Myth & Majesty: A Photography Experience in the Inland Empire
I remember the first time I truly encountered art — no, unfortunately, I wasn’t born in a family who could afford to go to museums every week, or even once a year, I was raised by a single mother who worked three jobs to sustain her three children, so of course, time and money was spent elsewhere. There were opportunities when I was younger to go to field trips, but even those cost money. It wasn’t until I had gone to college, fiddled with at least two other university jobs before I applied to work at the UCR Artsblock in my third year.
My experience, thus far, has been memorable — I have taken film and art classes in the past so I knew a thing or two about art, in a sense — though working around people who had made art their life was a bit daunting and just a little overwhelming. I recall a few months ago, when the exhibition Myth and Majesty was still showing. It was one of the few works of art that I had ever encountered, especially one pertaining to cultural preservation — something I was closely interested in as a Media and Cultural Studies major.
The black-and-white contrasting photographs with indigenous clothes, a piercing stare and ornate painted bodies — there was a rawness in the photographs that captivated me in coming back to gaze curiously at the people depicted in the photo. Photographed during the Manifest Destiny, a word coined in 1845, an American imperialist belief that justified the war against Mexico and reformation of Native Americans. Furthermore, this was an ideal that “…became more an article of faith used to support the righteous belief in continental expansionism. Fueled by the budding belief in American exceptionalism and fueled by a passion for Romantic nationalism, under the practitioners of Manifest Destiny the annexation of the American West had begun.”
At first, it didn’t really strike me as an exhibition that I could relate to — until I met an eighty- year old man who came in the museum.
“What do you think of the photographs in the exhibition?”, he asked me after his tour. Replying with rehearsed lines taught to museum docents for visitors, he asked again, stating that he had wanted to hear what I had personally thought about it.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “there isn’t really much that I know about the history of these photographs to even be opinionated on this topic.”
“Well, it’s not about outright knowledge on the history about this photographs that I wanted to know, but how this made you feel.”
Going back on the hour- long conversation we had afterwards, I realized that he was asking me to elaborate on the emotions that I felt in viewing the photographs itself in relation to the angst that the Native Americans must have felt when the Manifest Destiny came in to faith with the Caucasian Americans who regarded this idea into belief. In Thomas Faist’s “Diaspora and transnationalism: What kind of dance partners?”, he makes a metaphor between two awkward dance partners and the persons who make up voluntary and involuntary migrations in relation to cross- border social processes. This is also in lieu of whether the effects of imperialism of the Native Americans during the Manifest Destiny affected the way they had regarded their culture and how this changed their social formation in their communities — especially since this belief was what started the craze in documenting Native American cultures and lives, causing an often ridiculed historical part of their culture and heritage. Similarly, this western imperialism is felt throughout multiple cultures, though this be sensed domestically through Native American cultural communities.
Perhaps, in the end, I had joined in the Western imperialist en masse, in order to feel indifferently about the massive induction of Western personalities in diferent cultures ans which is why I had felt little difference even at the deepening words of a poised, inspiring man educating me on the emotional photographs hanging up on the walls.
