Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle has a good history of a statue that should be sitting in some municipal storage basement, rather than perched in front of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. “Early Days,” as it is called, is part of a grand “Pioneer Monument” celebrating various new world explorers, Gold Rush dudes, and even several Greco-Roman goddesses. Yesterday I visited the damned thing, and took some photos for your viewing pleasure.
What you’ve got in this photo is a Spanish vaquero preening over a submissive Indian waiting to be uplifted by a Junipero Serra type friar, he in turn pointing his finger at, well, God, I presume. As Knight’s article notes, people have been objecting to this icky object for decades. San Francisco dedicated the structure in 1894. Facing Market Street, it more or less minded its own business for the next 90 years. But by the 1980s the monument was delivering its supposedly inspirational message to a matrix of porn shops, fast food restaurants, and a parking lot. In addition, the city wanted to build a new main library, at which point the question of what-to-do-with-this-mess presented itself with new urgency.
Generally speaking, it takes some set of external circumstances to get people to notice that they’ve got a creepy, weird, racist thing sitting right in the middle of their downtown library / government complex. You’d think they would see otherwise, especially in a city that had gone through the Alcatraz Island occupation. But never underestimate what can get sloughed off to the background autoflow, so to speak. In 1996 then famous Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called “Early Days” a disgrace. “I say take a sledgehammer to it,” Caen wrote. But for reasons that remain unexplained, the Arts Commission came up with a compromise: they installed a brass plaque just below it that basically said ‘We know this sucks. We want you to know that we know it sucks. But we are keeping it around because that’s ok as long as we all agree that it sucks.’
Here’s the plaque:
In case you can’t read this bird poop speckled tablet, it states that “Early Days” represents “a conventional attitude of the 19th Century,” then goes on to note that during these supposedly halcyon years the tribal population in California dropped by almost 280,000 souls. The problem is that the plaque is placed just below the statue, which sits around six feet above the ground on top of a poorly kept garden of hardy plants. In other words, to read it you have to hoist yourself, like I did, over a low wall and navigate some rather sharp fern bushes (plus the poop), which of course nobody except fanatics like myself will do.
So, why is this monstrosity still up? About ten years ago the San Francisco Human Rights Commission called it one of a number of “images of conquest” still adorning the city. Yet here we still are. In the end it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to notice and deal with these things, which stay invisible to most of us until circumstances (see Charlottesville and the Confederate statue removals in Baltimore) dictate otherwise.
I chart a generic timeline for these sort of public art controversies as follows:
- Dedication phase: the artwork is launched to great public acclaim.
- Normalcy phase: most denizens of the geopolitical area in question still remember the dedication and still approve of the installation.
- Second generation phase: the initiators of the artwork are dying out or have left the area, weakening historical memory of the artifact’s origins.
- Fade out phase: the artwork begins to become invisible in plain sight.
- Nothingburger phase: most residents neither remember or particularly care about the object, which increasingly becomes a receptacle for bird poop.
- Re-entry phase: some locals begin to question whether the object really reflects contemporary values.
- Negotiation phase: participants in the discussion engage in a long series of arguments and compromises over the artifact.
- Last chance for selfies phase: off it goes to the warehouse.
Where is “Early Days” on this timeline? Will San Francisco now finally put this beast into mothballs? If so, better over a century later than never, I suppose.
