The Recycle Bin of History

As part of its effort to design a new academic building for Rockhurst (which we lovingly refer to as "NAB"), the architecture firm of Gould Evans came up with this idea: Hand out cameras to various profs and students and have them complete "photo surveys," wherein we took pictures of such things as "The place, space or thing that best describes Rockhurst to you," "A place, space or thing at Rockhurst you would show a new faculty member," "Your favorite place to work," and "The place you most often meet your colleagues." 

Under the category "Something you notice that you think others don’t notice," I placed this photo of a statue of a male youth resting behind a couple of recycle bins. 

This scene, which appears at the foot of the stairs in the main entry of Sedgwick Hall, both cracks me up and disturbs me. The statue (there are two actually--a discus thrower, not pictured) is such a part of the environment that it gets eclipsed by trash bins. 

I recently brought this quandary up to the students of my "Journeys, Voyages, Quests" class. We'd just finished reading two classic journey epics: Homer's The Odyssey and the Chinese folk novel Monkey (aka, Journey to the West). For their final papers, students will identify a key difference between these two classic conceptions of the journey motif (the first Western and the second Eastern) and then demonstrate how a modern novel synthesizes this difference.

For example, a student might focus on the way that The Odyssey represents physical strength and prowess as a virtue and how Monkey represents these same qualities as liabilities. Or, a student might (as many have) notice how important animal sacrifice is to the Greeks and how important rituals of nonviolence are to the pilgrims of Monkey. You'd never catch Tripitaka burning marrow bones (or anything bloodier than an incense stick) when giving props to Buddha. 

While discussing these differences, we got on the subject of the Greek fascination with the human body--the ritualized celebration of the body's potential in such Greek-engineered traditions as the Olympic games, which (in 2008) had been held in Beijing, and which had been advertised (in Europe) thusly: 

The animals (and the singing bodhisattva) of this TV ad are characters straight out of Monkey. It's not often that pop culture offers me such a perfect synergy of a world lit class's themes, which is why I reproduce it here. 

Anyway, while talking about the Greek fascination with the body and all the different things that this fascination has produced, like the Olympics, and the whole idea of the perfectibility of man from Da Vinci to Da Situation ... 

... I brought up the Sedgwick statues. Students didn't notice anything odd. 

So I asked: "What does the fact that we place recycling bins in front of statues of Greek men say about our values here at Rockhurst?" 

[crickets.] 

I tried again: "Does the arrangement of the foyer of this building say anything about what we value?"

Some students said stuff about how recycling is good. Then someone said that the bins represented a nonviolent effort to integrate contemporary ideals of conservation and environmental stewardship with the somewhat dusty Western ideals of beauty and perfection. The bins weren't replacing the statues. They were simply added to the scene. Peaceful coexistence at its best. 

However, just last week, some campus group inadvertently broke the peace when it placed a non-Student-Activities-Board-approved flier somewhere suspect. 

The fight for managerial control of public space never ends.