Gauguin in Seattle

So, yesterday Janice and I made it down to the Seattle Art Museum to spend the afternoon wandering around in the Gauguin exhibit. I don' t know that much about Gauguin (Van Gough is more what I like in a Post-Impressionist), but it was a good chance to learn more. The results was interesting: relatively few of the pieces fitted my preconception of his art, being in bright, primary colors. Most were in subdued, washed out colors -- though it's unclear to me whether this was by intent or due to the materials available to him (he ran out of canvas early on during his first sojourn in Tahiti and had to make do with substitutes). Many could have been painted in tidewater Mississippi or along the Carolina coast. Another surprise was finding that (a) he almost always included an animal in each painting, and that (b) he was really good at plants -- often the most interesting thing about a picture wd be the snaky plants along one border, or features in the background, or the like.

But my favorite part, I have to admit, was the discovery that this exhibit was only about half by Gauguin: the other half were Polynesian artifacts -- wood carvings from Rapanui, stone tikis from the Marquesas, intricately carved bowls from Tahiti. The archeologist or paleontologist in me trumps the art appreciator any day, so these really made the exhibit memorable for me.

Best of all was getting to see a rongorongo tablet. Somehow I'd gotten the idea that there were only three of these in the world; turns out there are just over two dozen, but only a very few (three or four) with large amounts of text. No one has ever succeeded in translating rongorongo; it's the orphaned remnant of a destroyed culture. I've seen one of the huge Easter Island heads, or moai (in 2007, in the British Museum), but in a way this little dark piece of wood as just as intriguing. When we'd gotten all the way to the end of the exhibit, Janice indulged me and we went back against the current to see this one item again. Well worth it.

So, if you're in the Seattle area, and have an interest in Gauguin, in Post-Impressionists, in artists behaving badly, or in Polynesia, this exhibit is definitely worth checking out. Esp. since they've brought together items from museums around the world: you'd have to visit a lot of places to see all the things in this exhibit. Enjoy!

--John R.

Panel at WisCon (People of Color in Fantasy Worlds)

(1) So, recently David Bratman had an interesting post about the single fact about Earthsea that most readers miss: that Ged is black. I think this is because Le Guin fails to clearly signal this simple fact to the reader,* but David here does a good job of arguing otherwise by bringing together all the references in A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA to characters' skin color:

http://calimac.livejournal.com/529509.html

What I found particularly interesting in this is David's drawing attention to the fact that Le Guin avoids describing Ged; a nice piece of subtlety, even though I think it backfired on her here.

(2) In any case, she avoided the misfortune of having been on the panel at WisCon David mentions and provides the link to, where one panelist (the talented Mary Doria Russell) sparked the ire of one person in attendance, who seems to have spent the rest of the weekend telling people that Russell had made racially insensitive remarks and trying to get people upset and outraged over what seems, from a distance, to be a perfectly harmless comment. Here's the offended party's description of the panel, along with her critique at the end of what upset her so badly:

http://kate-nepveu.dreamwidth.org/427014.html?thread=5266950#cmt5266950

(3) Despite the panel's general inconclusiveness and the outrage of the report's author, it's an interesting topic and I wd have attended if I still lived close enough to make it to WisCons. This was something that came up in D&D all the time, particularly among those of us at TSR in the early nineties who were trying to include as much gender and ethnic diversity into the adventures and boxed sets and sourcebooks we wrote and edited as we cd (particularly the art).

The problem is that acceptable terminology changes over time, so that "white" and "black" (which have the benefit of being universally understood) have been challenged and replaced by the more neutral terms "Caucasian" and "African-American". But in a fantasy world like Greyhawk or Mystara, there are no Caucasian Mts nor any Africa, so those referents are woefully out of place. The Forgotten Realms tried to address the problem by creating an area of African-style jungle called "Chult", but that solution itself was open to charges of tokenism (the Realms' Asia analogue, ORIENTAL ADVENTURES, was vast by comparison, as were its later Central-America analogue and Mideast analogue; only its Africa analogue was disproportionally small -- whereas in the real world Africa is the second largest continent, huge by comparison to Europe).

In the end, the problem wasn't solved so much as side-stepped. With the coming of settings like PLANESCAPE and later Third Edition it was simply assumed that the human population of those settings was racially mixed, with ethnicity no longer corresponding to culture -- that is, much more like post-modern America.

Ultimately, I don't think we ever found a good way to describe ethnicities in rpg products, and mostly fell back on the art instead -- though here too we quickly ran into difficulties (but that's a whole 'nother story).

So, I have no good solution. 'People of Color', the current acceptable term, will no doubt one day seem terribly quaint in its turn; I can only hope that by then people will look back on all this in mild disbelief that the people of our time were so obsessed by distinctions and gradations that no longer exist.

--John R.

*just as, in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, there's one scene in which she intended the reader to visualize the alien as a woman although she keeps referring to the character as "he" throughout. I think in both cases there's a disjuncture between what Le Guin sees in her mind's eye and what she conveys to the reader.