright
Aline Barnsdall House
(Hollyhock House)
Hollywood, California
1917-21
Like the Charles Ennis House, executed later, this unique house illustrates Wright's fascination with pre-Columbian architecture, in this case Mayan temples. Stylized patterns of hollyhocks, projecting pinnacles, and a site on a hill surrounded by olive trees and other foliage complete the historical "look" of this house, transplanted to southern California. More at http://www.park2parkla.com
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July 29, 2008
What does the Converse shoes and Frank Lloyd Wright's HollyHock house have in common?
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July 28, 2008
"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. "
By Frank Lloyd Wright
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July 27, 2008
RIP Julian Carlton
The scene of devastation at Taliesin the day after the murders
Mystery of the murders at Taliesin
Sunday, 14 January, 2001
A brutal multiple murder involving the lover of probably the most famous Welsh-American of all, the pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is to be the subject of a new book. American journalist Ron McCrea and Professor William Drennan of the University of Wisconsin have been researching the seven savage killings at Taliesin, the hillside home of Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1914.
Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 in Wisconsin, to a family of Welsh descent. He became America's most famous and influential architect and was a leading figure in world architecture until his death in 1959. He gave the name Taliesin - after the Welsh bard - to the house he built in 1911 near his childhood home in the valley where his mother's Lloyd Jones family - originally from Llandysul - had lived for generations.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Welsh America's most famous son
Taliesin was a showpiece of Wright's design principles. However, it was also the focus of scandal because he built it as the home for himself and the woman for whom he had left his wife and six children, Martha "Mamah" Borthwick. And three years later, on 15 September, 1914, it became the scene of the biggest single incident of mass-murder in Wisconsin history. Ron McCrea said that on that day, "all hell broke loose" at Taliesin when one of Wright's servants unleashed an attack that claimed eight lives (including the attacker's), left the world-famous architectural treasure in rubble, and devastated Wright, who was then 47 years old.
The attacker was 30-year-old Julian Carlton, an estate worker originally from Barbados. While Wright was away in Chicago, Carlton bolted the doors and windows of the dining room where Mamah Borthwick, her two children, and six other people were eating, poured buckets of petrol under the doors and torched the building. He then used an axe to attack those who jumped out of the windows to escape the flames.
Mamah Borthwick, Frank Lloyd Wright's lover
Only two people survived. Borthwick, and her children, Martha, nine, and John, 12, died... The other victims were: Ernest Weston, 13, the son of carpenter William Weston; Milwaukee draughtsman Emil Brodelle, 26; handyman David Lindblom, 38; and Taliesin foreman Thomas Brunker, 68. Weston and draughtsman Herbert Fritz survived and raised the alarm. Scores of farmers arrived to help. Wright's relative, the Unitarian preacher Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Iowa County Sheriff John T. Williams and Sauk County Undersheriff George Peck set up a posse to hunt for Carleton.
He was quickly found hiding near the burned-out building. He had swallowed acid. He was nearly lynched on the spot, but the sheriff and posse, pursued by three carloads of men with guns, got him to the Dodgeville jail. He died from starvation seven weeks later, despite medical attention. He made two court appearances but never stood trial, and his motive for the attack was never explained, although there are various theories.
Julian Carlton killed seven people, and himself
'Devastating scene of horror'
Wright arrived home on the night of Aug. 15, with Edwin Cheney, the divorced husband of Mamah Borthwick and the father of her two dead children. Wright described it in his autobiography as a "devastating scene of horror.'' Mamah was buried in the cemetery of the nearby Unity Chapel, which Wright had helped design for Jenkin Lloyd Jones. "I wanted to fill the grave myself,'' he said.
This axe was the murder weapon
Ron McCrea says that shortly afterwards, Wright published an open letter in the local newspaper to thank the community for its support - but also to defend Borthwick and to show he was not about to be driven out. He promised to rebuild Taliesin in her memory. He kept his word and rebuilt the house, which was his home until his death and which is now a monument to his life and work.
The restored Taliesin as it is today
"No evidence of a rational intention or motive, including a conspiracy, has ever come to light," said Ron McCrea, who is City Editor of the Capital Times and who is himself of partly Welsh descent. He has been researching the Taliesin murders for several years, and is now working on a book which will provide the first full modern account of the incident. He hopes his research, and that of Professor Drennan, will shed new light on the tragedy which hit the Welsh settlement in Wisconsin, and which devastated the life of Welsh America's most famous son.
