Storming the Gates of Paradise (46 page)

Imagine a contemporary artist, maybe using Photoshop, reworking
Kindred Spirits
again and again. Imagine that Cole and Bryant are, this time, standing not on a rocky outcropping but in, say, one of the puzzle and art supply aisles of a Wal-Mart near Kaaterskill Falls, dazed and depressed. Or imagine instead some sweatshop workers, a little hunched and hungry, on that magnificent perch amid the foliage and the golden light, invited at last into some sense of democratic community. Imagine paintings of Edward Hopper’s old downtowns, boarded up because all the sad and lonely people are shopping at Wal-Mart and even having their coffee and hot dogs there. Imagine video-portraits of the people who actually make the stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, or of the African American truck drivers suing the corporation for racism, or of the women who are lead plaintiffs in the nation’s largest class action lawsuit for discrimination. Imagine if Alice Walton decided to follow the route of Kmart with Martha Stewart or Target with architect Michael Graves and commissioned some cutting-edge contemporary art about these issues: videos and DVDs you could buy, prints for your walls, performance art in the aisles, art that maybe even her workers could afford. Imagine if Wal-Mart would acknowledge what Wal-Mart is rather than turning hallowed American art into a fig leaf to paste over naked greed and raw exploitation. But really, it’s up to the rest of us to make the real Museum of Wal-Mart, one way or another, in our heads, on our web sites, or in our reading of everyday life everywhere.

There was a time not so long ago when everything was recognizable not just as a cup or a coat, but as a cup made by so-and-so out of clay from this bank on the local river or a coat woven by the guy in that house out of wool from the sheep visible on the hills. Then, objects were not purely material, mere commodities, but signs of processes, human and natural, pieces of a story, and both the story and the stuff sustained life. It’s as though every object spoke—some of them must have sung out—in a language everyone could hear, a language that surrounded every object in an aura of its history.

“All commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time,” said Marx, but who now could dissolve them into their constituent histories of labor and materials, into the stories that made them about the processes of the world, made them part of life even if they were iron or brick, made them come to life? For decades, tales have circulated of city kids who didn’t know that milk came from cows, and, more recently, reports of the inability of American teenagers to find Iraq on a map have made the rounds; but who among us can picture precisely where their sweater or their sugar comes from?

I’ve been thinking about that because a new shopping mall has opened up at the eastern foot of the Bay Bridge, in what was once, according to the newspaper, the biggest shell mound in Northern California. From the 1870s to the 1920s, this place was Shellmound Park, an amusement park, racetrack, dance hall, and shooting range; but Prohibition put the pleasure grounds out of business, and the mound was bulldozed for industry. The remains of seven hundred Ohlone people
that an archaeologist snatched from the construction site in 1924 are still at the University of California at Berkeley. The site became industrialized, hosting paint and pesticide factories that eventually made it into a wasteland so toxic that those venturing into it wore moon suits. Now it has been reclaimed for shopping, and the cleanup has disturbed the remaining Ohlone burial sites.

The street that goes out to the shopping center is still called Shellmound, but the outdoor mall itself includes the usual chains that make it impossible to know if you’re in Phoenix or Philadelphia: Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Express, the three versions of the Gap corporation, including Old Navy and Banana Republic, all laid out on a fake Main Street. Anti-Gap protestors haven’t arrived yet, though they are frequent presences in downtown San Francisco, decrying both the Gap’s reliance on sweatshop labor and the clear-cutting of old-growth redwood forests in Mendocino by the Gap’s and those forests’ owners (see
www.Gapsucks.org
). But the day the mall opened, activists from the International Indian Treaty Council handed out flyers protesting the desecration of a burial ground. The mall is a doubly modern site, a space that could be anywhere, into which commodities come as if out of nowhere.

