Now think about all those Olympians waving small flags at the opening ceremony, or standing beneath larger versions as they accept gold, silver and bronze.
As symbols for ideas, flags bring people together and separate them. They build solidarity and set boundaries over who belongs.
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You might have heard about the installation before. Alaska Pacific University administrators asked Gonzales to remove the show ten days before its slated closing last October. According to Gonzales, outgoing APU president Doug North likened the installation to “guerrilla theater” and claimed to have wanted it out long before concerns over a children’s theater group came up.
Children attending theater classes that month walked past the ConocoPhillips Gallery in Grant Hall where Gonzales’s show would’ve been. The show included flags draped over frames the size and shape of coffins, and a comment area that encouraged passersby to publicly answer the question, “Please remind us…why are Americans still dying in the Middle East?”
People answered the question, occasionally using profanity, and APU administrators decided that the show needed to come down or get moved to the Carr Gottstein Gallery nearby. Gonzales agreed to the swap, then just took the show down early after deciding the alternative space wasn’t suitable. (Strangely enough, if Gonzales had switched venues with the art show at the Gottstein gallery, kids in Grant Hall would have walked by a small penis and vagina instead of the word “fuck.”)
“In the spirit of Monty Python, this was all very silly,” he says.
And deadly serious too, because the flag fills people with intense emotions; at APU, for example, someone removed a flag that was wrapped in plastic and included instructions on how to cover a body with it. The person not only pulled it from its case and out of its wrapper, but he or she then folded it military style and left a note that said, “This is how it should be folded.”
As far as Gonzales knows, the plastic-wrapped flag shroud is a military issue item. He got it from a colleague who got it from a student who got it from the late Ken Gray, an English-born artist and teacher born who came to Alaska in 1981 and influenced the Alaska art scene until and after his death in 1994.
That shroud, several huge wall flags and the flag-draped frames the size and shape of coffins will appear at Out North, along with the original APU comments, which pretty much filled the pages and included a wide variety of discourse, says Gonzales. “There were vacuous comments from the left and vacuous comments from the right, plus some meat in the center.”
Not to mention a few curse words and more to come at Out North since the installation will include an even larger flag along with pens and more space for comments.
“It’s just about people expressing an opinion and reading other opinions in real time, real space, not on the Web,” says Gonzales. “On the Web, you can be disguised. It’s a chicken shit way of carrying on, I think.”
Yes, someone might add something when no one’s looking, but making a statement still means holding the pen and expressing ideas in one’s own handwriting.
Gonzales also wants the installation to reclaim the flag for everyone. He believes the political right has hijacked the flag.
“They don’t hesitate to tell you that people died for your freedom, but since when does the flag belong to the dead?” he asked. “I think it belongs to people interested in the idealism behind the flag… The flag doesn’t belong to the military, to people who died, to people who say they’re sacrificing for freedom and security, but to everyone. I believe it belongs to the living.”
So why drape flags over armature shaped like coffins? Part of that impulse had to do with directly addressing censorship, Gonzales says. The coffin-shaped pieces were in direct response the Bush administration’s prohibition on photographs of coffins, he explained.
“This was happening in America in the early 21st century and nobody complained about that kind of censorship,” says Gonzales.
Gonzales is curious about how people will respond now.
“I’d sure like to see comments on how Obama increased troop numbers after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said. “The bottom line is that it still hasn’t been adequately explained to me what we’re doing over there.”
Certainly some people who see his show will try to explain; other will complain; still others will try to feel hopeful. Or maybe Gonzales be just be preaching to the choir at Out North.
But because of the scale of the flags—one reaching nearly 20 feet to the ceiling—and the coffin-like forms, Gonzales hopes the installation inspires people to think seriously about what’s going on and who’s making the decisions. “Real people are dying on both sides,” he says. “What for?”
Nine Flags, One Shroud & One Question opens with a reception on Friday at 5 p.m. and continues until March 15 at Out North.
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