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July 25, 2008
Not, Mentor
Bill Radawec
2008 Mixed media
3" x 4" x 1"
www.billradawec.com
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July 24, 2008
Not, A.Lincoln
Bill Radawec
2008
Mixed media
4" x 6" x 1"
www.billradawec.com
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July 23, 2008
"You're fired! Take the next ship home..." FLW 1918
Bill Radawec
2008
Just Not, Wright
Mixed media 4" x 6" x 1"
www.billradawec.com
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July 22, 2008
Quote of the day from me, Bill Radawec "it is just not Wright for the mob..."
Bill Radawec
Not, FLW
2008
Mixed media
5" x 5" x 1"
www.billradawec.com/portfolio.html
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July 21, 2008
The answer to the color of FLLW's square signature is Cherokee Red.
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July 20, 2008
What was the color of the square signature that FLLW placed on his homes in the 1930's?
Frank Lloyd Wright mug
"Cherokee Red" mug with a representation of Wright's signature. 14 oz. dishwasher and microwave safe.
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July 19, 2008
Frank Lloyd Wright 9/1/57 and 9/28/57 This interview was recorded in two parts. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America's youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death. Watch Video
WALLACE: The average man, the common man, I think that you have sometimes called him part of the mobocracy - part of the mob.
WRIGHT: He's the basis of it. I think the common man is responsible for the drift toward conformity now. It's going to ruin our democracy, and is not according to our democratic faith. I believe our democracy was Thomas Jefferson's idea. I mean I think Thomas Jefferson's idea was the right idea, but we were headed for a genuine aristocracy. An aristocracy that was innate, on the man, not of him ... not his by privilege but his, by virtue of his own virtue, his own conscience, his own quality, and that by that we were going to have a rule of the bravest and the best. But now that the common man is becoming a little jealous of the uncommon man, as H. I. Phillips wrote the other day, "It's getting to the point where" he said... "Well, what's the punk got we ain't got? He's just got the breaks that's all." Now that's going to ruin the common man, because the uncommon man is his vision. And I believe what you call the common man is what I call the common man, a man who believes in nothing he can't see, and he can't see anything he can't put his hand on. Read more about THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW
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July 18, 2008
The answer for his birth name is Frank Lincoln Wright
July 17, 2008
It's not Lyle Lovett
July 16, 2008
What was Frank L. Wright's Real Name?
July 15, 2008
John Lloyd Wright invented the Lincoln Logs.
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July 14, 2008
Imperial Hotel Lobby, Frank Lloyd Wright
The Demolition of Frank Lloyd's Wright's Imperial Hotel
The next clue is found in these videos.
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July 13, 2008
He Invented the Lincoln Logs
JLW
The answer is coming soon.
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July 12, 2008
domestic setting opening tonight from 5 pm to 8 pm
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July 11, 2008
Visit with Bill Radawec and the featured artists tonight at the Asterisk Gallery
Featuring Artists:
Robert Banks, Jason Byers, Clifford Charlton, Joan Deveney aka Joan of Art, Terry Durst, Isabel Farnsworth, Mallorie Freeman, Joe Fruce, Bernadette Glorioso, Haley Litzinger, Craig Lucas, Scott Miller, Bill Radawec, Robert Thurmer, Dan Tranberg, Karen Smith, Douglas Max Utter, Mark Yasencheck, and Jeff Yost
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July 10, 2008
Out of the Blue, the Turn Around is part of the Space Exhibition
Bill Radawec
Out of the Blue, the Turn Around
2008
Colored Pencil on Paper
14" x 11"
See more images at www.billradawec.com
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July 9, 2008
Come See the 4th Annual "19" exhibition at the Asterisk Gallery
Bill Radawec
Mask
graphite, enamel paint, paper
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4th Annual "19" invitational exhibition @ Asterisk Gallery
Opening reception Friday July 11, 6 - 11pm
The exhibition runs through August 2, 2008
Celebrity Mug Shots
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July 8, 2008
Bill Radawec's Novella Series
View more works by Bill Radawec at www.billradawec.com/blog/
Noam Chomsky - Noam vs Michel Foucault
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July 7, 2008
www.artslant.com-domestic-setting
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July 6, 2008
The Big House Song...
