Goatlord
This totem pole is a celebration of the cultural beliefs of a necessary social ecology. This is not an object of reverence, as no collection of resources should be, but a didactic tool and a collection to be broken down and reused, ad infinitum. Look at the streets around you, they are littered with the remainders of lives amidst objects. As we shed our skin we shed our objects, it has become human nature, the automatic response of the consumer. Every week, every day, a pile, representing a cell in the life prison of an individual, is let loose to the scavengers, or more probably, the elements and the dumps. Certainly we fight against this consumer decadence, why would you have something that was wrong in the first place, why not just wait until you find the right thing to fill that spot in your heart. Certainly we believe that the folks should not waste resources, waste their time. Certainly we believe in the stewardship of American Indian ecology, certainly we should “use everything.” But the schism has to start somewhere. As there are people at the bottom of the social bell curve using everything, wearing their shoes into oblivion, there must be those who construct the visual identity of culture meeting them from the other end. We can resist the temptation that places beauty in the palm of opulence, a bourgeois construct that keeps everyone idly struggling, and place beauty back into the economy of ecology, the indulgence in the creative spirit of paucity, and the charge to “use everything.”
