IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Idealism. Free-spirit. A new approach to a problem. Illuminating unseen potential and/or perspectives. A call to use one’s latent skills and gifts.
REVERSED: Self-limiting beliefs, and split energy. Newly-formed ideas. Controversies and scrutiny.
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IN DEPTH:
The Page of Wands depicts a collage containing: a series of mannequin hands, a microphone, and a photograph. The photo shows a young 1970s starlet clasping her hands nervously as she speaks the surrounding reporters. The mic is on and the cameras snap. She speaks loudly and in earnest. She looks out into the crowd of Vietnamese faces and in their eyes she sees her own—and the eyes of everyone she loves back home. Breathless for a moment, she sits back a little onto a large foreign object, and leans a little deeper into a situation that is beyond her control. There are historical moments in which we are called to use everything we have at our disposal in the pursuit of what is just. Her attention and outrage towards injustice are like a spell, attracting more of both– from allies and enemies alike. Do not underestimate this as a political form—attraction and repulsion—this is what that the Page of Wands has to offer. She has the courage to take the stage and act,so that others must re-act. A great actor—in film, in photo, in history, and in the heat of the moment.
When the Hollywood actress Jane Fonda made her 1972 trip to Vietnam, her anti-war efforts stirred great controversy after being photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, during a visit to Hanoi. After gaining the moniker ‘Hanoi Jane’, she became a popular target of media scrutiny and was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood for some years. Despite having rehabilitated her Hollywood career, the name ‘Hanoi Jane’ still inspires disgust among conservative talking heads. The Page of Wands is a reminder of heightened consequences and catalyzing power of being an object of public love and hate.
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“There is another problem too. And one one that we can’t avoid. We are two men that made ‘Tout va Bien’ and you are a woman. In Vietnam the question is not put that way, but here it is. And as a woman you will be undoubtably hurt a little or a lot by the fact that we are going to criticize a little or a lot, your way of acting in this photograph. Hurt, because once again as usual men are finding ways to attack woman. if for no other reason we hope that you will be able to come and answer our letter, by talking with us, as we go reading it in two or three places in the US.”
-Jean Luc Godard, ‘Letter to Jane’
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