The Boy Scouts are not a problem for J Zack Bent, who created his 4Culture exhibit – Buffalo Trace – to honor his family’s life in scouting. From the press release:
Zack Bent’s father was a Boy Scout within the Buffalo Trace Council in southern Indiana. “The tradition of scouting was handed down to me by him. And like the true Buffalo Trace, which was a migratory buffalo path through Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois that acted as road west for early Americans, scouting bears its trace in my life.”
Bent’s photos and relic-like objects document the wry and absurdly tender process of himself, his pregnant wife (the artist Gala Bent) and two young sons diving into the scouting life.
There are, however, children involved. What do they learn from scouting?
1. Homophobia. The organization is on the wrong side of history. If this were the only problem, I’d want its governing board to rot in hell, but there’s more.
2. Anti-eco greed. Just before my newspaper folded last March, PI reporter Lewis Kamb documented that Boy Scouts higher ups across the country for decades have conducted high-impact logging on tens of thousands of acres of forestland, often for the love of a different kind of green: cash. (Three-part series here.)
3. War mongering. See yesterday’s New York Times’ story, Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More. After reading it, art blogger James Wagner had the following, silver-lining thought:
Should we be grateful for one small favor? I mean, as homos we are fundamentally excluded from BSA membership, which normally means no participation in any of their fun and games or lovely overnights, so at least the Boy Scouts of America and their affiliate, the coeducational Explorers program, aren’t teaching violence, militarism, xenophobia, racism and fascism to our own young people (or at least not to those boys and girls who dare to be out while teenagers). (More here.)
Back to Bent. He won me over. I think he’s seriously wrong on this issue, but it isn’t his job to be right. The Boy Scouts are at the heart of his experience, which was in his case positive. Not only is he entitled to his memories, he’s able to turn them into doors that invite even the most alienated to walk through.
On the other hand, the uniforms chill me.
Regina,
ZACK’S (not JACK’s) work was not about aggrandizement of the BSA, not even remotely. I’m no boy scout, nor do I disagree with your criticism of the BSA, however misplaced. But i do have a problem with kind of this non-sequitor criticism. Did you see the vial of tears? Did you notice the bees? the birdhouses? the deer carcass? Did you not consider the ways in which mythologies and basic skills are passed along and that these very human traditions are perhaps disappearing as a result of a cultural dependence on other peoples labor, cheap oil, and fadish technological innovation?
It sounds like you made up your mind that the Boy Scouts were bad and therefore ZACK’S art was irrelevant. But you failed to scratch the surface.
Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll have to go check out Zack’s show to see where he’s going with this. However, as a former Eagle scout I should come to the defense of scouting – while I deplore the BSA as an institution for all the reasons you list and more (and refuse to donate money for those reasons), there’s another silver lining, and it’s this: growing up among all the red-state cliches not far from Zack’s home turf in rural Kentucky, homeschooled in a conservative evangelical family, my scoutmaster a Vietnam vet who had us stand in formation saluting the flag while Lee Greenwood blasted out of his Ford pickup’s sound system, we nevertheless ventured out into the real live woods from time to time, and those woods taught me deeper and longer-lasting lessons than any of the jingoistic propaganda the institution tried to instill. Combined with an ethic of minimalist survival skills, the exposure to nature and self-reliance gave me invaluable formative experiences in my youth that were to lead to a deep conviction of environmentalism and goodwill.
I wouldn’t shed a tear if the BSA were to collapse tomorrow, but the values I took away from the experience of scouting are lasting ones that I wish everyone had the chance to experience.
David. First, love your work. Second, imagine your childhood in the scouts had you been a gay teen. Think of how much hiding you would have had to do and ask yourself, was it worth it, out in the woods learning to tie knots and pitch tents, especially now that you know you were in the uniform of an organization that does not care about the natural world? Gay teens kill themselves, David. It’s our job as adults to jeer at all the institutions that make them feel terrible about themselves on the off chance a couple of them might read our catcalls and know better things await on the other side of the adult divide. Regina
Thanks for the kind words, Regina! Maybe you’re right, as a straight man I can never really know what it’s like to grow up gay. I can say, however, that my experience in the scouts was marked by traumatic social experiences, including bullying from the other boys — apparently for being bookish. My positive experiences had nothing to do with the social environment of scouting – quite the opposite. It’s the reason why, having had those experiences, I would not want my children to participate in scouting.
