Here is a fascinating 37-minute documentary on the use — by photographers, artists, journalists, institutions, and ordinary citizens — of the American flag in response to war/terrorism, from British film makers David Dunnico and Cat Gregory.
They compare two cases: the 1945 attack by US Marines on Japanese-held Iwo Jima out of which came Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photo, and the 11 September 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center, out of which have come a number of images, artifacts, and memorials, but none that have (yet) achieved the iconicity of Rosenthal’s photo.
The still unsettled nature of the cultural response to 9/11 is not necessarily a bad thing, allowing room (in theory at least) for artistic questioning and reconsideration, which is closed off when representations become fixed as icons, only suitable for narrowly prescribed contexts, or for parody and cliche. Dunnico and Gregory also highlight important differences between art, memorial, and propaganda, and between still photography, sculpture, and film or other dynamic media.
Joe Rosenthal’s famous World War 2 photograph of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima has acquired so much cultural currency, it has transcended its original form and become the most iconic photograph ever taken. But in doing so it has given the culture it came from a problematic legacy, that has become all too aparent in artisits’ responses to the attacks on 9/11.
David Dunnico is a documentary photographer from Manchester in the UK. Cat Gregory is a freelance film editior based in London.
Eugène Delacroix: La Liberté guidant le peuple / Liberty Leading the People (1830)
In Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix created what is arguably the single most famous depiction of any flag, and certainly of the French tricolor. The central figure, the personification of Liberty (and of the French nation), brandishing the flag in one hand, a rifle in the other, climbs over her fallen comrades urging “the people” on to victory. 185 years later, the audacious imagery still resonates, inspiring quotation, imitation, and parody. Here are some, in responses to the recent Charlie Hebdo terrorism in Paris.
LA LIBERTÉ SERA TOUJOURS LA PLUS FORTE / FREEDOM WILL ALWAYS BE THE STRONGEST by Plantu, in Le Monde, January 9, 2015.Liberty Je suis Charlie Hebdo, by Gary Barker (garybarker.co.uk). He writes: “Let’s hope this call to arms only means more people pick up their pencils and brushes rather guns and knives. I have a feeling those politicians now espousing freedom of speech will soon be trying to us this tragic events to enforce legislation upon us all that will curtail even more of our freedoms.”Liberty Leading the Press Freedom Pen, by Angel Boligan, in El Universal, Mexico City, January 11, 2015.By Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, January 7, 2015.The Simpsons’ tribute to victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, inserted into before the last commercial break in the episode Bart’s New Friend, January 11, 2015.By Kuang Biao 狂飙, China Digital Times.
A little counter-point to the last posting. Images of men sewing flags can be found, just not as easily. Here are some. (Click on the photos below for original context as found on the web.)
“Paul Servos, co-owner of the Flag Shop, practices a technique called applique-sewing, in which an image is sewn onto both sides of a flag to give the impression of a flat image.” From article in the CFB Esquimalt Lookout: Navy News Online, March 25, 2013.“Man sewing new flag for Communist regime in Vietnam. Hannoi 10-1954”.“Tailor in Berbera in the northwestern Somaliland region of Somalia sewing the regional flag.” Photo by Alfred Weidinger, 2011.A British sailor uses a sewing machine to repair a signal flag on board the armed merchant cruiser HMS ALCANTARA en route to Sierra Leone, 1942. Photo by Cecil Beaton. Crown Copyright, Imperial War Museum.“A Gift to the Nation” by Tom Browning.“A Moslem tailor hurries to finish the star-and-crescent flag of new Pakistan.” Photograph by David Duncan Douglas, published in LIFE Magazine, August 18, 1947. Note pakistaniflagmaker.page.tl claims the man in the photo was Altaf Hussain.
The production of flags has been, and continues to be, highly gendered. (Click on the photos below for original context as found on the web.)
