Political Art: 451 Degree Fahrenheit
Last week was Banned Books Week, and in the run-up to the November 3, 2024 U.S. Election I'm reposting another of my blatantly political artworks, "451 Degree Fahrenheit". It's a 24x30 inch charcoal, acrylic, and collage mixed media painting last exhibited at the Pacific Grove Public Library in January of this year.
The deliberate spread of disinformation is not new, but with new information technology and AI, the ability to transmit it in volume, speed, and intensity is. A recent NPR RadioLab referenced the work of Synon Orale, a professor at MIT whose team did research on how information spreads on Twitter (now X). He was terrified to learn that lies and falsehood travel six times faster than truth to reach the same number of people.
Add to this that largely Republican state organizations are now actively working to suppress the facts and ideas in books that allow the citizens of our republic - and their children - to learn from the past and envision the future.
According to PEN America, since 2021 they've counted over 10,000 books banned in public schools - including for the July 2023-June 2024 school year. The states of Texas and Florida are leading the censorship charge."And everywhere, it is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history."
The books I referenced in this painting are among the most banned books of 2023, though for brevity I couldn't include every book on that list. Interesting to note that comparing this list with the most banned books of all time in the U.S., books by Toni Morrison are on both lists. I read many of these books in grade and high school during the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe you did also. Some of the schools I attended were pretty conservative, yet some of these books were required reading in those schools. Well, middle and high schoolers are being denied access to them today.
1984 - George Orwell
Maus - Art Spiegelman (a graphic novel about the Holocaust banned by the McMinn County school board in Tennessee)
Flamer - Mike Curato
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
and lastly, alluded to in my painting's title
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
In this painting, I made allusions to the German Student Union (Hitler Youth) book burnings in Nazi Germany, 1950s U.S. State Department-sanctioned book burnings during the Cold War, and a Tennessee pastor's congregation's burning of Harry Potter books. You might even find a rubber-booted governor portrayed somewhere among the jack-booted Nazis.
No books were harmed in the making of this painting, although I've discovered through experimentation that if you heat paper in a skillet to almost combustion temperature (451 degrees F.) it really stinks up the joint.
