Hello all,
Apologies for my tardiness, here and in class.
There is a series of portraits that hang in the IMU, beginning in the hotel lobby, and I only recently have stopped to look more closely at them: they're paintings of each of IU's presidents.
Only have a cell phone camera, and it is pretty bad, so here he is, in all his blurry glory:
Herman Wells. The Man In Charge.
Wells. Ballentine. Woodburn. To my knowledge, all the buildings on campus are named after people. Most people, including me, don't know and don't look up who most of these people were. What does it mean, then, to have a building named after you? It's rather like Artaud's point that a theatrical gesture can never be replicated. We say the words, but they have no meaning. The words are dead to us, as are the people memorialized in this way. Memorials, because so many people are involved with making most of them, and because the decision to memorialize someone has to do with a conference of importance, are the site of a great deal of political-cultural information. Debord might add that there is, therefore, an implicit and fierce class issue at work here. The "unmarked grave" is something we associate with privelege-less, powerless masses for a reason.
The truth is I was nervous about posting what I really thought about after reading our class's prompt. I thought of Herman Wells. He's something of a benevolent omnipresence. There's never an image, statue, or plaque--or building--with his name on it far from wherever you're standing anywhere on IU's main campus. I have the honor of funding this year from a fellowship left not only in his name, but in his legacy. It's for a list of positive qualities that he is remembered as having, and the funding is for someone who embodies those qualities. I didn't want to blog about that and sound like a pompous jerk. But his are the memorials I notice, every time, and it's one of the only times in my life I've been aware, subjectively and bodily, of implication as a result of a memorial object. I was given a big gift, and now when I walk through the IMU and I see his face here in this painting, and his quote on the wall, and I walk into the library and see his bust and hear his name everywhere, it causes a self-awareness--an ethical self-awareness, not unlike that prompted by the Annie actress wrangling Sandy the dog. Like Handke's "Offending the Audience," Debord's assertion of spectacle as a phenomenon of social relationships implicates the audience. I finally figured maybe this feeling was okay to write to you guys about, because it might add a new twist to reaction-to-memorial posts: I am nothing if not an implicated audience member! I have a little "have I been worthy of this today?" check-in moment every time I see this person's community remembrances. Have I been generous with my spirit? Have I done my academic duties as best I can? (Nope, or I would have been punctual this afternoon and not caused Professor MacKay to reassign the note-taker.) Have I been conscious of my community today to the best of my abilities? I'm a deer in headlights that only I see.
It could be that Wells had other, less lovely sides to him, but we don't hear about those. His less awesome moments are not the ones memorialized, or the ones in whose name I study here.
There is a series of portraits that hang in the IMU, beginning in the hotel lobby, and I only recently have stopped to look more closely at them: they're paintings of each of IU's presidents.
Only have a cell phone camera, and it is pretty bad, so here he is, in all his blurry glory:
Wells. Ballentine. Woodburn. To my knowledge, all the buildings on campus are named after people. Most people, including me, don't know and don't look up who most of these people were. What does it mean, then, to have a building named after you? It's rather like Artaud's point that a theatrical gesture can never be replicated. We say the words, but they have no meaning. The words are dead to us, as are the people memorialized in this way. Memorials, because so many people are involved with making most of them, and because the decision to memorialize someone has to do with a conference of importance, are the site of a great deal of political-cultural information. Debord might add that there is, therefore, an implicit and fierce class issue at work here. The "unmarked grave" is something we associate with privelege-less, powerless masses for a reason.
The truth is I was nervous about posting what I really thought about after reading our class's prompt. I thought of Herman Wells. He's something of a benevolent omnipresence. There's never an image, statue, or plaque--or building--with his name on it far from wherever you're standing anywhere on IU's main campus. I have the honor of funding this year from a fellowship left not only in his name, but in his legacy. It's for a list of positive qualities that he is remembered as having, and the funding is for someone who embodies those qualities. I didn't want to blog about that and sound like a pompous jerk. But his are the memorials I notice, every time, and it's one of the only times in my life I've been aware, subjectively and bodily, of implication as a result of a memorial object. I was given a big gift, and now when I walk through the IMU and I see his face here in this painting, and his quote on the wall, and I walk into the library and see his bust and hear his name everywhere, it causes a self-awareness--an ethical self-awareness, not unlike that prompted by the Annie actress wrangling Sandy the dog. Like Handke's "Offending the Audience," Debord's assertion of spectacle as a phenomenon of social relationships implicates the audience. I finally figured maybe this feeling was okay to write to you guys about, because it might add a new twist to reaction-to-memorial posts: I am nothing if not an implicated audience member! I have a little "have I been worthy of this today?" check-in moment every time I see this person's community remembrances. Have I been generous with my spirit? Have I done my academic duties as best I can? (Nope, or I would have been punctual this afternoon and not caused Professor MacKay to reassign the note-taker.) Have I been conscious of my community today to the best of my abilities? I'm a deer in headlights that only I see.
It could be that Wells had other, less lovely sides to him, but we don't hear about those. His less awesome moments are not the ones memorialized, or the ones in whose name I study here.
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