Sculpture on Film #2: The Coen Brothers and Frederic Remington

This post combines two things I really like doing: watching Coen Brothers films and pointing out sculptures by Frederic Remington. Remington is one of America's best-known artists of Western subjects. He was active in the art world from the early 1880s until his death in 1909, producing scores of paintings, small bronze sculptures and magazine illustrations glorifying the American West, a subject that by the end of the 19th century was already ripe with nostalgia. Remington's work doesn't always appeal to me - it usually has an air of rah-rah Americana that is a little over the top for me - but I find his small bronzes to be rather compelling. I first began looking at them for comparison purposes when I was working on similarly-scaled bronzes by James Edward Kelly for my undergraduate thesis, and since then, I've noticed that Remington sculptures have a tendency to pop up in unexpected places, from films to antique stores to bed and breakfasts, and more.

The Bronco Buster, first copyrighted in 1895, is probably Remington's most recognizable sculpture:


Hundreds of authorized casts and untold numbers of unauthorized casts of the exist; the one above, cast in 1918, is from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the most famous individual Bronco Buster casts, though, and one of the best for eagle-eyed TV and movie viewers, is the cast that belongs to the White House collection. Given as a gift during the Carter administration, the sculpture resides in the Oval Office, and is thus constantly working its way into the frame, both with real-life presidents and with fictional presidents.

Real president:


Fake president:


Oh, and then there was this one time when I was in this weird store at Caesar's in Vegas, and they had a Bronco Buster that was about eight feet tall, and it was for sale!


Not really sure who the intended audience for this thing is, or who might buy it, but I thought it might be worth bringing up in a post about Remington.

But where was I? Weren't we talking about the Coen Brothers?

I noticed a few years ago that bronze sculptures and other works of art tend to show up in the background in Coen Brothers films A LOT. There are a lot of examples, but today I'm going to focus on two that feature Remington, one from Fargo and the other from Burn After Reading. Interestingly, both of these scenes feature characters who decide to pull the rug out from under close family members.

The first is Fargo. William H. Macy's hapless car salesman arrives at a meeting with his much wealthier father-in-law, played by Harve Presnell. Macy is looking for a loan for a real estate deal, but as the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that the father-in-law has no intention of lending the money, that he holds nothing but barely veiled contempt for his son-in-law, and that furthermore, he plans to cut Macy out of the deal entirely and use his money to fund the purchase for himself. And meanwhile, Remington's Bronco Buster and Cheyenne (copyright 1901) look on:


If you've seen Fargo, you know that this conversation, spurred by Macy's desperate search for money, begins a devastating chain of events that results in several deaths.

Remington's Cheyenne (the same cast perhaps?) witnesses another scene of familial cruelty in Burn After Reading:


This time, the sculpture resides in the office of Katie Cox's (Tilda Swinton) lawyer. During the scene in question, she negotiates with her lawyer to bring divorce proceedings against her husband, played by John Malkovich. Not only is the divorce a complete surprise to her husband, but she accompanies the announcement by freezing his assets and changing the locks on their Washington, DC townhouse. As in Fargo, this action sets off a desperate chain of events, this time played for broadly comic effect.

So what does this say about the Coens' opinion of people who own and display Remington sculptures? I'm almost afraid to speculate.

Personal note: Once again, I'm realizing that other responsibilities are keeping me away from blogging as much as I'd like. I'm going to keep posting as much as possible in the next six weeks, but look for much more regular posts after September 1! I'm going to be relocating to DC in September, and I'm hoping I'll get a lot of new inspirations for blogging in that environment.

People and Public Art #1: Introduction

I know I promised to debut another blog feature this week, and here it is! One of the great things about public art is its capacity to engage with people in a way that traditional art in museums really doesn't. By nature, public art lives outside, in public, with people. We use it as a meeting place. We touch it. We interact with it. We make it a part of our lives.

I kind of love it when I have the opportunity to watch people engaging with their public art. There's just something about sculpture that brings out the theatricality in people - I know that when I'm teaching, I often find myself acting out the works of art I'm describing. What better way to explain contrapposto to a class full of undergrads than to act it out with your own body? And I've realized by walking around and looking at people that I'm not the only one who has this impulse. Something about public art, and sculpture in general, turns us into actors.