Woman sewing a signal flag. Early 1940’s. From Bankcroft Library.“Tanya Mounts and Jackie Darr add the grommets to a large American flag.” Coshocton, Ohio. Photo from Annin Flagmakers website.Sewing the American Flag. Photograph by May Smith, National Geographic.“A mother sewing the flag in front of her daughter, Lebanon – 1950” From lebanonpostcard.com.Linda Le (right) and Kuo Nam Lo, above, embroider a presidential flag on Flag Day at the Defense Logistics Agency. Below right, a detail from the flag. LUIS FERNANDO RODRIGUEZ / Staff Photographer, Philadelphia Inquirer.Sewing stripes on an American flag at the Annin Flag Company, March 1943. Photographer: Marjory Collins (1912-1985). From US Library of Congress.A female inmate works on an American flag while working in the Prison Industries Authority Fabrics program at the Central California Women’s Facility on Thursday, April 5, 2012 in Chowchilla, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle / SFFrom the National Archives and Records Admin: “Patriotic old women make flags. Born in Hungary, Galicia, Russia, Germany, Rumania. Their flag-making instructor, Rose Radin, is standing. Underwood and Underwood., ca. 1918”Photography from Fred’s Flag Shop (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~njf49)“Women Sewing Flags” Photographer: Margaret Bourke White
Color is so elemental in flag design that colors is a synonym for flag. Recently, however, all-white flags have been in the news due to two Berlin artists, Matthias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf. In the wee hours of July 22 they evaded police surveillance to replace each 10-by-19-foot U.S. flag atop both towers of the Brooklyn Bridge with all-white versions of their own making. New Yorkers awoke to this strange spectacle, and quickly began joking about surrender.
New York Post, 23 July 2014.Brooklyn Bridge, 22 July 2014. Photo from ilovegraffiti.de.
Wermke and Leinkauf are not the only artists to produce all-white American flags. I’ve come across at least three precedents. Earliest is Jasper Johns’ monumental 1955 painting White Flag, now in the permanent collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another is the flag James Cross painted white, photographed, and submitted to a 1986 design exercise by Kit Hinrichs. Third, like Wermke and Leinkauf and at roughly the same time, Portuguese artist João Felino fabricated and displayed an all-white U.S. flag as one of many “de-colored” national flags in his “Flags of the World” project.
These artworks are all, in their own ways, meditations on the ideas of liberty and possibility. They use white not as the color of surrender, but as the absence of color—so startling in the case of the U.S. flag that it forces a double-take. They make us ask anew, “what does this mean?”
Jasper Johns’ painting is a major milestone in the history of modern art, a force to be reckoned with by any subsequent artist working on this theme. It’s large (10 by 6 feet), richly layered (made of wax, pigment, and newspaper clippings), and deeply ambiguous. As critic Andrew Graham-Dixon points out, it was originally understood as “art for art’s sake” having little to say about the flag and its meaning, instead “[forcing] the viewer to contemplate only the act of painting itself”. Johns then divulged, mysteriously, that it had come to him in a dream, rooted in a trip he took with his father to a monument to their ancestor William Jasper, who died in the American Revolution saving a flag from enemy hands. And how could it not be seen as a commentary by the young, gay, and left-wing Johns on 1950s America in which ideals of free speech and free association were buried under layers of homophobia and McCarthyism?
In White Flag, Johns laid the foundation of a life-long project in which he painted and repainted the American flag many dozens of times and ways, continually returning to it and questioning it.
James Cross: untitled, 1986. From Kit Hinrichs: Stars & Stripes, Chronicle Books, p.24.
For his 1986 book Stars and Stripes, Kit Hinrichs invited fellow graphic designers and illustrators to reinterpret Old Glory to make a related point: that the U.S. flag itself invites reinterpretation, and that those obsessed with “protecting” it from “misuse” are misguided. James Cross’s flag covered by thick white paint is, like all the other submissions, an expression of the American ideal of liberty, to make and remake our own meanings independent of formal codes and standards. The book presents all the re-workings without commentary, leaving them to the reader to interpret.
