Red mountain majesties

This is Red Fuji (Southern Wind, Clear Sky) by Hokusai.

It is the second print--and the second-most-famous print--in his renowned series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji; in both cases, The Great Wave off Kanagawa comes first.

I bought a poster of this image last year and hung it in my living room at college. "I come from the mountains," I explained to my housemates, "and I miss them when I'm on the East Coast."

Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that I "come from the mountains," since Portland is not particularly high in elevation, but still, on a sunny day you can at least see a couple of genuine glacier-capped peaks, which is more than can be said for New York State.

People like me love making fun of Easterners who think that the Catskills (tallest peak: just over 4000 feet) are "real" mountains. But when I went to France, and gave my host family a calendar featuring Oregon photographs, and worked out the height of Mount Hood in meters just so I could tell them accurately (11250 feet/3429 meters), they gave me a look as though I wasn't describing a "real" mountain at all. "Oh! It's like the Pyrenees!" they said, smug in the knowledge that Mont Blanc, the highest of the Alps, lies within their borders.

No one would ever say that Mount Fuji isn't a "real" mountain though, and it's not that much taller than Mount Hood (12388 feet/3776 m). You could think of Hood as Fuji's kid sister--the smaller, rougher version. Fuji is the most-climbed mountain in the world and Hood is the second-most-climbed; Fuji has an exceptionally symmetrical cone while Hood has a few lumps on it; both are located pretty close to big urban areas, closer than is usual for such tall mountains, though of course the population of the Portland area can't compete with that of Tokyo!

My friend Lexi, who I lived with last year, didn't like my putting up the Red Fuji poster. She said it frightened her. (She's not from the mountains--grew up in New Jersey and Texas.) Somehow, that made me stubborn--since I had to defend my poster, I ended up liking it more. I bought a diary with this same image on the cover and have been using it for the last few months:


and today, while once again browsing at the used bookstore, I found this--36 Views of Mount Fuji by Cathy Davidson, a memoir of time she spent living in Japan:


The reason I bought this wasn't just because of the Hokusai print. (You know what they say about books, and covers...) No, I picked it up because I am planning a vacation to Japan in a couple of months--to visit Lexi, who is teaching English there.

And yes, she's gotten used to the mountains by now.

Rauschenberg and the '60s

I am not extremely familiar with the artwork of Robert Rauschenberg, who died this week at the age of 82, but I do remember writing a short response to his silkscreen-collage, "Signs" (above) my senior year of high school.

Every year, my school would display a selection of prints borrowed from a wealthy art collector, and my senior year, my art history teacher had us choose a print from that year's art show and write about it. Out of all the interesting artwork on display, "Signs" fascinated me the most. I was amazed how it contains every image that we nowadays associate with The Sixties--the Kennedys, MLK, the space program, Vietnam, awesome music--yet Rauschenberg didn't have the benefit of much hindsight when he made the print, since it appeared in 1970.

Rauschenberg's prescience, his ability to distill a decade down to its essential people and its essential feelings--rage, grief, death coming before its time, the astronauts on the moon looking back at the Earth, that little conflict-ridden bauble hanging in the sky--convinced me that this was the work of a great artist. I first saw "Signs" in 2003 or 2004--now it's 2008 and I still don't know how I would visually sum up this decade in a way that would still resonate forty years from now.

Robert Rauschenberg grew up in the same Texas town as Janis Joplin, explaining her presence in this print. Evidently he created "Signs" as a magazine cover, though it was never used for that purpose. "It was conceived to remind us of the love, terror and violence of the last ten years. The danger lies in forgetting," he once said.

With memorials like these, I don't think there's any danger of forgetting the '60s.

I'm less certain about our own decade--which feels turbulent, too, but lacks the utopianism of the '60s, and so complex that it is impossible to distill things down to a few images. How would you describe the "look" of this decade, its symbols, its preoccupations? We can't even give it a name! And if naming something gives you power over it...well, then, we don't even have the power to take charge of our own era.

I said this to a friend the other day, who immediately retorted "The Aughts!" (He is an anglophile.)

"Half the people in this country don't know what that means," I said cynically. "And then what do we call the next decade? The Teens?--but then what about 2010, 2011? The Tens? No, I don't think things will get better till 2020. And then we'll still get depressed, because we'll realize it's been one hundred years since the 1920s, and we'll feel old."

On a more upbeat note, if you've got time and want to commemorate Rauschenberg, why not read Chuck Mee's exuberant homage, bobrauschenbergamerica? (Like all Mee's plays, it's available for free online). I had a good time at a student production of it last year. Rare to see a play that celebrates suburban Americana rather than denigrating or satirizing it!

Image from billsheppard.com