I plan to use this new feature to share instances of spontaneous interaction between people and their public art, like this one time when I was documenting Franklin Court in Philadelphia for a project and snapped this moment of unbridled whimsy:


And I'll admit that sometimes I am overcome in a similar fashion:


I also plan to use this feature to point out instances where public interaction with a specific work has led to an appreciable change in some aspect of the work. One extreme example of this is the medieval statue of St. Peter in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome that has been rubbed and venerated by so many pilgrims over the year that its bronze feet have been worn to nubbins:


Whenever I see either a fun interaction between people and art or an obvious change in materials that results from such interaction, I'm always tempted to document it - this will be my chance to share those snapshots with you.

Columbia and other monument-topping ladies

I'll admit it: female figures representing classical virtues don't really get me out of bed in the morning. I consider this to be something of a weakness, because they make up a big part of nineteenth-century memorial art. I can't really put my finger on why this is. I suspect that at least some level of it comes down to basic attraction; I've been known to admit to having actual crushes on works of art (this guy and this guy come to mind, as does this detail). But there's more to it than that: "bronze men with guns" (as I sometimes call them) are pretty easy to interpret, but there's something opaque, at least to me, about these cool stone goddesses. While I can draw direct links between the citizen soldiers of the past and things that are happening today, such as National Guard ads, I have trouble making the same links with the ladies. Maybe that's my problem.

Good thing there are other people writing great things about this topic! This past Sunday, the New York Times Disunion blog ran a column by Ellen L. Berg about the figure of Columbia and how she served as a motivating symbol for men fighting on both sides of the Civil War. (Incidentally, if you're at all interested in the Civil War and not following Disunion yet... what's stopping you?) The article is apparently an offshoot of a book-length treatment of the topic of Columbia, and I look forward to reading more when the book comes out. What I like about the article is that it gets at how common figures like Columbia were in popular imagery of the Civil War, and how easily they would have been understood. Clearly, I need to do a lot more thinking to get on that wavelength with my monuments.

Some allegorical ladies that I've encountered in my fieldwork include a copy of Thomas Crawford's Freedom in Peabody, MA (originally designed for the U.S. Capitol):


Martin Milmore's Genius of America atop his Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common:


The Call to Arms, sculpted by James Edward Kelly, visible at the top of this Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Troy, NY:


And one of my personal favorites, a decidedly odd Defeated Victory, the centerpiece of Frederick C. Hibbard's Confederate Monument at Shiloh:


There's definitely much more room here to think about these figures than I've allowed so far. I'm so glad to find exciting scholars working on these issues who can help me to see them in a new light as well.

Fireworks are the opposite of monuments

I love fireworks. The noise, the light, the pageantry, the crowds, the pretty colors - all this appeals to me. I try to attend fireworks only once a year, in the context of Fourth of July celebrations, because that's when the best show tend to happen, and also because I don't want to dilute my love of fireworks by turning them into an everyday thing. For three out of the last four years, Charlie and I have made it a point to attend Milwaukee's fireworks, always held on July 3 on the shores of Lake Michigan, where Milwaukee's citizens camp out for two days beforehand to assure a good spot to watch. Charlie and I always show up about a half hour before the show starts, and we always walk straight to the front, because there's always room for one more blanket for two. It's our tradition, and we like it.

For the last few years, I've been musing about fireworks as a kind of public art form, and indeed the most ephemeral kind. They have a mass appeal that is visual, aural, and kinetic, and yet momentary.


Sometimes fireworks seem to go off at random, but at really well-planned shows, like the one we attend every year in Milwaukee, the fireworks are arranged in specific compositions of color and light. They bloom, grow, and fade in moments, changing in the blink of an eye.


This is a show, yes, a broad form of popular entertainment, but it is also a visual experience, and spending too much time in the art world keeps me thinking about it that way. I can't help thinking of the fireworks show as the flip side of the monuments I study. Both have martial overtones, the "bombs bursting in air" and the citizen soldier. Both are sites of national celebration: the soldier monument still serves as a meeting place on Memorial Day and Veterans' Day, and the fireworks display brings people together on the Fourth.


And yet, composed of bronze and granite, the soldier monument gives the impression of permanence, while the fireworks display is all fire and powder. Do they both get the point across? And what point?

I'm not sure yet how to interpret my desire to preserve something as ephemeral as fireworks through photographs. Maybe that's my own art form.


And here we are before the fireworks began last night. I'm big on recording moments, and attending this particular fireworks show has been an enjoyable time for us over the last few years. Last night was our last time, though - next year, we'll be seeing how DC handles the big light show! And I'm sure I will have more overwrought musings to share.

