Saturday, May 17, 2008
Where are all the artistic tributes to air disasters? Plus: Your in-flight cellphone questions answered.
Dec 24, 2004 | "Only a Western wall of race and arms can hold back the infiltration of inferior blood and permit the white race to live at all in a pressing sea of yellow, black and brown ... We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races."
A week ago I challenged readers to identify the source of the preceding and quite distasteful commentary. Nearly 400 of you responded. Most numerous among the incorrect submissions were those citing Adolf Hitler. Seems logical, but remember I'd hinted that the answer involved some sort of aviation tie-in. Other botched guesses included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Patrick Buchanan, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Franklin.
Robert Gill, of Vancouver, B.C., was the first to accurately identify the speaker as none other than Charles Lindbergh -- American hero, eugenics enthusiast and recipient of Nazi Germany's prestigious Deutscher Adler medal, presented to Lindy by Hermann Goering, World War I fighter ace and commander of the Nazi Luftwaffe. The diatribe is excerpted from a Lindbergh essay titled "Aviation, Geography, and Race," appearing in the November 1939 issue of Reader's Digest.
Mr. Gill receives a signed copy of "Ask the Pilot" and my esteemed Fastest Googler of 2004 award. Onward in this column I've devised a slightly more Google-proof contest.
In the meantime, let's revisit another bizarre aerohistorical anecdote. Here again is a link to Cheri Cherin's "Catastrophe de Ndolo." Cherin is a well-known Congolese artist, and "Catastrophe" is his strange oil-on-canvas rendition of the 1996 air crash in Kinshasa, Zaire. Upwards of 300 people were killed when a Russian-made cargo plane went down after takeoff, barreling through a crowded marketplace. Although it was one of the worst-ever disasters in terms of fatalities, everybody on the airplane survived.
Ndolo is the name of Kinshasa's in-town airport, where the accident occurred. Not to be confused with the capital's larger international facility, Ndjili. I'm unsure what "Wapi mama" translates to, though it may be some kind of pained exclamation made as an Antonov turboprop comes roaring through your fruit stall.
I asked Sister Wendy Beckett what she thought of Cherin's non-masterpiece. You remember Sister Wendy -- art historian, critic and Catholic nun -- from the PBS series. I was eager to hear her thoughts on "Catastrophe" and its portrayal of flaming wreckage and partly eviscerated bodies.
"A splendidly gory re-creation," she tells us. "We see a bloody, devastated marketplace marked with the hulk of a burning fuselage. Yet the true fury of the event is captured not in the fire and gore but in the cries and gestures of the people. It's the apocalyptic landscape of a Bosch painting seen through the anguished psyche of modern African folk art."
In fact, who knows what Sister Wendy might say? I made that up and, if you can't tell, have no idea what I'm talking about.
What I know for sure, though, is that if Western culture lacks one thing, it's artistic tributes to air disasters. Considering all the unfortunate events we so incessantly and weirdly sentimentalize, why not plane crashes?
I'm not, necessarily, being facetious. Swissair 111 got a seaside memorial in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, and American 587 is getting one in Rockaway. Next time, instead of a commemorative plaque, how about shards of metal welded onto something evocative and appropriately tangible? Or a statue cast from actual, crash-site aluminum? I did catch a fragment (cabin window and attached metal viscera) of American Airlines flight 11 on display at the USS Intrepid Museum in Manhattan, but that's not the same. Sculpture seems the obvious vessel -- wreckage as a kind of meta-minimalism, but there's fantastic creative potential using almost any medium.
Here's a sample from my very own portfolio, "Catastrophe Over Fenley Street," recovered from my parents' house this past Thanksgiving. Drawn here is the infamous -- we assume, since it was wholly imaginary -- three-way crash involving Swissair, American Airlines and TWA. Fenley Street is where I grew up, though I'll save the explanation about my last name for another time. The picture is typical of my mid-1970s "collisions period." Disillusioned with the uninspired, stridently orthodox sketches of my fourth-grade classmates ("stifled," as my art teacher put it), I went for something bolder and more provocative.
At the bottom, we see the severed foresection of a TWA 747. The rest of the jet is conspicuously missing, but judging from the three upper-deck windows, this is an old 100 variant. Note also the carrier's '70s-vintage livery with the interlocked twin globes. The other two aircraft types remain unidentifiable. You'll notice neither plane has wings or engines, a telltale trait of my earlier, more abstract work. Wings were such a modernist thing, and they required a degree of three-dimensional scaling I hadn't mastered yet.
"The amount of negative space really bothers me," remarks Sister Wendy, "There's a disconnect between the colliding planes at the top and the 747 at the bottom, as if we're seeing two different accidents, perhaps at different times. Yet the juxtaposition of the Swissair and American jets is quite lovely, and the artist has restrained himself admirably. It's rare to see a fourth-grade disaster rendering free of bodies or gratuitous violence."
She didn't stop there. The good sister always got a little giddy when discussing racy or controversial artwork, and "Fenley" proves to be more revealing than expected:
"I also see a preconscious sexual awareness -- a fear of castration and a fascination with airplanes combining to form a troubling psychosexual portrait of our young friend. The vaguely vaginal TWA fuselage portion in the foreground would likely have been pierced by the nosediving American phallus, had it not been intercepted by the meddlesome, somewhat larger Swissair craft.
Um.
Anyway, two of the three depicted carriers are no longer in existence, I'll point out -- TWA and Swissair -- making my picture markedly exotic and valuable. I have no inkling why I chose those three particular airlines, or what in my 8-year-old brain may have precipitated the disaster. Perhaps the Swissair pilots were blinded by a laser beam.
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