This is the essay that Adam Fine kindly wrote to accompany my recent exhibition 'Tomorrow Comes A Day Too Soon'
I'm sure he'll appreciate any feedback,
Sam
A Brilliant Veneer
Adam Fine
We live in an age less than
golden. And if history must teach
us one lesson, it's that we will forget most if not all of what history can
teach us. The failings of past
times do not vaccinate subsequent generations from a doomed repetition, rather
they remain cancers in remission, ever threatening to re-emerge resistant to
prior treatments, leaving us scrambling desperately for new cures.
The period in American history
immediately following its Civil War and coinciding with the Second Industrial
Revolution is known as the Gilded Age, a term attributed to the 1873 novel of
the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. This era, roughly spanning the late
1860s to 1896, proved to be a terrific exercise in Manic-Depression—reaching
exceptional highs and catastrophic lows with little room for balance.
With the abolishment of the
economics of slavery, the US embraced an economy centric to corporations. Railway expansion brought opportunity
and business to the American West in levels heretofore unseen, and concurrent
with the railway industry's growth, there also grew manufacturing, agriculture,
mining and finance. Patents
increased exponentially with enormous technological advances in electrical
applications, communication, the moving image and transportation among many
others. Alongside these new
industries, the middle class rose with solidified concepts of upward mobility
in the form of career tracks for skilled workers and managers. Labour unions equipped with the ability
to strike would also gain traction in the name of workers' rights. And those captains of
industry—reaching, even surpassing levels of wealth and power only previously
held by monarchs and nobility abroad—engaged in immense philanthropy:
establishing universities, schools and academies, hospitals, venues for the
arts, public libraries, and charities.
At first glance, America seemed to emerge from the horrors of its Civil
War into a shining new golden age of prosperity.
But prosperity is often enjoyed
most by the few who can control it.
Indeed this golden age would prove itself gilded: a glittering veneer
upon a vast corrosion.
During this same time, concepts
of eugenics, Social Darwinism and “the survival of the fittest” emerged into
new prominence. Innate
superiority, in the natural sense, was deemed to be found within the powerful
individuals who languished in the spoils of the free market, while the
poor—those who are governed rather than govern—were believed to be inherently
weak, a result of moral depravity, cultural failure, ideology, religious
tradition, ethnicity. So-called
'political machines' took root to control an increasingly corrupt political
system—locally and nationally—via bribery and physical coercion. Black Friday and the Panics of 1857,
1873, 1884, 1893 and 1896—economic depressions defined by financial
risk-taking, failed investment, fraud, and the collapse and bailouts of
financial institutions, with suspected ties at times with the highest levels of
government—pockmarked notions of societal growth. The new American aristocracy, dubbed “Robber Barons”,
created tight monopolies in their respective industries through strict vertical
integration of their corporate trusts.
Workers suffered under sometimes fatal working conditions, and career
tracks were typically designed with absolute ceilings; union strikes could be
met with military opposition. A
result of deregulated industrial practices was reflected in Upton Sinclair's
1905 novel, The Jungle: a Socialist piece exposing immigrants'
treacherous working and living situations along with many ghoulish practices of
Chicago's meatpacking industry.
And the American South, formerly aligned with the Confederacy, found
itself outside any prosperity or growth seen in the rest of the nation, with
most farmers only renting their land, and replete with the same political
malfeasance, poverty, racial and gender inequality, and racial violence
experienced in some degree nationwide.
Light, it would seem, can mask
far deeper shadows.
The idea of an age of progress,
existing as merely a golden veneer upon a dilapidated interior, still resonates
to this day, reflected on a global scale not only in physicality but also
systemically. Progress in the past
century is unmistakeable. We can
communicate with individuals across the globe almost instantly, and in fact, we
can travel to said individuals in a matter of hours, not days or months. Medicine and sanitation have rendered
moot many of the scourges that long plagued past civilizations. We now understand much more about
science from the dynamics of our universe to the mechanics of life, having
answered many questions of physics and biology and better knowing what
questions to ask.
On the other hand, this march
forward has equally deleterious effects.
This exponential progress, a term comfortably italicised or set in
quotation marks, brings with it certain attitudes, expectations, and actions
which are self-damning to the concept.
When people expect technology to cater not only to their needs but also
to their wants, their whims, the original problems mankind have faced tend to
be lost within the public's weak attention span and lacking imagination. For instance, once smallpox was
effectively eradicated, so too were its vaccines; however, many countries still
have stores of the virus, and if used nefariously or even carelessly, we are
left with an old problem and little recourse to an effective solution. And on a less apocalyptic note, but no
less imperative to cultural health and longevity, we have left much of our
cultural qualifiers—literature, news, music, film, art—to an ethereal and
ephemeral digital cloud. The
expectation of such information to be immediately available on a 24-hour cycle
has led to a higher reliance on digital media than on traditional physical
media. We can access Fahrenheit
451 instantly on an e-reader (without a much needed sense of irony), but
given this lack of physical source material, we establish ourselves not only
within a metaphorical Gilded Age, but a new Dark Age where access to
information can be as easily controlled as instantly lost or rendered
technologically obsolete. As well,
with reliance upon digital photography, the historical and journalistic
chronicle of our times is threatened.
With the related storage methods for digital images and like material,
we may not be able to fully conceive what our times will provide future
generations, future archaeologists and anthropologists. Consider the impact that photographic
processes had in communicating the deadly effects of America's Civil War to the
nation, as well as the effect said processes had upon the tradition of
painting—both inextricably related to the physical photograph. We understand much of earlier
civilizations based on the structures they built, what texts lasted on papyrus,
vellum or stone. With our flimsy,
temporary structures and architecture, and with the ephemerality of our
collections of technological and cultural material, we are only building
ourselves a higher platform from which to fall, far out of sight of its
foundations.
We cannot ensure a hopeful future
whilst denying it a past. Progress
must be mindful of its origins, and success must acknowledge its own
failures.
Ultimately, the solution and the
problem, the light and the dark, the prosperity and the poverty are inherently
human matters. The industrial and
technological advances that mould societies create imbalance, poverty and
slavery in equal measure.
Disparities between the states, social and ethnic groups in the latter
half of nineteenth century America are easily paralleled in this more globally
connected age, between 'developed' and 'developing' nations. When we learn to drive, we are taught
not only to look several seconds ahead of where we are, but also to mind our
mirrors for what remains behind.
Both are necessary to keep our course.
A veneer, no matter what skill or
substance it implies, does not substitute for integrity of structure and cannot
exist alone.
