Three Aliens and the Interpretation of a Painting from the French Revolution of 1830

Editor’s Note

The installation contains Eugene Delacroix’s artistic painting captured during 1830 French Revolution. Delacroix was known as someone who devoted his life to art. The painting on the installation was one of his best artistic images, capturing socioeconomic and political movements in France.

Now, that we are in this community. We should be able to find it habitable just like ours. I am also having the same feeling because I can see that they are human like ours. Let us move to the main arena of the community and see how we can make new friends and probably getting jobs before consummating our marriage. Wait! See that billboard and the image on it. The installation must be historical to the people of this community. Yes. It’s because I can see that people in the image are of the past, you can detect that from their dressing and the kind of activity that took place then. What I am seeing here is a protest, signifying revolutionary movement against their leaders for ensuring economic and social justice. Security officers killed people unjustly. Political leaders must be cruel and not yielding to people doing things according to their whims and caprices.

For the fact that the event happened in the past does not mean that people are not dealt with the same way today. Their leaders must be autocratic and not democratic like ours. Why can’t their leaders embrace our democratic principles that ensure economic and political freedom for all? The presence of a woman and her nudity, including a boy at the vanguard of the protest indicates how women and youth were not protected and respected in this community. Ours is a community where women and youths are given opportunity to thrive in their own ways not allowing them to be used as subjects of political movements.

Well, I want you to understand that political leaders might not be as wrong as you described them. What I see here is a government that wants to protect the interest of the majority not the minority that wants to hold the community to ransom because of personal interest. Apart from this, maybe when women and youth lead social movement protests against political leaders, it is more effective here. I don’t really agree with you.

Okay, does that mean a woman should go naked before stressing her presence during protest? Don’t you see that this is abnormal! Don’t you see that female sanctity is not protected here! You can see how that man was looking at her nakedness. To catch fun or what? The nakedness might not be intentional. And, don’t forget that the woman held the community’s flag firmly, indicating her commitment to people’s liberty. Having women and youth as part of protests is universal and not restricted to this community alone. This is inherent in our culture as well. As I said, maybe their political leaders usually respond positively when women are involved in protests.

The views expressed about the installation indeed indicates that we are really living in “complex differentiated multicultural societies, composed of various subcultures,” which requires making different meanings out of similar images, texts and objects. The aliens see the community differently. In our analyst’s view, this is in line with their essentialism and structuralism perspectives for understanding subjects in the installation. Alien-essentialist’s attitude towards the community is that his community has the right approaches to dealing with social movement protests than the community. This resonates with the “limits of thinkable,” which indicates that “one way of representing and making sense of reality can be the true one,” a situation described further as “totalitarian discursive closures” “which prevent us from the possibility of seeing alternative ways of defining the problem.” Simply, his community represents reality while the new found community is wrong in understanding how to handle social movement protests. Alien-structuralist opposes this position on the basis that one cannot judge every culture using his or her “ideal” definition of “culture” that the cultural norms are universal.

These approaches lead to different frames for presenting social and political structures as well as subjects in the installation. Alien-essentialist stresses the difficulty in people having socioeconomic and political freedom, while Alien-structuralist emphasizes the place of understanding factors that contribute to having the freedom or not using norms and values of the community. To her, woman and youth’s participation in social movement protests is not wrong because it signifies people’s readiness to collectively demand for their rights and being freed from complex socio-political structures. Mythologically/allegorically, alien-essentialist sees a woman and boy’s participation as subjugation of womanhood and childhood in the community. Whereas, alien-structuralist does not consider the participation as bad because womanhood and childhood are “everywhere” in political violence and social movement response to it.

Our analyst notes that we need to have a better understanding of a community’s norms, values and ideas believed to be common sense and think differently before judging, instead of locating the found cultural materials/capital within our own grid. Despite the alien-essentialist’s description of how people are denied socio-economic rights, his use of myths (for depicting the woman and boy) represents lowering estimates of the protest’s contribution to the community’s history.

While the aliens have seen the culture of their new found community these ways, a third alien, with post-structuralism view would reiterate that all the cultural materials do indeed make sense differently considering the impossibility of saying that one is right and others are wrong. Alien-poststructuralist would see that multiple factors must have contributed to woman’s and boy’s participation in the protest. For instance, it could be that the consequences of the social injustice are more enormous on them than the men and the old. Alien-poststructuralist would also not accept that the best way to deal with social revolts is to maim and kill protesters on the belief of protecting majority’s rights. In terms of referencing the actors and subjects, poststructuralist would have created his frames consciously because of the need to locate, perceive, identify, and label object (freedom) of the discourse within the cultural capital of the community.

For example, political leaders would not be seen as barbaric because the community has its specific governance principles. The woman would not be seen as a sexual bait for the man that looked at her because her clothes did not drop intentionally. Alien-poststructuralist would see it as an action that occurred in the midst of the woman’s commitment to her ideals and the need to safeguard the future. In other words, different chain of meanings would be attached to the different signifiers in the installation by the Alien-poststructuralist.