Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Chloe Alberta on why she recommended “Founding Documents Restaged” by Craig McDaniel for our Fall 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue here.
I admit, I have the attention span of a goldfish, or an excitable child—in a pile of nonfiction, “Founding Documents Restaged” caught my eye. But beyond the piece’s visual appeal, I was excited by the ways it plays with form and genre, the ways it opens up the boundaries of art and the essay. It’s a collage, a puzzle, a code to crack. It’s a visual-textual exercise in meaning-making. This is the kind of work that opens minds, that forces you to slow down and think about what isn’t being said. It asks questions and doesn’t offer easy answers. What does it mean to turn concrete political ideas into shades of purple and blue? What is Tiger Woods doing inside the Pledge of Allegiance?
By rewriting the United States’ foundational texts with his own visual alphabet, McDaniel questions the implications of the word “foundation.” Is a foundation ever as sound as we trust it to be? Or is it shakeable, translatable, subject to infinite alphabets and the reframing—or restaging—of each witness who comes across it? Democracy in the United States has progressed, regressed, and twisted into something new. “Founding Documents Restaged” offers a perspective on how the words that once held up this democracy now mean something new, or maybe mean nothing at all.
Note: While, strictly speaking, the founding documents consist of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), my project has a wider scope: I include other key texts (e.g., the Gettysburg Address) that continue to exert a powerful influence on our national identity and help shape our understanding of, and the debates surrounding, the central tenets of our democratic form of government. I have transmuted passages of these seminal texts through the lens of a changed, charged process of encoding in experimental alphabets, substituting color blocks or images of my choice for many of the individual letters. The restagings I offer are mine. Not necessarily at all like yours. To paraphrase Whitman, these texts are large, they contain multitudes.
- THE GETTYSBURG ADDRE
Note: the alphabet runs along the bottom of the artwork.
2. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
Alphabet:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.
3. from the
GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (version 2)
. . . that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
4. from MARTIN LUTHER KING
“I HAVE A DREAM” SPEECH
Let us not seek to sat isfy our th irst for fr eedom by dr inking from the cup of bitterness and hatred
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal . . .
5. from DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
[in the following artwork the text is transformed by an experimental alphabet (identified at the bottom) featuring letters signified by pictures of “Americans” from an array of cultural domains—including Elvis, Jeff Sessions, and Alfred E. Neuman, Babe Ruth, the Tin Man, plus American inventions (phonograph, motion picture camera), American wildlife (hummingbird), and others.]
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