However, what I took away from the experience, and what I believe Zack is also conveying, is more ambiguous than that. It is neither full-throated endorsement nor condemnation, but in the middle ground where true art lies. The purity of pure innocence is never attainable; we are always accomplices in some crime. While Bush was president, a German friend of mine refused to travel to the U. S. The same position might be taken about Germany: how can the German people live with the holocaust on their conscience? We are unable to separate ourselves – our experiences, our past lives, even fond memories – from the trauma and horrors that are externalized from those experiences. Those experiences are a part of us, and rather than attempt to purge them, we need to integrate them into our being.
Indeed, what Zack’s show means to me is not the reality of scouting but the coming-of-age rites behind them – return to the elementary and the necessary, passing of the torch from father to son through simple acts such as building a fire or tending to a scraped knee.
That the BSA as an institution is detestable, deserving of boycotts and all the criticism you levied at it, does not mean that we should detest ourselves or the formative experiences we gained through those institutions, or indeed the experiences themselves, which I hope all young people of all genders and sexual orientations have a chance to experience – a connection to the natural world and to the frailty of one’s own body. It’s an indication of a dialog and a reconciliation that must be made – not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, not letting the conservative monsters own those rites of passage. It’s an attempt to reclaim those experiences for the innocence and universality they offer everyone.
Wow, this is getting lively! I actually said almost exactly the same thing to David one time. I had a hostile emotional reaction based on specific political controversies (which we are all on the same side of) and basically dismissed the substance of whatever Scouting-related experience he was trying to relate.
The trouble is, we could just as easily say the same thing about identifying positively with the “American experience.” America kills civilians as a matter of policy and apparently sanctions torture, for Chrissakes! Many people can (and do) say the same thing about just about every religion out there. And yet there are countless human experiences borne of all these busted cultural structures that give rise to good art all the time, and I don’t think any of them can or should be denied as valid.
My full response to this post is on Translinguistic Other, but basically, I think a strong driving force in the content of the work (based on my own associations and the artist’s writings about it) is precisely the tension and ambiguity inherent in the task of trying to teach children to find and use what’s good about the inherently flawed social structures they find themselves born into.
Thanks for your post, Regina, and for sparking this discussion. One thing is sure: today’s Boy Scouts of America are Grade A bastards. I doubt that Zack Bent would sign his kids up for the real Boy Scouts, and that’s part of why he needs to go through these rituals at home. I also hope that as times change and the Scouts refuse to change with them, they’ll be obsolete soon enough, whether or not we ignore them.
I wonder if they offer a merit badge for a time-honored institution digging its own grave.
Thanks to Emily and David for their amazing responses. (Aside to Emily: Zack’s kids are in the real Boy Scouts.) To both: I wrote that Zack’s work won me over, partly because I sense he’s struggling with these issues. Not all his photos are sweetly romantic about the enterprise. I think Boy Scouts do damage to both gay and straight kids. The former feel inferior and the latter feel superior. Art can’t reasonably be judged on the merits or failings of its social content, but this show pushes me to the edge, which Zack new ahead of time, because I told him. Regina
(Aside to Emily: Zack’s kids are in the real Boy Scouts.)
Oof! My mistake.
In an ideal world there would be an alternative organization, I guess. Or better yet, some soul-searching on the part of the Boy Scouts.
Important Aside: My children are NOT in the Boy Scouts of America (they are way too young at 2 & 4 years of age anyway) and the ‘costumes’ were made by me to represent a generic scout not a BSA scout. My kids don’t even know what a scout is.
Sorry Zack. I misremembered what you told me. Ok, they’re too little. Will you sign them up when they’re old enough?
you ask if zack will sign up his children for scouts when they’re old enough; this is totally irrelevant to an honest examination of the work. if he answered in the negative would the work be worthy of deeper consideration? and what if the answer was yes? would you be justified?
regina you indicate that you were ‘won over’ by bent in the end, but that you nonetheless think ‘he’s seriously wrong on this issue’. but you remain consistently off topic: he is not offering a position on an issue, but using the boy scouts as a vehicle for inquiry.
when artists allow their politics to guide their creative choices it normally results in ham-fisted gestures and flaccid aesthetics. when critics do this the result is much the same.
bent’s work has merits that have been entirely overlooked to accommodate the reviewer’s antipathy toward the BSA. while perhaps justified, this revulsion it is not relevant to the show. this is the real offense here.
As an Eagle Scout whose Boy Scout Camp Omache counselor was local Eagle Scout-turned-Governor-turned-Obama-cabinet-member Gary Locke, let me say that Omache’s woods once echoed with Country Joe and the Fish’s antiwar ditty “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag,” though I don’t recall Gary joining in. He had his future to consider.