Scale, Patriotism and Fun: Crossing the Last Frontier of Fantasy
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Oz Volume 8 Article 10 1-1-1986 Scale, Patriotism and Fun: Crossing the Last Frontier of Fantasy Karal Ann Marling Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Marling, Karal Ann (1986) "Scale, Patriotism and Fun: Crossing the Last Frontier of Fantasy," Oz: Vol. 8. https://doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1118 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oz by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Scale, Patriotism, and Fun Crossing the Last Frontier of Fantasy Karal Ann Marling I According to the rhetoric of a debate In the world of North Fairfac Boulevard that erupted in Germany in 1933 under in 1926 (or in 1984), it does not behave the leadership of Hermann Broch and like a vase or a hymn, providing visual was brought to a raging boil in America background music for daily activities. Its by Clement Greenberg in 1939, the arbitrariness and self-importance imp California Sphinx is a prime example of inge on and alter the workaday environ "kitsch." In its most restrained defini ment. A modest street address becomes tion, the verb "kitschen" means to pro the site of endless questioning and an duce trash, or fake art, by manipulating endless variety of illogical, imaginative, real art, especially the art of past ages, fantastic answers to the riddle of this in the manufacture of articles for mass Sphinx. consumption. In the practice of the late 1930s, however, kitsch came to mean Although appalled and angered by the the anithesis of elite, high culture, par very mention of kitsch, Rosenberg has ticularly artifacts deviating from the several cogent insights to offer on its canons of avant-garde art and architec American manifestations. The an ture. Wheras Broch had conceded that tagonist of kitsch is, as he correctly im "there is a drop of kitsch in all art," the plies, the reality of Los Angeles, not the term signified bad taste, blatant excess, ideology of modem art, and the environ and a tinge of pornography, all relative ment - nature in America - is the focus judgments, to be sure, calibrated against of this persistent drive to step beyond the prevailing tenets of a highly serious, the frontier of reality into the fan chastened modernism. Essentially, then, tasyland of the imagination. In the most damnable quality of kitsch was Rosenberg's lexicon the gigantic Rockies its popular origin and its hard-to-define are, per se, kitsch - obvious, blatant, ex but unquestionable appeal to mass cessive, semipornographic. That set of culture. adjectives can be conflated into one, The Sphinx Restaurant, Los Angeles, California.' gigantic "too muchness." Nature made ''Kitsch is art that follows established noticeable elements of the en The vernacular California Sphinx is an an aesthetic error of scale in America, rules at a time when all rules in art are vironment. In America kitsch is affront to art because it recreates a troublesome to art critics, mythmakers, put into question by each artist, '' wrote nature. The Rocky Mountains masterwork; it copies, it ''follows the landscape painters, tricksters, novelists, Harold Rosenberg, dean of the have resembled fake art for a cen established rules'' at a time when the and tourists ever since. formalists: tury. There is no counterconcept avant-garde pursued a course of idiosyn to kitsch. Its antagonist is not an cratic individualism. The rule of moder Between 1927 and 1939, Gutzon Kitsch is the daily art of our time, idea but reality. To do away with nism is to assault the rule of rule. But Borglum set out to rectify that mistake as the vase or the hymn was for kitsch it is necessary to change for all its obeisance to historical rule, the in the Black Hills, by turning Mt. earlier generations. For the sen the landscape, as it was necessary Sphinx is as startlingly idiosyncratic as Rushmore, South Dakota, into the sibility it has that arbitrariness to change the landscape of Sar any Jackson Pollock (or John Marin, or largest statue in the world, a set of por and importance which works take dinia to get rid of the malarial Gerald Murphy), precisely because it trait busts of four presidents unfailing ly cited in handbooks of kitsch 36 on when they are no longer mosquito. does not exist in a "daily" environment. alongside the Statue of Liberty, a French will appear from below no larger than gift to the United States, unveiled in a fly." An advocate presenting the pro 1886, but thereafter blamed exclusively ject to a businessmen's meeting stunned on American bad taste. Kitsch or not, his audience when he announced that Mt. Rushmore is a stunningly successful a work of such magnitude would cost