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Gun Country: A Powerful Pro-Gun Statement
A clip showing Michael Murphy’s display “Gun Country.”
Apparently it was commissioned by the DNC as an anti-gun message.
I do not think it conveys the message they think it does. To me it says “God bless America.” God bless the Second Amendment.
Published in Guns
I agree that it looks more pro-gun than anti. So haha.
Man, that’s art.
I’m verklempt…
It just makes me want some of the guns. Though the safe’s getting pretty full.
It’s really ambiguous in the statement its creator is making.
And while it’s clever, I don’t know if clever makes it good art.
The artist intends it as an anti-gun message. I (and others) view it as a pro-gun message. The artist is wrong.
I agree with this and with @drewinwisconsin. He failed in his mission if the message wasn’t received. With some art, the creator intends for us to derive our own meaning, and multiple meanings are possible. But this guy clearly had an intent, indeed an assignment, to elicit one certain response, so he failed.
Well . . .
I tend to believe that an artist who cannot properly communicate his message — whose message is so badly communicated that its receivers take the exact opposite meaning — might not be a very good artist. Might be considered a bad artist.
(And then I recall how the post-modernists have done such a thorough job of brainwashing several generations that even well-communicated messages get misinterpreted. See for example Flannery O’Connor’s frustration with academics who so badly misinterpreted her novel The Violent Bear it Away* that she wrote “if the modern reader is so far de–Christianized that he doesn’t recognize the Devil when he sees him, I fear for the reception of the book.”)
*She noted in a letter that the voice in Tarwater’s head — which is supposed to be the devil — was interpreted by some college class she spoke to as being “the voice of reason.”
Actually the artist did a very good job. The only issue is that the message means different things to different people. The anti gun people see it as an indictment of gun culture and America. The pro gun people view it as a celebration of America’s gun culture and freedom.
Personally I wish I could have one.
I would have thought that Kentucky was a “shall issue” state.
It is confusing since we all have one and most of us have many and mostly they are inherited. But I have plenty of guns. The artwork is sort of neat.
It really does look cool.
Having just watched The Shining again, my antennae are up for layered meanings. At the literal level it’s just a bunch of rifles hung in two degrees of freedom, arranged in recognizable patterns from two perspectives. There’s no “art” there; most of us could figure out the string lengths with Excel.
At the first interpretational level it states that the U.S. is composed of rifles, and that the U.S. is a handgun. Oooh, metaphor.
But despite the sponsor’s order for an anti-gun statement, the piece itself is neutral. The DNC obviously thinks it carries their message. “See? It’s all guns! You’re so awful!” We gun nuts, on the other hand, take it positively. Yes, my country of modern rifles tis of thee. Did I tell y’all about my new .300 AR build?
So – I hope the piece executes the maker’s intent. It sets the context and then we get to observe the two perspectives arise. That wouldn’t be art of Kubrick’s complexity, but it’d be in the same vein.
Yeah, what they said.
Two perspectives! Perspectives! Okay, maybe it’s better than I thought at first.