🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a friend who was born in Cambodia.  One day I asked her how she would
feel if the City of San Jose decided to celebrate Cambodia's contribution to
local cultural diversity by recreating Ankgor Wat downtown.  She burst out
laughing.  I have another friend of Greek ancestry.  I asked her how she 
would react to San Jose honoring Greek culture by rebuilding a temple to
Aphrodite.  Her quizzical look gave way to comments about the importance of
the Greek Orthodox church.

Equivalent to these two examples, I also asked a Hispanic friend how she felt
about the "Plumed Serpent", artistic rendering of an Aztec idol which was
commissioned by the City of San Jose.  She said the Hispanic community 
"hates this statue.  There are so many other beautiful things they could 
have chosen."

Artist Robert Graham received $500,000 in taxpayer money for a sculpture 
of Quetzalcoatl, the ostensible relevance to public purpose that provoked 
this splurge was to honor Hispanic diversity.  The original design stood 25 
feet high with a 10 foot base, all bronze, and supplanted the historic 
Firemen's Bell in "Plaza de Cesar Chavez", a civic park at the corner of 
San Carlos and Market.  In the face of public pressure, the city forced 
Graham to scale his creation back to 10' high and use other materials, he 
chose some kind of cement which has manifested as a dirty grey.  
Consensus regards the Idol as emulating the excrement of a Jurassic Park 
refugee.  The prime advocate for this artistic blight was then a member 
of the San Jose city council:  Blanca Alvarado, now serving out an 
appointed term on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

The Plumed Serpent is a recurring motif of ancient Mesoamerican cultures.  The
cover article "Star Wars of Ancient Mexico" from a 1994 issue of ARCHEOLOGY
magazine documents how worship of this idol included various manifestations of
ritual human sacrifice.  When Cortez landed and began the process of
intermingling which lead to the modern Latin American culture, the usual 
desire to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ was heightened by 
disgust for these bloody practices.  By the time anyone of what we now 
call Hispanic extraction set foot in the Santa Clara Valley, worship of 
the Plumed Serpent had been vigorously suppressed.  For spiritual 
guidance, these people looked to the Holy Father in Rome, as most 
Hispanics still do.  Direct cultural experience of Quetzalcoatl is 
completely foriegn to every human being who ever lived in this county.

This is not the first time Robert Graham has been found irrelevant.  He was
previously commissioned for one of the San Jose "Gateway" sculptures, where
the theme was our agricultural heritage.  The result was a yoke for a pair of
oxen;  this was turned down by the Gateway committee, to their credit. 
Anyone with the slightest glimmer of empathy for the history of Santa Clara
county would know that the defining aesthetic event in our heritage is the 
flowering of the fruit trees in the spring.

Visualize a gently ulundating surface.  From this emerges renditions of 
bare deciduous trees in geometric rows.  White lights are made to shimmer
by shallow submersion, as fountains under very low pressure gently spray the
bare trees from underneath, glistening drops on each tiny metal branch
suggesting the awakening blossoms.  No city funded education campaign would be
needed to explain such a sculpture.  Old timers would see it and hearken back
to the blossom parades of yore, and a cultural legacy would be preserved.  It
is said each year around the Campbell Prune festival that no living prune 
trees remain within the town's limits.  The memories need not die as 
well, preservation through commissioned art is a legitimate government
function.

The question is: which piece of art?

Set aside the waste of taxpayer money.  Neglect the spiritual ramifications of
raising up this idol.  Let us consider the Plumed Serpent solely on the issue
of artistic merit.  For most of this misbegotten century, it has been
considered de rigeur to violate the sensibilities of the public at 
large.  The more outrageous the violation, the more vigorous the avant 
garde's applause.  This trend has been pursued to its absurd
conclusion:  artists strain mightily to further violate a post-Victorian
consensus which no longer exists, and achieve nothing but conformity and
convention in the act.  

Art speaks to the audience, society once held that good art uplifts the
beholder.  Even a degraded effort like Serrano's "Piss Christ" relates to the
audience enough to offend.  Graham's Plumed Serpent fails even this 
test.  It is completely irrelevant.

As noted, the primary promoter of Graham's edifice was then San Jose City 
Council member Blanca Alvarado.  Minutes of the San Jose Urban Design Review 
Board meeting on September 15, 1992 contain her quote:  "...the more I 
become involved with this project, the more profound my emotion and my 
attachment to this piece becomes.  ...There has been for me a spiritual 
renaissance in researching the attributes of Quetzalcoatl.... I hope that 
it will be spiritual for other people."  

Allow me to suggest, Blanca, that the commission you engineered for Mr. 
Graham should have been funded with your own money, so you could display his 
creation on your own property.

-Dorr H. Clark


"A gentleman is not an implement."  - Confucius