The image of the 16"x16" metal print image of Madame Roland speaks to me a year after the 2020 Presidential Election. I am remembering that on the day before election day, I wrote about my summer show with some worry about what would happen if the election went to Joe Biden. I didn't envision the January 6 Insurrection. I now appreciate how my commentary was more prescient than I could have known. This is what I wrote:
Tomorrow is the big day – will we have new leadership in America? Many in the nation are on edge, worried about a potential difficulty if there is a transition of power. I think of my recent installation Revolution/Revelation that included this digital collage. A palimpsest of 18th Century French Revolutionary painter Jacques Louis David’s famous painting Death of Marat lies beneath the “leaden bed covers” of one of Marat’s adversaries, Madame Roland, found in an Anselm Kiefer installation at MASS MOCA. Anyone connected with the aristocracy (a Girondin) was added to Marat’s hit list and sent to the guillotine for beheading. Roland and other Girondins were beheaded for proposing a constitutional monarchy that would allow for a peaceful transition of power.His assassin, Charlotte Corday, was beheaded for her treasonous act of stabbing him in his bath.
The image of the three stems protruding from the blankets of lead in this photo comes from Kiefer’s ideas about a sunflower. The dead sunflower holds many seeds, that when planted, sprout new life. Let us hope that we can come together peacefully as Americans, and sprout new life, no matter the outcome of the election.