Bill Radawec
2008
Sing Sing from the Novella Series
Colored Pencil on Paper
20 x 22 inches
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_Sing
Sing Sing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in Ossining, New York, USA. It is located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. The name comes from the town of Ossining's original name of "Sing Sing", though the penitentiary was first called "Mount Pleasant" when it opened in 1828.
Sing Sing houses approximately 1,700 prisoners.[1] There are plans to convert the original 1825 cell block into a museum.[2]
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focuses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.
The book's translated name, some argue, does not fully represent the meaning conveyed in the French title. Surveiller is not discipline, but surveillance (French for "watching over"). One could argue that the slight change in name is not important, but considering that one of Foucault's main topics of discussion is "theaters of punishment" or "theatrical forum" it could be said that the difference between discipline and surveillance is anything but unimportant. However, according to translator Alan Sheridan in the translator's note in his 1977 translation, Foucault himself suggested Discipline and Punish. Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison's dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the "disciplines", a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
Gene Krupa - Sing, Sing, Sing
Sing Sing comes to Ebay
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July 5, 2008
Close your Eyes and Think...
Bill Radawec
Relax
2008
latex, acrylic, wood on canvas
10 x 8 inches
Bill Radawec
Dream
2008
latex, acrylic, wood on canvas
10 x 8 inches
Bill Radawec's Novella installation at the Asterisk Gallery
Opening reception Friday July 11, 6 - 11pm
The exhibition runs through August 2, 2008
July 4, 2008
Happy Fourth of July Smile and Laugh what else can I say...
Bill Radawec
2008
Smile from the Novella Series
Colored Pencil on Paper
13 x 22 inches
Bill Radawec
2008
Laugh from the Novella Series
Colored Pencil on Paper
13 x 22 inches
10 x 8 inches
Bill Radawec's Novella installation at the Asterisk Gallery
Opening reception Friday July 11, 6 - 11pm
The exhibition runs through August 2, 2008
July 3, 2008
Out of the Blue, the Turn Around
See more images at www.billradawec.com
Bill Radawec
2008
Colored Pencil on Paper
13 7/8 x 10 7/8 inches
On September 11, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked and two of them were crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, the third into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers attempted to retake the plane. Popular mythology surrounding the event says that the plane turned around in the Cleveland area from its intended flight to the Capital, possibly over Ridge Road in Parma
It's the end of the world as we know it
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July 2, 2008
Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?
Illustration: Bryan Christie Design; photos: Corbis
Malcolm Jones
NEWSWEEK
July 7-14, 2008 Issue
How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. As historical facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it's just a coincidence, it's a coincidence that's guaranteed to make you do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution and the Civil War in the same sentence? Why would you, unless you're writing your dissertation on epochal events in the 19th century? But instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It's not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exact coevals. Rather, it's because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world.
As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detachedÑhmmm, so far so good). As we approach their shared bicentennial, there is already one book that gives them double billing, historian David R. Contosta's "Rebel Giants," with another coming early next year from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Contosta's joint biography doesn't turn up anything new, but the biographical parallels he sets forth are enough to make us see each man afresh. Both lost their mothers in early childhood. Both suffered from depression (Darwin also suffered from a variety of crippling stomach ailments and chronic headaches), and both wrestled with religious doubt. Each had a strained relationship with his father, and each of them lost children to early death. Both spent the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age: Darwin published "The Origin of Species" when he was 50, and Lincoln won the presidency a year later. Both men were private and guarded. Most of Darwin's friendships were conducted through the mail, and after his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle as a young man, he rarely left his home in the English countryside. Lincoln, though a much more public man, carefully cultivated a bumpkin persona that encouraged both friends and enemies to underestimate his considerable, almost Machiavellian skill as a politician.
It is a measure of their accomplishments, of how much they changed the world, that the era into which Lincoln and Darwin was born seems so strange to us now. On their birth date, Thomas Jefferson had three weeks left in his second term as president. George III still sat on the throne of England. The Enlightenment was giving way to Romanticism. At the center of what people then believed, the tent poles of their reality were that God created the world and that man was the crown of creation. Well, some men, since the institution of slavery was still acceptable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon lineÑit would not be abolished in New York state, for example, until 1827, and while it had been illegal in England since 1772, it would not be abolished in English colonies until 1833. And Darwin, at least at the outset, was hardly even a scientist in the sense that we understand the termÑa highly trained specialist whose professional vocabulary is so arcane that he or she can talk only to other scientists.
