Before walking into the Gallery room for the State of Emergency,<\/i> I noticed a strange work on the left side of the entrance hallway to the VAC. The black and white etching, called And the Santa Fell a Week Later, <\/i>first appears to be a sort of ship sinking in icy waters, but closer inspection reveals that it is a kind of UFO crashed in the snow. The artist, Wisconsite John Edward Paquette, entered the piece into the first Davidson National Print and Drawing Competition in 1972, although he never fully explained his work or its objectives. The title, according to the placard, refers to how NASA astronauts typically use the callsign \u201cSanta Claus\u201d to identify potential UFOs. And the Santa Fell <\/i>won a Purchase Award at Davidson and is now a permanent work in the college\u2019s catalog. Regardless of the origin or the intentions of the etching, it can doubtlessly be interpreted as a disaster.<\/p>\n

The viewer can utilize various clues to build an interpretation of Paquette\u2019s work. The scene shows a small column of cavalry investigating a crashed object in a frozen wasteland. Using the horsemen as a scale, I noticed the immensity of the ship- one that could capably store thousands of people. The very first image that popped into my mind was the Titanic <\/i>sinking in the North Atlantic. <\/i>I\u2019m not sure what led to this mental connection. Was it because AMC just had a marathon of the movie last weekend? Or does the image of any ship facing a vertical demise immediately remind me of the Titanic?<\/i> As Paquette never fully explained the argument of his work, we are only left to the details and our interpretations. As a work from 1972, the Titanic, <\/i>as well as UFOs, had both become established parts of American folklore. However, I believe that the Titanic<\/i> imagery is more important and prevalent than the use of the UFO.\u00a0 In my opinion, Paquette is making a contemporary argument about the state of America at the time of his work.<\/p>\n

Marston<\/a> noted how disasters are often utilized as tools of \u201cinflated dramatization\u201d in modern media, and I believe that Paquette uses this idea in his work. In the 1970s, the United States was struggling with unemployment, oil embargoes, and defeat in Vietnam. There was a crisis of trust and leadership, as highlighted with the chaos in the Nixon Administration. Despite its past victories and technological advances, the nation found itself vulnerable and susceptible to setbacks. Common clich\u00e9s concerning the Titanic<\/i> include how the ship was perceived to be invincible by its backers, only to find that there were internal faults that they had overlooked or underestimated. The same story, arguably, could be used for Vietnam-era America, and Paquette uses the memorable image of the Titanic\u2019s stern slowly descending into the ocean as the powerful analogy. The \u201cadvancedness\u201d of the UFO\u2019s structure symbolizes the material strength of the US military, while the ship\u2019s demise reveals its overconfidence. Paquette\u2019s symbolism reveals power of using historical disasters (especially well-documented ones) to construct contemporary arguments and metaphors.\u00a0 These kinds of disasters create emotional responses in our psychological interpretation of art, whether we notice them or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before walking into the Gallery room for the State of Emergency, I noticed a strange work on the left side of the entrance hallway to the VAC. The black and white etching, called And the Santa Fell a Week Later, first appears to be a sort of ship sinking in icy waters, but closer inspection … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Old Disasters, Modern Metaphors”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":161,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[309,398,407],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-paquette","tag-titanic","tag-ufo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}