FUTURES, Artist: Stephanie Syjuco, Arts and Industry Building, Smithsonian Institute. December 2021
St Louis, bad karma, and "future past"
The FUTURES exhibit at the newly re-opened Smithsonian Arts & Industries building displays the "future" as something past, present, and even future. Although always quaint to look at how people imagined the future long ago, the above exhibit, a collection of photos where the artist covered people's faces with her hand, chilled me to the bone.
St Louis was included on my 60th birthday, pandemic lull, Diamond Jubilee trip across the Midwest. The city astounded me. St Louis is built on the scale of a capital city for another country. The buildings that line its central mall are from an age of wealth and splendor that are only surpassed by New York, Chicago, or Washington, DC. That "city of the future", St Louis hosted the 1904 World's Fair (Exposition). A city in ascendance, the expo proved that St Louis had come of age as a world class location.
St Louis no longer astounds - it quietly decays. The downtown is now an empty reflection of glory days. If any of its great public buildings were in Europe, tourists would flock to see them. Now, they are well-kept tombs of a gilded age. It is profoundly sad. However, was it a case of "bad karma" come to wreak revenge? Not that I believe it, but the FUTURES exhibit as well as other dubious St Louis history certainly would put the city in some negative karmic crosshairs.
The single worst decision made by the US Supreme Court, Dredd Scott vs Sanford, was originally tried in the domed courthouse on St Louis' central mall. At the 1904 Expo, a man named, Ota Benga "purchased" and "rescued" (??) from slave traders in Africa, was put on exhibit there as a "real African tribesman". And, as the photos describe above, an entire fake Filipino village was constructed for 1,000 people to occupy over the course of the expo for visitors to experience a "living exhibit" of that distant nation. If the preceding events don't attract some bad karma, I don't know what else would.
The US won a war with Spain in 1898 and received territory in victory: Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The Filipinos hoped for immediate independence from Spain (like Cuba - sort of), but just changed to another colonial overseer. The Spanish had been in the Philippines since the 16th century. On visits to the Philippines, I saw churches as old as some of the cathedrals of Europe. Filipinos of that time were as deeply Roman Catholic as Italians. Ota Benga, the poor African guy on display, was just one man plucked from the forest. Although horrible, it represented a general ignorance of Africans by the world as a whole. Filipinos, on the other hand, lived in a country where there were plantations, cities and churches that were known to the outside world. They were NOT from an "undeveloped" and "primitive" part of the world. What was being accomplished by their "living village exhibit" other than late Victorian Age voyeurism of the exotic or dangerous, contained at a safe distance "for viewing pleasure"? That is some dark shit.
The world has changed. The same kind of thing is now accomplished at modern Expos (minus locals on display) or Epcot Center in Disneyworld. We tell ourselves "never again", yet this kind of ignorance creeps back repeatedly, just under another mask. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.