attempt to tum reality on its ear. A the city of Atlanta 50 million dollars: mountain becomes a statue. By carving Mt. Rushmore, man takes over the shap There was a chorus of exclama ing role of nature and tailors the physical tions and questions, but the environment to his own measure. The speaker went on, ' 'It will cost the activity humbles nature and renders it city as much as that to build new responsive to human control. roads and erect hotels, to care for the tourists who will come to see In literal terms, Borglum reenacted the· Stone Mountain." metaphorical task of W.B. Laughead, Ned Buntline, and Davy Crockett: he The artist was not insensitive to the made frontier giants of stone, fully as publicity value of his epochal stunt, nor large as the continent. Borglum had did he sneeze at tourism. Having been born in the spacious frontier coun grasped that the sheer hubris of his try near the border of Idaho and determination to carve Stone Mountain Nevada, and from the beginning of his was raising eyebrows well beyond noisy career, aimed at a grandiose scale Atlanta, however, Borglum was hard derived, he said, " from American pressed to give his essentially southern sources, memorializing American memorial a broader and a bigger achievement. " Thus he despised the meaning. In. interviews, he began genteel reticence of official U.S. Mount Rushmore? speaking of his mountain as ''a symbol, classicism. The little temple on the than art had hitherto cared to admit: valdsen's Lion of Lucerne. In other in really American dimensions, of a vital Potomac dedicated to Lincoln in 1922 "There was never a better one lived. We words, as Borglum later recalled their in chapter in our history - a symbol of the had nothing to do with the robust have had all the emotions any people vitation, the ladies' timid plan- more union of all the forces which make for essence of the man. As for the marble on the earth ever had,'' and at a pitch European than American - was to the greatness of our nation." Granting obelisk of the Washington Monument, of intensity Borglum would translate in "subordinate it wholly to the space that the Civil War had been a watershed "if there weren't a policeman to tell you to stupefying size. upon which it was to be placed, ... a in national history, cooler heads that (it) was placed there to record the great granite facade eight hundred feet wondered whether the lost Confederate work and life of a man who built this In 1913, the United Daughters of the in height and about three thousand feet cause merited the immortality of the great nation after eight years of one of Confederacy invited Borglum to submit in length. Instead, Gutzon Borglum con Rock Ages: the most trying wars that a little people designs for a bas-relief of Robert E. Lee ceived of a design covering the whole ever had,'' could a stranger from ''Tim to be carved into the living rock on the mountainside with a procession of Con No one will quarrel with Mr. buctoo" deduce the meaning of that face of Stone Mountain, in Georgia. The federate chieftains, led by a full-length Borglum's audacity in seizing the pallid shaft? The American story, overall dimensions contemplated for the figure of the general so immense that " a opportunity to sign his name, in Borglum argued, was bigger and earthier bust were based on those of Thor- workman engaged in chiselling the hat letters fifty feet high, to the largest 37 Lincoln Memorial. 3 Washington Monument.• monument in the world, bar tent with the great modern none. Nothing has ever been awakening that I should have attempted on this scale before, turned to the huge cliffs of our either in ancient Egypt or Assyria. land, the lofty granite ledges, and The Colossus of Rhodes wasn't in them carve monuments and anywhere near eight hundred feet there leave records of the found high, that is certain ... morglum) ing of our great nation and the admits that already there is a fifty development of our civilization. thousand-dollar oiled road to the base of his potential monument. Borglum's own contemporaneity was One wonders did the Pharaoh never in doubt. He took the first chunk erect road houses furnishing ex out of Mount Rushmore in 1927. As cellent chicken dinners at the feet Mount Rushmore.' , work speeded up with the introduc of their pyramids to attract camel teetered between apathy and outright inviting Borglum to tour the Black Hills tion of jackhammers and new methods touring parties? antipathy because, as the Norfolk "to see if a mountain monument to of dynamite sculpting, however, a Virginia-Pilot put it, "there still clings to America's greatness could be carved columnist for The Nation admitted At first, Borglum's enthusiasm silenced the enterprise, despite its sincerely there ..