Darwin, the man who would almost singlehandedly redefine biological science, started out as an amateur naturalist, a beetle collector, a rockhound, a 22-year-old rich-kid dilettante who, after flirting with the idea of being first a physician and then a preacher, was allowed to ship out with the Beagle as someone who might supply good conversation at the captain's table. His father had all but ordered him not to go to sea, worrying that it was nothing more than one of Charles's lengthening list of aimless exploitsÑyears before, Dr. Darwin had scolded his teenage son, saying, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." How could the father know that when the son came ashore after his five-year voyage, he would not only have shed his aimlessness but would have replaced it with a scientific sense of skepticism and curiosity so rigorous and abiding that he would be a workaholic almost to the day he died? Darwin was also in the grip of an idea so subversive that he would keep it under wraps for another two decades. But the crucial thing is that he did all this by himself. He became the very model of a modern major scientist without benefit of graduate school, grants or even much peer review. (It's hard to get a sympathetic hearing when your work, if successful, is clearly going to knock the blocks out from under civilization.) Darwin may have been independently wealthy, but in terms of his vocation, he was a self-made man.
Lincoln was self-made in the more conventional senseÑa walking, talking embodiment of the frontier myth made good. Like Darwin, Lincoln was not a quick study. Both men worked slowly to master a subject. But both had restless, hungry minds. After about a year of schooling as a boyÑand that spread out in dribs and drabs of three months here and four months thereÑLincoln taught himself. He mastered trigonometry (for work as a surveyor), he read Blackstone on his own to become a lawyer. He memorized swaths of the Bible and Shakespeare. At the age of 40, after he had already served a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, he undertook Euclidean geometry as a mental exercise. After a while, his myth becomes a little muchÑhe actually was born in a log cabin with a dirt floorÑso much that we begin looking for flaws, and they're there: the bad marriage, some maladroit comments on racial inferiority. Then there were those terrible jokes. But even there, dammit, he could be truly witty: "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."
Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of this riddlesome man was just how he managed, somewhere along the way, to turn himself into one of the best prose writers America has produced. Lincoln united the North behind him with an eloquence so timeless that his words remain fresh no matter how many times you read them. Darwin wrote one of the few scientific treatises, maybe the only one, worth reading as a work of literature. Both of them demand to be read in the original, not in paraphrase, because both men are so much in their prose. To read them is to know these elusive figures a little better. Given their influence on our lives, these are men you want to know.
Darwin seems to have been able to think only with a pen in his hand. He was a compulsive note taker and list maker. He made an extensive list setting down the pros and cons of marriage before he proposed to his future wife. His first published work, "The Voyage of the Beagle," is a tidied-up version of the log he kept on the five-year trip around the world, and he is unflaggingly meticulous in his observations of the plant and animal life he saw or collected along the way. To live, for Darwin, meant looking and examining and then writing down what he saw and then trying to make sense of it.
In the Beagle log and his journals, Darwin is something like a cub reporter, asking questions, taking notes, delighting in the varieties of life he discovers, both alive and in the fossil record, in South America, Australia or the Cape Verde Islands. With Darwin there is no Eureka moment when he suddenly discovers evolution. But by the time he left the Beagle in 1836, he was plainly becoming convinced that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, life is not staticÑspecies change and evolve. Shortly before the voyage was over, he mulled over what he had seen on the Gal‡pagos: "When I see these islands in sight of each other, and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure and filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties É If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of the [Gal‡pagos] will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of Species." What he did not have was a controlling mechanism for this process. It was not until two years later that he conceived the idea of natural selection, after reading economist Thomas Malthus on the competition for resources among humans brought on by the inexorable demands of overpopulation. There he had it: a theory of everything that actually worked. Species evolve and the ones best adapted to their environment thrive and leave more offspring, crowding out the rest.
As delighted as he was with his discovery, Darwin was equally horrified, because he understood the consequences of his theory. Mankind was no longer the culmination of life but merely part of it; creation was mechanistic and purposeless. In a letter to a fellow scientist, Darwin wrote that confiding his theory was "like confessing a murder." Small wonder that instead of rushing to publish his theory, he sat on itÑfor 20 years. He started a series of notebooks in which he began refining his theory, recording the results of his research in fields as disparate as animal husbandry and barnacles. Over the next five or six years, he went through notebook after notebook, including one in which he began to pose metaphysical questions arising from his research. Do animals have consciences? Where does the idea of God come from?