Thomas Hart Benton at the Milwaukee Art Museum

I've been living in Milwaukee for about ten months now. I moved here to spend time with Charlie while he trained for speedskating (he retired at the end of the season), and we'll be moving to DC in the fall, but it's been an interesting experiment spending the year in the Midwest when I've lived my entire life so far on the East Coast. One of the great pleasures has been visiting the local museums and cultural institutions, especially the Milwaukee Art Museum. We became members for the year, and it's been a pleasure to visit the collection, a unique and eclectic representation of art movements around the world. Two of the highlights for me are the American collection (naturally, as I'm trained as an Americanist), which employs one of the most accessible approaches to the decorative arts that I've ever seen, and the folk art collection, which is varied and deep.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera when we stopped by yesterday. I had been thinking about finding material to talk about here on the blog (especially as I know I've been remiss about posting all week), and it turns out that the piece that most captured my imagination yesterday, a sculpted clay maquette made circa 1939 by Thomas Hart Benton for his painting Cotton Weighing, is almost completely unrepresented by images online. I was able to find two, a tiny one on MAM's website, and a Flickr image posted by user hanneorla. May this be a lesson to me to staple my camera to my person for the future.

I never knew that Thomas Hart Benton used miniature clay sculptures as studies for his paintings, and now that I know, I'd like to learn more about it. It's certainly a novel way to work. If you're at all familiar with his paintings, you can probably picture the exaggerated, monumental figures, swirling motion, and dramatically tilted perspective that mark many of his paintings; all of these elements were visible in the little clay maquette. In the images above, you can probably even make out that the glass case enclosing the maquette even features a sharply tilted floor, making the perspective even more exaggerated. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed my little step into a tiny 3D version of a Benton painting. What can I say? I'm a sculpture person - I like it when paintings pop out of their frames.

Full disclosure and point of order on blogging: Yesterday marked the six week mark before my wedding, and about the eight-week mark for my cross-country move back to DC. I'm starting to realize that starting a blog at a time like this might have been a weird idea, but I'm going to do my best to keep plugging away, even if I didn't do such a good job of that this week! In the upcoming week, expect some musings on art events as they happen, and the introduction of at least one new blog feature!

Two Davids, un-alike in dignity

In America, they put boxers on David:


In Italy, they put... David... on boxers:


(First picture was taken today in Waukesha, WI in a gelato shop; second picture was taken last summer outside a souvenir store in Florence.)

Can we make something about the fact that pretty much everybody seems to be obsessed with the same aspect of David's anatomy, but there seem to be regional trends on how that's expressed? We could go all academic about it, or we could just giggle.

I choose to giggle.

Sculpture on Film #1: My Cousin Vinny

Part of watching a movie with me is dealing with the fact that I spend a lot of time scrutinizing the frame around where the main action is happening for fun or worthwhile visual things, and when I find one, I tend to tug on the sleeve of whoever is sitting next to me to whisper about it, because I have a hard time keeping things to myself. This new feature, which will repeat at random whenever I have material for it, is the blogging version of my annoying whispering in the dark. Here, I hope to share films with scenes that prominently feature sculpture.

First up: My Cousin Vinny (1992)! This movie is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, at least partially due to my ongoing and slightly embarrassing crush on Ralph Macchio, and also for the fun it has with its goofy North v. South plotline, and for Marisa Tomei and her *thunk-thunk* biological clock. I had to come up with a way to justify watching it over and over again, and thankfully I found one that is related to my dissertation.

The first time we meet Joe Pesci in the film, he is driving his big, outrageous convertible into a sleepy Southern hamlet to defend his cousin and a friend, wrongfully accused of murder. As rock music blares, shots of Pesci's car are intercut with the locals, who are utterly shocked to see such a person pulling into their town. What interests me is the town itself: one of those typical Southern county seats, with the wide town green in front of a grand courthouse. The setting is supposed to be in Alabama:


Pesci gets out of the car first, followed by Marisa Tomei:


And what's that behind her? Why, could it be a Confederate war memorial? I think it might be!

Whoever was in charge of scouting locations for this film really did a great job. A lot of the film's exterior scenes take place in this town square, and it really adds a lot to the kind of juxtapositions that are so integral to the movie's storyline. It's a popcorn, Saturday afternoon kind of film, yes, but its visuals tell a compelling story.

I did a little sleuthing, and it turns out that the town square and monument actually belong to Monticello, Georgia:


Fabricated by the McNeel Marble Works of Marietta, Georgia, it was dedicated on April 6, 1910. I haven't visited the monument to photograph it myself yet, but I'm hoping to do so sometime in the fall. The second chapter of my dissertation is on Southern monuments, and I have a feeling the Georgia monuments are going to tell me some compelling stories.

And that's how I managed to work My Cousin Vinny into my dissertation!