In
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, Friedrich Engels recounts the crimes behind the production of everyday things—ceramics, ironware, glass, but particularly cotton cloth. He wrote in a time when objects were first becoming silent, and he asked the same thing that the activists from Gapsucks.org do, that we learn the new industrial languages of objects, that we hear the story of children worked into deformity and blindness to make lace, the story of the knife grinders with a life expectancy of thirty-five years, or today the story of the Nike workers who are paid less than living wages to work long hours in excruciating conditions. These industrial stories have always been environmental stories too, about factory effluents, cotton chemicals, paper dioxins, the timber industry, the petrochemical industry, on and on.

Somewhere in the industrial age, objects shut up because their creation had become so remote and intricate a process that it was no longer readily knowable. Or they were silenced, because the pleasures of abundance that all the cheap goods offered were available only if they were mute about the scarcity and loss
that lay behind their creation. Modern advertising—notably for Nike—constitutes an aggressive attempt to displace the meaning of the commodity from its makers, as though you enter into relationship with very tall athletes rather than, say, very thin Vietnamese teenagers when you buy these shoes. It is a stretch to think about Mexican prison labor while contemplating Victoria’s Secret lavender lace boy-cut panties. The objects are pretty; their stories are hideous; so you get to choose between an alienated and ultimately meaningless world of consumption and one that makes terrible demands on you. And to tell the tales is to be the bearer of bad news—imagine activists as Moses coming down from Sinai but cutting straight to Leviticus, with forty thousand or so prohibitions: against shrimp (see
www.montereybayaquarium.org
), against strawberries (methyl bromide, stoop labor), against gold (see
www.greatbasinminewatch.org
), and on and on. It’s what makes radicals and environmentalists seem so grumpy to the would-be consumer.

Maybe the real questions are which substances, objects, and products tell stories that don’t make people cringe or turn away and how to take these items from the margins to the mainstream. For the past half century, the process of artmaking has been part of its subject, and this making becomes a symbolic act that attempts to substitute for the silence of all the other objects. But nobody lives by art alone. There’s food from the wild, from your own garden, from friends, ancient objects salvaged and flea-marketed, heirlooms and hand-me-downs, local crafts, and a few things still made with the union label, but it’s not easy for anyone to stay completely free of Payless or Wal-Mart. Too, good stories—such as those told by pricey organic and free-range and shade-grown food that is available only in the hipper stores of the fancier regions—can be a luxury.

Some of the enthusiasm for farmers markets, which are springing up like mushrooms after rain, arises from meeting objects that aren’t mute, because you see the people who grew the produce and know that the places they come from are not far away. This alternative economy feeds people who want to be nourished by stories and connections as well as by food, and it’s growing. Some farmers markets are like boutiques, with little bunches of peas or raspberries displayed and priced like jewels, but I go to an intensely multiethnic mob scene called Heart of the City
Farmers Market in which the food, even some of the organic stuff, is pretty cheap and everyone is present, including the homeless, who frequent that space all week anyway, and the locals use the market to make up for the way supermarkets boycott poor neighborhoods. Seeing the thorn scars on the hands of the rose growers there was as big a step in knowing what constitutes my world as realizing that, in this town where it never snows, our tap water is all Sierra snowmelt.

What bothers me about the new mall is its silence, a silence we mostly live in nowadays; what cheers me are the ways people are learning to read the silent histories of objects and choosing the objects that still sing. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.

One day not long ago, I went to see a show of animal skulls at the local science museum. I like skulls. What’s ordinarily hidden under the upholstery of flesh, skin, hair, and other tissue is revealed in bones, the foundations of bodies and, in the size of craniums, perhaps the seat of consciousness, a sort of naked essence of what makes each animal so distinctly itself. The barn-size room was full of them, from the gray throne of an elephant’s head to the yellowish hacksaws of crocodile smiles, all the same raw ingredients of teeth and craniums and eye sockets in spectacularly different proportions corresponding to vision and diet and defense and thought. A wall was covered with a grid of hundreds of sea lion skulls to show their subtle variation, and antlered and horned creatures were lined up on other walls, all the splendor of what in that room seemed apt to call the animal kingdom.