This questioning spirit is one of the most appealing facets of Darwin's character, particularly where it finds its way into his published work. Reading "The Origin of Species," you feel as though he is addressing you as an equal. He is never autocratic, never bullying. Instead, he is always willing to admit what he does not know or understand, and when he poses a question, he is never rhetorical. He seems genuinely to want to know the answer. He's also a good salesman. He knows that what he has to say will not only be troubling for a general reader to take but difficult to understandÑso he works very hard not to lose his customer. The book opens not with theory but in the humblest place imaginable: the barnyard, as Darwin introduces us to the idea of species variation in a way we, or certainly his 19th-century audience, will easily graspÑthe breeding of domestic animals. The quality of Darwin's mind is in evidence everywhere in this book, but so is his characterÑgenerous, open-minded and always respectful of those who he knew would disagree with him, as you might expect of a man who was, after all, married to a creationist.
Like Darwin, Lincoln was a compulsive scribbler, forever jotting down phrases, notes and ideas on scraps of paper, then squirreling the notes away in a coat pocket, a desk drawerÑor sometimes his hatÑwhere they would collect until he found a use for them in a letter, a speech or a document. He was also a compulsive reviser. He knew that words heard are not the same as words read. After delivering his emotional farewell speech in Springfield, Ill., in 1861, he boarded the train for Washington and, if the shakiness of his handwriting is any indication, immediately began revising his remarks prior to publication.
The Gettysburg Address apparently gestated in a somewhat similar fashion. The winter and spring of 1863 were one of the lowest points for the Union. In the West, Grant was bogged down in his protracted siege of Vicksburg. In the East, the South won decisively at Chancellorsville. Since the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on Jan. 1, people in the North were wondering aloud just what it was they were fighting for. Was it to preserve the Union, or was it to abolish slavery? Lincoln was keenly aware that he needed to clarify the issue. The Northern victory at Gettysburg in early July gave him the occasion he was seeking.
Some witnesses at Gettysburg claimed to recall applause during the speech, but most did not, and Lincoln was already taking his seat before many in the audience realized he had finished. This was a time when speeches could last for four hours. Edward Everett, who preceded the president on the program, had confined his remarks to two hours. Lincoln said what he had to say in two minutes. Brevity is only one of the several noteworthy aspects of what is surely one of the greatest speeches ever made. Of much greater importance are what the president said and how he said it.
With his first 29 words, Lincoln accomplished what he had come to Gettysburg to doÑhe defined the purpose of the war for the Union: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He could have put this sentence in the form of an argumentÑthe equality of all men was one of the things the war was about. Instead, he states his argument as fact: the nation was founded on the principle of equality; this is what we fight to preserve. There is a hint of qualificationÑbut only a hintÑin the word proposition: equality is not a self-evident truth; it is what we believe in. In the next paragraph, he continues this idea of contingency: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." In other words, republican democracy hangs in the balance. Before the speech, none of this was taken for granted, even in the North. In 272 words, he defined the national principle so thoroughly that today no one would think of arguing otherwise.
Lincoln's political genius stood on two pillars: he possessed an uncanny awareness of what could be done at any given moment, and he had the ability to change his mind, to adapt to circumstances, to grow. This is Lincoln in 1838, addressing the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum on a citizen's obligations to the legal system with such lines as, "Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap." Here he is not quite 30 years later in the Second Inaugural of 1865 (there's a mother and child in this one, too, but what a difference): "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphanÑto do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
This is the language of the Bible, and if the rhetoric does not convince us of that, Lincoln mentions God six times in one paragraph. But what kind of God? Lincoln's religious history is perhaps the most tangled aspect of his life. His law partner, William Herndon, swore Lincoln was an atheist, and to be sure, there are plenty of boilerplate references to the Almighty scattered through Lincoln's speeches. But as the war wears on, and the speeches grow more spiritual, they become less conventional. Lincoln was a believer, but it is hard to say just what he believed. He speaks often of the will of God, but just as often adamantly refuses to decipher God's purpose. And he never, ever claims that God is on his side.
