Flags And Their Many Meanings

Flags and Their Many Meanings

Art Appreciation

Final Critical Essay

By: Rachelle Goude

April 23, 2005

Critical Essay on God Bless America, Faith Ringgold, What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?, Dread Scott Tyler and The World Flag Ant Farm, Yukinori Yanagi.

Flags and their Many Meanings

I will be describing and evaluating the works and artists described above. To begin I will describe each work and its symbolism. I will then summarize the artists and the times of their artworks. Afterwards, I will explain how the works fit into the time period and then compare and contrast all three artworks.

To begin, I chose the above artworks because of their symbols, the flag. Each artwork depicts a flag in different forms and for different reasons. The first, God Bless America was painted by Faith Ringgold. The painting's star is depicted as a sheriff's badge and its stripes are in the form of prison bars symbolizing that the United States has turned into a prison. (Sayre, p.20) The white woman in the painting is pledging her allegiance to the flag but in the same breath she is being depicted as a racist denying blacks their civil rights. It is also depicting the struggles that her community and she were facing while trying to gain equal rights from the majority of white Americans. In this oil painting she uses only three colors, black, white and red which are indicative to her other paintings in the series. She uses rectangles and squares to depict the flag, even the woman in the painting has an elongated rectangular appearance to her. The second, What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag? is an exhibit by Dread Scott Tyler, a minority student at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit is a 34 by 57 inch American flag on the floor underneath pictures of flag-draped coffins and South Koreans burning flags and holding signs that said "Yankee, go home son of a bitch". There is also a ledger where viewers can write their answers to the question "What is the proper way to display a U.S. flag?" Two problems with the setup of this exhibit where the flag draped on the floor and the placement of the ledger book. Viewers had to decide whether to honor the flag and try to sign the ledger without stepping on the flag, or honor their freedom of speech and just step on the flag. The third, The World Flag Ant Farm, created by Yukinori Yanagi. This is the most interesting of the three works. It is 170 8 by 12 inch boxes filled with colored sand for each nation's flag. The boxes are connected to each other by plastic tubing. Yanagi then placed ants into the exhibit and they immediately began carrying the colored sand between the boxes. This created a mixing of the colors which symbolized "the cross-cultural network of multinational symbols and identities."(Sayre, p.22) On page 22 of A World of Art Yanagi states that the only thing the traveling of the ants shows us is that they travel to resume a task they have been preprogrammed to do, not to acquire freedom.

In 1969, the Supreme Court of the United States upholded the Civil Rights Act, giving the African Americans back their rights as American citizens. The United States bombed Vietnam. Three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. All of these "goings-on" contributed to the work of Faith Ringgold. Ringgold's art, at the time, focused on the Civil Rights movement, racism and a divided country because of segregation. She depicted all of this in her God Bless America. I'm not sure I could have survived those times. I am appalled by racism and prejudice. I believe everyone should be treated equally regardless of their skin color or religion or sexual orientation. We were all given the right to freedomÐ'...

In 1989, the United States Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is a protected right of free speech. The Berlin Wall crumbles thus creating one Germany. United States troops invade Panama. Dread Scott Tyler's work was a tapestry of controversy. War vets would protest and people were arrested for walking on the flag. The very reason he made the exhibit was to show people that they weren't being treated fairly in their freedom of speech. Some people would step on the flag to sign the ledger feeling that they were actually honoring the flag while others wept and protested. One war vet even picked up the flag, folded it up and put it on the shelf with the ledger. I would have unfolded that flag and put it right back down on the floor. He is expressing his freedom of speech!

In 1990, Iraqi troops invade Kuwait, thus creating the start of the Persian Gulf War. Mexicans were dying in the summer heat trying to cross the border into the United States. Yukinori Yanagi was using boxes and sand to show the globalization of the many cultures of Japan. Yanagi's work depicted the many cultures that influenced his country's change in society. With the "invasion" of the influences of China, Korea and the United States, Japan's society was no longer an isolated culture. As the book states, Yanagi's Ant Farm works kind of like a microchip or processor from earlier days of computer processing. (Sayre, p.22) This work shows the process of information exchange that has become possible over the internet and the World Wide Web causing more cultural diversity throughout the world. I think more people in this world need to accept the cultural diversity that surrounds us. It is a matter of art in itself! Our world is made up of so many different people of so many different colorsÐ'...just like the rainbow!

These three artworks are similar in meaning, yet so very different. God Bless America and Ant Farm are similar for an obvious reasonÐ'...they both are about flags. However, they both have totally different meanings. Ringgold's work is about civil rights and racism while Yanagi's work is