Closeup of one of Wermke & Leinkauf’s enormous white flags. From ilovegraffiti.de.
For Wermke and Leinkauf, their flag stunt is a similar expression of individual freedom and resistance. Though mysterious (and to the NYPD embarrassing and even scary) when taken out of context, the event is better understood as part of a series of “interventions” they’ve carried out. They declare:
We investigate the boundaries of public space in urban environment through different kinds of interventions and performances. We temporarily override limitations and constraints without permission or invitation. Our aim is to question common standards and to show the beauty beyond these standards.
This particular stunt was a tribute to fellow German John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge and died during its construction, and his American-born son Washington Roebling who oversaw its completion—and to the bridge itself as a wonderful accomplishment and public space. Their intervention calls attention to the two huge flags that are part of the bridge’s design, and (unlike the other three cases) to the power of flying a flag in a public place.
João Felino’s de-colored flags as exhibited in Lisbon, May-August 2014.Felino holding his de-colored US flag.
Coincidentally, while Wermke and Leinkauf were displaying all-white U.S. flags they had made in Brooklyn, artist João Felino was displaying an all-white Stars and Stripes he had made in Lisbon’s Museum of Design and Fashion (MUDE). Felino’s work is more overtly critical, pointing to the ways in which national colors divide the world’s people, fostering an “us vs. them” mentality. As the director of MUDE, Bábara Coutinho, puts it:
Without the color, the differences erode, revealing the organization and the common rules of composition that the design of all flags must respect. Thus, this installation evokes the commonalities that unite all countries, despite their cultural and historical differences. (From a Google translation of the press release for Flags of the World)
This nicely expresses the idea that there is a “language of flags” that unites all nations in common needs of self-expression, respect, and autonomy, but also in the material requirements of flag design itself. Flags are about free speech and liberty, but also standards and constraints.
The questions that Jasper Johns first raised in White Flag in 1955 continue to resonate. How can flags be at once commonplace but extraordinary, standardized but reinterpretable, divisive but universal, and admitting so many layers of interpretation and meaning? The “simple”—but provocative—act of draining color from a flag is a surprisingly rich way to explore fundamental vexillological concerns.
(For more on white flags and art, David Dunnico’s A White Flag on the Moon and other stories about Flags and art and stuff is full of fascinating examples and analysis. Available at http://artandflags.wordpress.com.)
Portland’s mayor, Charlie Hales, reports to us: “We flew the Portland flag all summer on the s/v Elizabeth, in Puget Sound and Canada’s Gulf Islands. Lots of comments and questions. This image is from our return voyage, nearing the mouth of the Strait of Juan De Fuca.”
The Portland flag flying on the Elizabeth. Photograph by Charlie Hales.
Oregon’s entry in the “Flags of Our Nation” stamp series, released August 12, 2011.
There was a ceremony in Salem today to announce a new USPS stamp featuring the Oregon state flag. (Actually, only one side of the state flag — the obverse — leaving what some would argue is the better side hidden.)
PFA member Ken Dale took this striking image from the Oregon City Bridge on September 11, 2004. It seems an appropriate image for Flag Day (June 14th).
According to former West Lynn major Alice Norris:
The photo is from our annual 9/11 ceremony, a silent remembrance of the September 11 attacks. The City of West Linn originally initiated and planned the event and Oregon City co-hosted it until last year when we held no ceremony since the bridge was under construction. The City of West Linn bought the flag and ODOT placed the hardware on the bridge that holds that flag, and ODOT workers unfurl and remove the flag each year. It hangs for about a week. … The short ceremony usually involved a bagpiper playing ‘Amazing Grace’ on the bridge as traffic was stopped at 9 am; the two communities meeting in the middle of the bridge; the unfurling of the flag; the mayors of the two cities throwing wreaths into the river, and community members, students and others tossing flowers into the river….all wordless, a silent tribute. I always found it very moving and beautiful. One year (it might have been 2004), someone stole the flag, and a students from a charter school in West Linn raised money to purchase a new flag.
