Art, Magic, and Professional Wrestling
By Margaret Hawkins
July 27, 2024
(left) Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With” (detail) 1964, oil on canvas, 36 x 58.
Courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Philadelphia.
(right) Digital college, Kamala Harris and shadow of figure from “The Problem We Live With.”
Every July I teach a week-long workshop at Ragdale, an artist residency program north of Chicago. The room I’m usually assigned has a screened sleeping porch that overlooks the prairie. When I’m not teaching, I walk the grounds and the adjacent open lands or hole up and work. Often, I just look out my windows at the gardens. The first morning this year I woke up to the sight of a frolicking doe and her two spotted fawns dashing about like puppies.
I arrived at this idyllic place late on a Sunday afternoon. Beautiful light lay upon the meadow and, except for a preponderance of rabbits, the place was deserted. Perfect, I thought. But when I tried to enter the house, I found a keypad that required a code. In the past it had always been open. In the year since I’d last been there, they’d installed security.
Ragdale House, Ragdale Residency, Lake Forest, Illinois.
Last year I’d arrived at the same deserted scene and spent an hour roaming in and out of buildings, as if in some fairy tale world that existed in a pocket of self-replenishing bounty and trust. Everything was there for the taking, yet nothing was ever taken that wasn’t already given. An apple, a banana. It had seemed incredible that a place so charmed, dedicated wholly to art, could exist only 30 miles from the third largest city in the country.
Of course, it can’t, not anymore. When I asked what had prompted the change, I was told that “residents expressed concern.” I love the politeness of that construction. I can imagine how resident artists more sensible than I freaked out when they arrived and learned they would be sleeping in a house with no locks. These days American homes, not to mention schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, indeed whole neighborhoods, are in lockdown. Even guns need locks. Especially guns.
Prairie remnant near Chicago. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
One day before I arrived at Ragdale, a 20-year-old climbed, unimpeded, onto a rooftop with an automatic rifle and nearly succeeded in assassinating Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who opposes gun control. As a result, Trump has become even more of a hero to his party. Until President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, becoming an actual hero, Trump looked like a shoo-in to win this election. He may still win. His fans love him. Some have taken to sporting lookalike gauze bandages in tribute to his close call.
Trump’s apparent impermeability even to whizzing bullets thrills his fans, inspiring a belief that he’s God’s choice, predestined to return to the White House. Weirdly, the availability of the weapon that nearly killed him, an availability Trump supports, has worked in the candidate’s favor. It is as if he actively engaged a villain and won a duel rather than simply standing on a stage and getting shot at by a deeply troubled, now dead boy whose careless parent allowed him access to a killing machine.
A combination image shows Donald Trump with a bandaged ear (center) after he was injured in an assassination attempt, and Republican National Convention supporters and attendees wearing bandages over their ears in tribute to Trump. Courtesy of Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz, Andrew Kelly, Marco Bello, Brian Snyder, and Mike Segar.
Also in Trump’s favor is his sense of theater, his extraordinary media savvy. Photos of the event, images that Trump spontaneously masterminded just seconds after the shooting, reinforce the belief that Trump has a special destiny. On instinct, he stopped the secret service in their effort to hustle him away from the scene so that he could pump his fist at the crowd — and the cameras — and show off his bloodied face. It was a brilliant reaction. What else could photojournalists do but take the bait and document the moment with all its historic and histrionic elements? Blood, a flag, a tousled warrior! Thus a fake but indelible moment of heroism was created. Almost instantly the images were compared by his campaign and media allies to photos of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.”
In the evenings at Ragdale, after dark, I would retreat to my room and climb into bed with my laptop to watch the Republican convention. The event was curated as a bizarrely brilliant testosterone fest. On Wednesday night Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt, then, after a musical interlude by Kid Rock, ceded the stage to Franklin Graham, who prayed to a male God. Trump made his nightly entrance down a long tunnel, boxer-style, swaggering to the strains of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World.” Although the song’s lyrics say “it’s a man’s world but it ain’t nothin’ without a woman or a girl,” women and girls’ importance in this scenario was secondary.
Aaron Stansberry, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World,” acrylic and wax on canvas, 48 x 60”.
Courtesy of Song Word Art House and the artist.
Reproductive rights are off the table. That night’s speaker, Trump’s pick for VP, JD Vance, has opined that the Democratic Party is “run by childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” The most lauded woman at the convention that night was Vance’s departed grandmother, who seemed to have been afflicted by testosterone-adjacency. Vance thrilled the crowd with a tender reminiscence of his Mamaw’s collection of nineteen loaded handguns, which he says she kept at the ready around her house “to protect her family.” The crowd went wild, responding with a spontaneous chant of “MAMaw! MAMaw!”
It’s not a coincidence that an aura of professional wrestling hung thick in the air. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t vastly entertaining. Trump really knows how to put on a show. Watching it all unfold, I kept wondering: How does he do it? How does he make people see what isn’t there, turn lies into beautiful illusions? Trump’s ring name should be The Magician.
Stan Herd, as yet untitled portrait of Kamala Harris and her running mate (unfinished), 2024, native prairie, compost and sand, near Lawrence, Kansas. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Dalton Paley.
I like Kamala Harris a lot. She’s practical, principled, and very smart, though in this election those aren’t her most important traits. Nor is the fact that she’s Black or even that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s sane and seems to be law-abiding. A low bar, but there we are. And have I mentioned her prosecutorial skill?
As scary as the upcoming election is, I came away from this year’s experience at Ragdale strangely hopeful. While locks clicked and guns were loaded, and while the RNC faithful in their white ear bandages listened raptly to the trickster magician, artists still made art and roamed the native prairie. Meanwhile, President Biden wrote a letter and delivered an Oval Office chat that has activated a glorious last-chance surprise comeback of the Democratic Party. What could be more American than that. It almost makes me feel patriotic.
