Metaphors and Murder

How Do We Come to a Dead Forest?

Image: Bed of Nets Aviva Rahmani 1992

Ecocide is murder, whether you consider a forest sentient or calculate how many people die because their habitat is destroyed, it is a crime against humanity that ends in death. Halfway through the new aria to be performed by the soprano Alison Cheeseman at the Anita Rogers Gallery October 30, the wife of the fossil fuel executive accused of ecocide sings, "I was standing alone, naked in a dead forest." How did she end there? As she laments her cold marriage and the Earth her husband has scorched, her alter ego, played by the dancer Rishauna Zomberg, wrestles with a large blue-painted branch from the dead forest, the reality she had been oblivious to see.

I saw the wife's nakedness as a metaphor.  The metaphor tells a story about a psychological stripping down. All the wife's defenses against grief, facing just how destructive the man she loves has been, come down even as a part of her struggles with the barren real world his destructiveness has left her to inhabit alone. It is a turning point, a time to face reality. She is just one figure among many facing the realities of climate change. The whole world has clear choices now: face the effects of climate change created by fossil fuel use or live in a forest of death. Begin to hold people responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity or let them walk away with impunity.

Metaphor and storytelling narratives create worlds. The central metaphor in the entire Blued Trees project is blue on live and dead wood: a blue sine wave on designated sentinel trees in the forest, dead, broken blue painted branches in galleries: the threat of death and death itself made beautiful, even, as in The Blued Trees Symphony, threat and death was made into music. The world I am shaping now is the dystopic world we may leave ourselves if we cannot establish firm boundaries: naked in a dead forest. That will all take place in a gallery, the venue for an informal mock trial, in which all will be judged.

A color can be a metaphor. The blue I use evokes the calm pleasure of blue skies and waters. The blue on the trees and branches I use is Ultramarine, a non-toxic, now synthetic pigment, once ground from Lapiz Lazuli and very costly. It was reserved for special images, such as the Madonna's robes, surely something the real Madonna could never have aspired to wear. With a touch of black, it became Yves Klein’s color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue#:~:text=International%20Klein%20Blue%20(IKB)%20is%20a%20deep%20blue%20hue%20first

Lakoff and Johnson explored the political implications of using metaphor to change a world. More systematic studies have since been conducted on the effects of metaphorical framing. Metaphors can embody the gist of a culture's values even if the world depicted is delusional, whether an image of an idealized blond Madonna, dressed in expensive garments cradling a precocious Jesus or a Richard Prince revision of the photograph that became the Marlboro man.

In the case of the Madonna, the cultural enshrinement of falsity is remarkable: a middle eastern blonde dressed like a European noblewoman exemplifying a putative relationship between religion and aristocrats to justify the oppressions of European monarchies. Prince did something, similar, reifying a mythical paradox: that a healthy outdoor life was compatible with smoking cigarettes but then he did something different, by then taking the low art of advertising into a high art venue. Prince was part of the appropriation movement of the seventies, which began dabbling in culture-jamming, turning tropes on their heads to make socio-political points, as in B Barbara Kruger's appropriation of advertising design to make challenging cultural statements. These artists and the works of others, whose appropriations tested the limits and boundaries of copyright law were challenging the notion of who owns what and why. Since then, copyright law is again being tested and is now, a hot legal topic in the promotion of AI.

It was in the seventies that I first became fascinated by copyright law and took my first law class. At the time, an idealistic goal of the appropriation movement was to make all cultural artifacts free to all, as a matter of common rights. Eventually, that morphed into a series systems to gain reasonable access but still protect intellectual property.

What initially drew me into studying copyright law was outrage over how the appropriation movement was used by some to excuse cultural theft from the less powerful: younger artists and researchers, Indigenous Peoples and partners, generally, wives and girlfriends at the time.  I became committed to the idea that appropriation without attribution was both outright theft and an historical impoverishment, rubbing us of an historical understanding of how ideas develop.

Since the seventies, a number of politicians and pundits have grasped the power of metaphor and noted the creation of mythical stories to promote policy, as Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out in how Ronald Reagan launched and leveraged the trope of the independent cowboy to promote ultra conservative values .

Reagan's campaign, like church's promotion of a wealthy, blond Madonna en familia, untethered metaphor and regulatory logic and yet it successfully sold a conservative agenda. Extractive policies were primarily sold by relentlessly leveraging the emotional triggering that evoked 1950's movies about a delusional world of valiant white cowboys, conquering malignant Indians on an open range.  In truth, the real cowboys were often people of color. The Indians were brutally persecuted in ignominious ways and the range was only open because of genocide and ecocide. As the costly blue of the blond Madonna's robes, this was the selling of a lie. It was the opposite of truth. And yet, these tropes were remarkably successful in trading on lies to effect oppression.

In an actual court of law, which might lead to actual policy with some idea of justice, any plaintiff’s pleas must be backed by standing. Standing is a plaintiff's right to be heard because there is an ownership relationship, recognized in the community. Theoretically, simple publishing creates copyright. In court, one way to establish standing for any ownership is evidence of community credibility. So, for example, the standing of Blued Trees in the 2018 Mock Trial was established on the basis of expert art testimony about its art historical significance.

I have always been mindful of the stories metaphors can tell and sought verisimilitude in the corollaries. In 1992, as I was beginning Ghost Nets (1990-2000), I assembled a number of drift nets I had collected at the local town dump, and placed them on an iron bed, that had been painted gloss white. I called it the, "Bed of Nets," and said it was a metaphor for all our familiar habits and routines that like the lost drift nets in the sea, become internal ghost nets, indiscriminately trapping and killing life, drifting indestructibly through the oceans of our lives for many, many years. Ghostnets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_net were a central metaphor for the entire project and have returned to my mind, almost twenty-five years later, in Blued Trees.

My idea in the Bed of Nets, was that we get in bed with what is familiar, literally and figuratively and it may kill us. It was such a powerful idea for me, that what drove the entire Ghost Nets project for me, was to experiment with doing what was unfamiliar for me towards restoring the former dump site into flourishing wetlands. That theme, of braving what was unfamiliar and scared me culminated fifteen years later with gaining my PhD with a hard science cross over for, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism."

Eventually, I took the experiment further,  doing what scared me, I began working on an opera based on the mock trial for The Blued Trees Symphony, and most recently, performed the wife's new aria a Capela for it

That aria will be the raw material for the event Oct. 30 at the Anita Rogers Gallery. The aria is about a relationship between a fossil fuel executive, his wife and the Earth he has despoiled but the deeper content for me is the question of what we get in bed with? What are the tolerances we accept as the Earth burns and drowns? What are the limits of our liabilities? Holding powerful people accountable for murder does not come easily for most of us.

Eventually, I took my experimentation into my personal life in a difficult relationship, I learned to let the concrete facade of my defenses fall off me as intimacy grew, exposing new raw skin to air and light, living what the wife in my aria clung to and knowing how finally, reality will tear away her last defenses. My personal courage translates back to greater boldness in my wor.

In the aria under production for October 30, the wife has been in bed with a world destroyer who is her love. She has not yet connected to the disconnect between her memories of love and the dead world he left her that she sees in her dreams and carries on her back. The context of the production will be an audience who will be tasked with judging accountability for each of them: the executive and the wife. Was her disconnect deliberate? Is her disconnect the same as denial and did her denial enable her husband to live long and flourish in his crimes against humanity with impunity?  Was she blinded by an idea of her husband, a narcisistic delusion? Will she be left with anything but the dead forest? Those are some of the questions I intend to find answers to from my audience October 30, in a chain of questions that lead to a dead forest, a dead planet.