Zack Bent defends his show

In response to this post, Zack Bent emailed me the following, used with permission:

I appreciate your candor and your perspective in the post you put up. To round out the discussion, my purpose was not to glorify (Boy Scouts of America) but to investigate scouting as a type of American survivalism that is wrought with complexity- and is far from innocent.

I was hoping to use the notion of a ‘trace’ as something that remains in a person, something that is experienced. To me a trace in itself doesn’t denote either positive or negative traits, it just IS. This is where my investigation began. I wasn’t trying to romanticize the scouts, though I do believe there is a romanticism inherent in scouting that is tied to an old American idealism.

I do find it curious that you didn’t address the work/images in my show that dealt with tension, ambiguity, and failure: the deer carcass, the jar of tears, the hatchet with a cast, the tree full of bird houses – why only show the images that seem romantic?
Here is bit from my show statement: “Though earnest in these attempts, the BSA have failed in both areas (conservation & social responsibility)…. my aim has been to reference scouting traditions (honor, merit, first aid etc) while allowing my family to become a tribe of scouts that aims to understand its own limitations in relating to each other, to the natural world, and to the divine.”

Good points. Bent and I discussed this show as he was working on it. He emailed me to say he’d taken my thoughts about the BS into account. The first time I saw the exhibit, I didn’t focus on those ambiguities. Second and third time, after he drew them to my attention, they became apparent, as well as the insufficiencies of my original review.

It’s not my job to review anybody’s politics, but it would be disingenuous to pretend politics don’t matter to me, that I can separate out the aesthetics and focus on them exclusively.

Raised Catholic and unable to separate myself completely from a church whose social agenda I find reprehensible, I should have been more sympathetic.

Here’s what Paul Schmelzer had to say on his excellent blog, Eyeteeth: A Journal of incisive ideas:

Having just seen Zack Bent’s scouting-inspired mixed-media exhibition in Seattle, I’m floored that Regina Hackett can’t move past her fixation with the evils of the Boy Scouts to actually examine Bent’s art; while her critiques of the Boy Scouts are fair (if over-emphasized), she ignores some of the most poetic pieces (I’ll be interviewing Bent next week). A counterpoint: “How different is teaching children to learn the positive lessons embedded in the loaded framework of scouting from teaching them to function in American society (which is, well, fundamentally war-mongering, greedy, and all the rest)?”