History As Art, Art As History by Desai Dipti;Hamlin Jessica;Mattson Rachel; & Jessica Hamlin & Rachel Mattson

Author:Desai, Dipti;Hamlin, Jessica;Mattson, Rachel; & Jessica Hamlin & Rachel Mattson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2009-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Employing a brightly colored palette to his satirical acrylic paintings, Ben Sakoguchi comments on a range of injustices that frame American society including social and political issues and historic events. Drawing on images, texts, and objects from popular culture, Sakoguchi’s images provoke the viewer to question conventional beliefs about modern warfare, citizenship, consumerism, and the media. More broadly, Sakoguchi’s source material (LIFE magazine, movie stills, postcards, and newspapers) suggests that what we learn about events in the United States and around the world is inexorably linked to how we learn about it.

Sakoguchi’s series Postcards from Camp (1999–2000) is a visual record of daily life in the internment camps that housed Japanese-Americans during World War II. Based on his own experience as a Japanese-American and his early childhood memory in the Poston internment camp in Arizona, each of the eighty picture postcards explores the tensions and contradictions between personal and public memory of this time, as well as the contradictions between propaganda and reality.

Sakoguchi began to work on this series in 1994 when he realized that his father was dying, and continued to work on it after his father’s death in 1996. In discussing the project with his mother, he was taken aback when she declared that she had hated every moment of living in the camps, a time that he remembered her as accepting stoically, if not without issue. This disjunction between his memory of this time and her eventual revelations spurred Sakoguchi’s interest in re-presenting the historical events of Japanese incarceration from a new vantage point. In this series Sakoguchi draws on primary source materials such as family photographs, documentary images of other internees, texts from media sources, and quotations from collections of Japanese-American internees and government agencies during that time period. The series is grouped into several sections: the prewar Japanese-American community, the evacuation, camp, the achievements of Nisei soldiers during WWII, postwar resettlement, and Asian-American victims of hate crimes in contemporary America.

In the work “Rohwer, Arkansas” (Plate 5), Sakoguchi portrays young Japanese-American boys playing marbles on a sunny day outside their barracks at the Rohwer Camp. It is a picture perfect moment that is often found on postcards in tourist stores. A postal stamp on the postcard indicates the time, place, and date this card was sent to us, the viewers, but also indicates that we are looking at a scene from that time. Below the image of the children is a quote from John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War in 1942, that states: “If it is a question of the safety of the country (and) the constitution … why the constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.” We are left to wonder where the connections are between this placid image and the distrustful, nervous quote below it. The statement by McCloy suggests that the country is not safe, and that in times of insecurity, drastic measures are required. McCloy refers to the Constitution as a scrap of paper – fragile, malleable, indefensible. His quote hints at the justifications for how the U.

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