Something I’d missed on a previous visit stopped me cold and made me think for days afterward: a glass case containing four stag skulls, or, rather, two pairs of stag skulls. Each pair of opponents had locked antlers and, unable to disentangle themselves, had died face to face, probably of hunger. The antlers were intricately intertwined like branches of trees that had grown together, and it must have taken only an instant of coincidence when the antlers were angled to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle rather than to clash, a moment when the stags sealed their fates. Such a tangle is fairly common among antlered creatures and some horned ones, such as bighorn sheep, and it’s given rise to the phrase “lock horns,” which I’d never thought about, any more than I had ever thought why a
penknife is called a penknife until I came across Wordsworth mentioning that he used one to trim his quill pen.

Language is full of such fossils of the actual and the natural, but what struck me on this visit was the grimness of the stags’ fate and the ease with which it turned to metaphor and to warning. I quickly reviewed my own life to see if any conflicts were so intractable and vowed not to let any so consume me. A lot of people have died of being right, and some of them have taken their opponents with them. Everyone’s encountered bad divorces, noise-obsessed neighbors, monomaniacs who let a grievance take over their lives to the exclusion of everything else, a sort of psychological starvation. It’s not hard to expand this notion to politics, to the locked horns of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Nor is it hard to extend the idea to the way the United States seems lost without an opponent abroad—an evil empire, an axis of evil—with which to lock horns, so that rather than reap a peace dividend since 1989, we’ve watched political leaders look for the familiar embrace of an enemy’s antlers.

But it’s important to remember that it’s a metaphor, that stags are no more prone to divorces than to first-strike missile deployment. Theodor Adorno objected to astrology (or, more specifically, to the astrology column in an American newspaper) because people thought that the stars were about them; better to say that we are about the stars. That is, it’s not that stags are like us but that we are like stags. One of the uses of the natural world is the generation of striking images and actions that let us define and redefine ourselves and connect ourselves to everything else. That the natural world gives rise to metaphors by which we understand ourselves is, I have long thought, one of the most neglected reasons for protecting it and paying attention to it. It’s important to remember too that biological determinism is just bad analogy: all that stuff claiming we are like our primordial selves, therefore we must eat raw food or copulate with those who look this way or act out that way, is just saying that the stars are about us.

The definition is always partial; the door at the far end is always open for something else to happen, for redefinition. “My love is like a red, red rose,” wrote the poet Robert Burns; we assume that there is something about roses—sweetness, redness, delicacy, beauty, ephemerality—that he has in mind and do not picture
his sweetheart with thorns, roots, and maybe aphids. Partial resemblance, because metaphor takes us only so far; then we must travel by other means.

The same week I saw the skulls of the stags who’d starved of intractable combat, I went downtown to meet my friend Claire and see the last day of a big show of Yoko Ono’s art. It was a magnificent show, and Ono’s work managed to do all the things the conceptualists of that era most prized, but with a kind of tender hopefulness that wasn’t theirs but hers. At the entrance to the exhibition were two tables, each with two chairs, and the tabletop was a chessboard set with chess pieces, ready to play. But all the chessmen—and the tables, and the chairs, and the board—were white, whiter than the stags’ antlers, than their skulls, than their teeth, pure white. In Ono’s game, your opponent was no longer different from yourself and maybe no longer your opponent. Can you fight yourself? How do you know when you’re winning?

Claire, who has gone around the world doing antinuclear and peace work and now heads Oakland’s Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center, has many surprising talents, and it turned out that she is an avid chess player. I am not, and I was tired, but that was all to the good, because she was delighted that it took only three moves for me to mistake her rook for mine and move it against her—at which point the game was over, we had unhooked antlers, and Ono had firmly suggested that difference is negligible and conflict avoidable, in this artwork that was about remaking the games and metaphors for war into a playful merging. Further in the exhibition was documentation of Ono’s billboards and placards from the Vietnam War era, which said things like “The War Is Over If You Want It.” Ono makes it clear not only that we could disengage from conflict but also that with open imagination we could transform it into something else—perhaps into love, a word that crops up all over her work. Stags are stags, but chess doesn’t have to be war. Neither does war.