Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which was marked by a series of events, including a Recommitment March, lead by the Rev. Al Sharpton, ending at the Lorraine Motel, where King was gunned down, now the National Civil Rights Museum.
A vigil, to commemorate King and his legacy was held from the former motel balcony, where speakers, including his son Martin Luther King III, daughter Bernice King, and Jesse Jackson, spoke about King, his work, and his ongoing legacy.
Last night, over a dinner with several CODA students, Charles, John Weeden, and Hamlett Dobbins, Hamlett told us about a documentary that I definitely must see, about entertainer/actor/performance artist Andy Kaufman’s wrestling career. While I was aware of his foray into professional wrestling (I’m even old enough to remember it before seeing Man on the Moon), I did not realize that Memphis played such an important role.
Kaufman came to Memphis, and went out of his way to belittle the citizens of Bluff City, as well as the entire South. It was all part of his act as the ‘bad guy’ to the local ‘good guy’, former art student, turned professional wrestler, who also happened to secretly ‘get’ Kaufman’s act: Jerry Lawler.
This gives you a taste of Kaufman’s critique.
Hopefully I haven’t made any similar faux pas (intentional or not).
If I have, Mr. Lawler and the good citizens of Memphis, please don’t hurt me.
Hello, fellow researchers/readers. Til now I’ve been lurking, but as the third curator of the Heartland project along with Charles and Kerstin I’m overdue to join the fray. We’ve been having great conversations in person and in email as the project has evolved over the past months. We’ll be shifting more of that process of discovery into the blog and using this forum more fully as a place to sort through all that we’ve been learning.
But first, introductions/positions. I’m a curator and adminstrator at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art (coorganizer of Heartland along with the VanAbbemuseum). I’m collaborating with Charles and Kerstin to shape the project so my first role is “co-curator”, a comfortable enough designation. But I’m also in the less familiar role of “local informant/interlocutor.” I’m seeing the region—my region—through Charles’ and Kerstin’s eyes. I haven’t always agreed with their reads of things, which has led to some usefully intense conversations about our responses to places, people, social constructs, cultural possibilities, everyday realities, and, of course, art. Through our exchanges I’ve learned a lot about their external perceptions as well as about my own insider’s-blinders and the partial, idiosyncratic, and incomplete nature of my local knowledge. All of us are developing an increasingly nuanced understanding of the complexity, diversity, and sheer scale of the area that we’re staking out as “the heartland.”
Last summer, while we were in Memphis, I had this idea of trying to talk Charles and Kerstin into a short trip down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to go find the crossroad where Delta Blue’s legend Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil.
To be honest, considering that I’ve never been a rabid fan of the Blues, or even the Rolling Stones for that matter, I’m not really sure why I wanted to go. I suppose I can blame Ralph Macchio.
