Quiet pushback from a sculpture garden in Texas
It has been hot in Austin, Texas — the hottest June, with temperatures soaring above the symbolic 38°C level on most days.
The city’s streets, usually abuzz with activity, have been quiet as Austinites retreat indoors to find air-conditioning. When the languid day turns to slightly cooler night, however, the sidewalks of Sixth Street and South Columbus Avenue come alive again; this is, after all, not just the state capital but one of the most celebrated US live music hubs.
In Austin, you can pay a $5 cover charge to see a brilliant but largely unknown acoustic duo playing for a dozen people. You can join a throbbing bar, where beer and sweat mingle, to rock with the Next Big Thing on the alternative music scene. And you can find an old-time honky-tonk spot where they clear away the tables after dinner and the line dancing starts, continuing into the small hours with fiddles and steel guitars.
People in Austin love country music and chicken-fried steak and cowboy boots as much as their fellow Texans, but it is also a place that marks itself as distinct. “Keep Austin weird” is the local credo.
In this so-called liberal bubble the signs outside suburban houses declare “Beto for Texas”: a nod to Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for governor who will take on Republican incumbent Gregg Abbott. (It is also not uncommon, in this week of all weeks, to see a T-shirt suggesting “Abort Abbott”.)
Of course, O’Rourke’s attainment of 48% of the vote when he ran for the Senate against the GOP’s Ted Cruz in 2018 suggests that Texas is not simply a red state; the portraits of governors past in the enormous rotunda of Austin ’ s Capitol building indicate a Republican stronghold, but things are more complicated than that. The “Lone Star state” used to be independent (it was only incorporated into the US in 1845), and even today many Texans resist being lumped in with the partisan politics of the rest of the country.
It is, nonetheless, caught up in the nation’s manufactured culture wars and their related talking points — so the front yards of Austin are also decked with signs affirming the occupants’ convictions that: “Black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human being is illegal, science is real” and so on.
It was climate science, in particular, that I had on my mind as I made my way through the haze of a sweltering Austin afternoon to the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, dedicated to the work of Charles Umlauf (1910-1994). Born into a family of French-German immigrants, Umlauf settled in Austin in 1941 and would become one of its most prominent artists; his bronze and stone sculptures can be found all over the city.
UMLAUF’S BIBLICAL FIGURES RECALL THE ‘TIRED, POOR AND WRETCHED’
In one sense, Umlauf was following in the footsteps of his German-American predecessor, Elisabet Ney (18331907), whose sculptures of historical luminaries Sam Houston and Stephen F Austin grace the Capitol building, and whose work was recruited into the nativist mythmaking of late 19th century Texas. Within a few generations, families such as the Umlaufs were subjected to antiGerman prejudice that led them to anglicise their children’s names (Charles was born Karl).
This was not merely a result of World War 1, but part of an all-too-familiar pattern of US xenophobia at odds with the Statue of Liberty’s invitation to give America the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Umlauf’s childhood experience later inspired a series of sculptures produced during and after World War 2: War Mother (1939) in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland, Refugees in 1945 and Mother and Child (Refugees) in 1950.
A number of Umlauf’s biblical figures, such as his renderings of a gaunt John the Baptist, recall the “tired, poor and wretched” of Emma Lazarus’ poem. He would also return, again and again, to the image of mother and child: whether the Pietà of Christian tradition or more secular but nonetheless archetypal pairings.
Yet, as right-wing ideologues across the US exploit the lionisation of motherhood in their attack on women’s rights via the US Supreme Court, Umlauf’s sculptures present girls and women in roles and postures that quietly resist the country’s slide towards patriarchal control of the female body.