Tuesday April 19, 2011

Public Culture 8 with Katie Hargrave

What do US Flag Code, Flag Day, lapel pins, and Betsy Ross have to do with nation building? Katie will lead a conversation on the history of the American flag, its current use, and the desecration of the flag related to flag code. From the history of choosing the stars and bars to the history of sewing, how much content can be crammed into this flag?

About Katie Hargrave:

Katie Hargrave is an artist interested in the history and production of place, memory, and naming throughout the United States. She is based in Iowa City, Iowa.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote: "what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as tradition."

Americans and non-Americans alike have created an imagined community that is located quite physically in the places that make up the United States of America, but it is also located in the stories we tell and the stories told about us. These stories are simultaneously truth and fiction, created and perpetuated in literature, history, and embedded in the landscape, invisibly and visibly. These truths and mythologies are particularities, and they can be seen and understood distinctly differently by any one individual or group. They are specific reflections of desires, fears, notions of race, class, religion, and so on. I am interested in how relationships between conflicting reflections might alter the ways stories are told.

For me, making work about American perceptions is a labor of grieving, understanding, failure, and hopefulness. I want to understand the history of this place and this nation, and in doing so, to understand the perspectives of groups I agree and disagree with. As Keith Basso, cultural anthropologist studying the conceptions of place to the Western Apache noted, "relationships to place are lived most often in the company of other people." It is equally important to phenomenologically experience the place together as it is to attempt to use the place as a medium for communication. Insiders and outsiders must come to an agreement on how to make a place outwardly digestible and yet internally meaningful. I hope to bring up more questions than answers, address the tenuous relationships we all have to histories, each other, and to this land.