The God of the Second Inaugural is utterly inscrutable: "The Almighty has His own purposes." One of those purposes, Lincoln then suggests, may be to punish both North and South for permitting the offense of slavery. Then he delivers what biographer David Herbert Donald has called "one of the most terrible statements ever made by an American public official": "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'." It is here, just when he has brought his audience to the edge of the cliff, that Lincoln spins on his heel in one of the great rhetorical 180s of all time and concludes, "With malice toward none; with charity for all É" Even today, reading that conclusion after what's come before is like coming out of a tunnel into bright sunshineÑor out of a war that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Lincoln understood that language could heal, and he knew when to use it.
Lincoln, no less than Mark Twain, forged what we think of today as the American style: forthright, rhythmic, muscular, beautiful but never pretty. As Douglas L. Wilson observes in "Lincoln's Sword," his brilliant analysis of the president's writing, Lincoln was political, not literary, but he was, every bit as much as Melville or Thoreau, "perfecting a prose that expressed a uniquely American way of apprehending and ordering experience." What Lincoln says and how he says it are one. You cannot imagine the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural in words other than those in which they are conveyed.
Lincoln and Darwin were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men upended realities that prevailed when they were born. They seemÑand soundÑmodern to us, because the world they left behind them is more or less the one we still live in. So, considering the joint magnitude of their contributionsÑand the coincidence of their conjoined birthdaysÑit is hard not to wonder: who was the greater man? It's an apples-and-orangesÑor Superman-vs.-SantaÑcomparison. But if you limit the question to influence, it bears pondering, all the more if you turn the question around and ask, what might have happened if one of these men had not been born? Very quickly the balance tips in Lincoln's favor. As much of a bombshell as Darwin detonated, and as great as his book on evolution is (E. O. Wilson calls it "the greatest scientific book of all time"), it does no harm to remember that he hurried to publish "The Origin of Species" because he thought he was about to be scooped by his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently come up with much the same idea of evolution through natural selection. In other words, there was a certain inevitability to Darwin's theory. Ideas about evolution surfaced throughout the first part of the 19th century, and while none of them was as cogent as Darwin'sÑuntil Wallace came alongÑit was not as though he was the only man who had the idea.
Lincoln, in contrast, is sui generis. Take him out of the picture, and there is no telling what might have happened to the country. True, his election to the presidency did provoke secession and, in turn, the war itself, but that war seems inevitableÑnot a question of if but when. Once in office, he becomes the indispensable man. As James McPherson demonstrates so well in the forthcoming "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief," Lincoln's prosecution of the war was crucial to the North's successÑbefore Grant came to the rescue, Lincoln was his own best general. Certainly we know what happened once he was assassinated: Reconstruction was administered punitively and then abandoned, leaving the issue of racial equality to dangle for another century. But here again, what Lincoln said and wrote matters as much as what he did. He framed the conflict in language that united the NorthÑand inspires us still. If anything, with the passage of time, he only looms largerÑmore impressive, and also more mysterious. Other presidents, even the great ones, submit to analysis. Lincoln forever remains just beyond our graspÑthough not for want of trying: it has been estimated that more books have been written about him than any other human being except Jesus.
If Darwin were not so irreplaceable as Lincoln, that should not gainsay his accomplishment. No one could have formulated his theory any more elegantlyÑor anguished more over its implications. Like Lincoln, Darwin was brave. He risked his health and his reputation to advance the idea that we are not over nature but a part of it. Lincoln prosecuted a warÑand became its ultimate casualtyÑto ensure that no man should have dominion over another. Their identical birthdays afford us a superb opportunity to observe these men in the shared context of their timeÑhow each was shaped by his circumstances, how each reacted to the beliefs that steered the world into which he was born and ultimately how each reshaped his corner of that world and left it irrevocably changed.
Answer: Lincoln
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July 1, 2008
"19"
4th Annual invitational exhibition
07-11-2008 - 08-02-2008
Featuring:
Robert Banks, Jason Byers, Clifford Charlton, Joan Deveney aka Joan of Art, Terry Durst, Isabel Farnsworth, Mallorie Freeman, Joe Fruce, Bernadette Glorioso, Haley Litzinger, Craig Lucas, Scott Miller, Bill Radawec, Robert Thurmer, Dan Tranberg, Karen Smith, Douglas Max Utter, Mark Yasencheck, and Jeff Yost
4th Annual "19" invitational exhibition @ Asterisk Gallery
Opening reception Friday July 11, 6 - 11pm
The exhibition runs through August 2, 2008
