Reason sleeps

Saw a fascinating and disturbing exhibit last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Entitled "Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection," it included sculptures and paintings depicting, from the view of Chinese artists, life in China today. It's worth a look should the exhibit arrive at a museum near you.
The message in these works was bleak, a world of forced conformity and false authority.
Hard to have a favorite among such sad images. Still, one piece struck me for its dark-humor approach to a gray life. It's The Sleep of Reason, a sculpture that likely borrows its name from El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos/The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the 18th Century etching above right, by Francisco Goya. (The inspiration's reproduced here because of copyright restrictions on the work under review.) From a distance, the 2005 work by Beijing sculpture professor Sui Jianguo (below left) resembles a colorful behemoth of a mountain, surrounded by a color-wheel of swirling landscape. Close up, one sees that the mountain is the late Communist leader Mao Zedong, who's snoozing under a warm blanket while phalanxes of brightly hued admirers stand guard. The admirers? Monsters of a sort that's filled with meaning, toy-store purchases all -- plastic dinosaurs.

On May 3

On this day in ...
... 1898 (110 years ago today), Golda Mabovitch was born in Kiev, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Ukraine. She immigrated to the United States in 1906, joining her father, a carpenter, who had made the move 3 years earlier. She lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, until 1921, when she, her husband, and her sister went to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the woman eventually known as Golda Meir (the last name means "illuminate") entered governmental service. Among the offices she held: Member of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, 1st Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Israel's 1st woman Foreign Minister (the only other woman, Tzipi Livni, now holds the post), and, from 1969 to 1974, Israel's only woman Prime Minister. Meir (above left) died from cancer in Jerusalem in 1978.
... 1808 (200 years ago today), near Príncipe Pío hill in Madrid, troops loyal to an appointee of France's Napoleon, who'd entered Spain and deposed the king the year before, summarily executed Spaniards who'd staged an uprising the day before. The painter Francisco Goya depicted the moment in the painting at right, entitled Los Fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo, or The Shootings of May 3rd. It was commissioned in 1814, to encourage Spaniards to resist "the forces of Napoleon."