Nebraskaland

December 2022 Nebraskaland

NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.

Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/1485990

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58 Nebraskaland • December 2022 THE LAST STOP Late one afternoon, the bison skull propped on a chair in our dining room caught my eye. I liked how the sunlight coming through the window cast the skull in warm colors and created sharp shadows. I grabbed my camera and snapped a few photos. The skull is one of three bison skulls on display in our house. It belonged to a bull bison purchased nearly 20 years ago from a southeastern Nebraska rancher for butcher. I cleaned the skull and placed it on the chair. Later, Grace, my wife, inserted a "cheap plastic vine" into the killing bullet hole and draped it over the skull. Later, while viewing the skull photographs, I was reminded of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of cow skulls I had seen in art books. O'Keefe was an American modernist artist who lived from 1887 to 1986. I pondered why she, like myself, was so infatuated with skulls. I did a little reading. O'Keefe's interest in skulls began during a summer visit to New Mexico in 1930, the year after a severe drought littered the desert floor with bones. Fascinated by the "stark elegance of the bones," she collected cow and horse skulls and shipped them back to New York to paint. One authority said her paintings "attempt to capture the inner essence and therefore true 'reality' of the thing … [and represent] the death and destruction of the American landscape, or they can be viewed as celebratory works that pay tribute to the animals that first inhabited the Western landscape." Whoa! That is such deep symbolism — not what I saw when I photographed my bison skull. To be honest, I rarely notice or understand symbolism in art, movies or literature. For example, Grace recently told me the vine twining from the skull's bullet hole symbolized "life growing from death." I totally missed that — I thought she used the vine just to hide the hole. One possible explanation for my "symbolic incompetence" is that I was born without or with a very small "symbolic lobe," that little-known part of the brain that recognizes and understands symbolism and inspires artists such as O'Keefe. Or perhaps, unknown to my conscious mind, deep in my subconscious I do understand symbolism and my photographs are loaded with it. Therefore, in reality, my bison skull photograph represents the death and destruction of the great American prairie and pays homage to its iconic creature, the bison. Hogwash. Who am I trying to fool? I took the photo because, to my simple mind, it looked cool. By Gerry Steinauer SYMBOLIC DEFICIENCY

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