Who benefits today from folding the evidence of Russian intervention in American democracy into a narrative about the continuation of an endless Cold War? And where does Trump desire for a military parade fit within this narrative? Our suspicion is that both the parade as timely display of US military might and the claims of an ongoing Cold War are part of a Trumpist Stuffed Owl. What, you may ask, is a stuffed owl?
We introduced this term in a post last year about the Roman poet Catullus and the artist Haim Steinbach (Feb. 23). Back then we wrote:
In his discussion of this poem [Catullus 12, addressed to the brother of Asinus Pollio who likes to steal napkins (lintea) at dinner parties], Charles Martin compares the lintea that are either exchanged, gifted or thieved, to poetry books, thus making Catullus’ poetic threat to Pollio tit for tat. Martin compares these poetic lintea to ‘the Roman version of The Stuffed Owl‘, a reference to the 1930s volume The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. (The title comes a poem of the same name by William Wordsworth, with its line: The presence of a stuffed Owl for her/Can cheat the time). The specific way a stuffed owl seems to ‘cheat time’ is in how the timely moment of stuffing create the impression of timelessness (the owl looks alive after its death). In this way, the stuffed owl represents a timely timelessness.
The stuffed owl seems to be in play when confronted by any of Steinbach’s work (e.g. his 1986 sculpture Basics pictured above). We can see how he wants us to play a serious game of ‘spot the difference’ between multiples, and their timely timelessness. Like the stuffed owl, the objects (e.g. the toy bears) evoke their former life as they circulated in real world capitalist economy (as commodities), but they also engage with each other placed outside such circulation as a work of art. Trump’s Cold War parade would, therefore, be a way to ‘spot the difference’ between the exceptional situation of Russian intervention in his election and the timely distraction from this moment by framing it as part of a timeless Cold War between the two countries. In this spirit, we want to go back to basics and in selecting some topics from our two week period last year (Feb. 20-March 5), so you can practice and hone your ability to play this ‘serious game’ of ‘spot the difference’ on the following stuffed owls.
Names (Feb. 22) vs. Paintings (Feb. 20)
Objects (Feb. 26) vs. Memories (March 5)
Mistakes (Feb. 21) vs, Problems (Feb. 28)
Plans (Feb. 27) vs. Nets (March 4)
Books (Feb. 25) vs. Chairs (Feb. 24)
Owls (Feb. 23) and Humans (March 1)
Roots (March 3) and Rumors (March 2)