Sarah Elliot holding the most recent issue of The Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper (2008), and right John Elliot holding the first issue of the original Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper (1890)

On Monday November 17th I drove a sculpture called Karl Marx Tree Marker, down to the offices of the The Kaweah Commonwealth a weekly newspaper of Three Rivers and all of Kaweah Country, California. I invited the French artist Aurelien Froment to come with me, both to help me photograph the sculpture in the offices of the Kaweah Commonwealth, and also to see the huge sequoia trees—giants symbolizing the hopes and failures of American westward idealism—in the Sequoia National Park nearby.

Karl Marx Tree Marker, was one of several objects I produced in collaboration with the artist Matthew David Rana, for a project titled How to Talk About Utopia Without Saying Utopia . This project took the form of an exhibition examining hope, failure and creativity within the history of three California social Utopian communes from the 19th Century, Alturia, Icaria-Speranza and Kaweah. Karl Marx Tree Marker was created to contest the pivotal renaming of one of the largest sequoia trees in the world, now known as the General Sherman. This tree was originally named “Karl Marx” by the anarcho-socialist Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth (1885-1892) — who for almost 8 years ran a communal socialist colony in the area surrounding Three Rivers, subsisting though a major logging operation. In 1892 the National Park Service—under the United States government and in cahoots with the Southern Pacific Railroad, wary of the colonies increasing power—expropriated the Kaweah colonies’ land by turning the area into the United States’ second national park. The renaming of the Sequoia to commemorate the general William Tecumseh Sherman—a figure largely associated with scorched earth campaigns during the civil war, through widespread destruction of civilian supplies and infrastructure; and American westward expansion, through his ‘protection’ of the United States railroads at all costs by way of unceasing attacks on indigenous peoples and the systematic devastation of large herds of Buffalo—was a clear slight to the former Kaweah colony. For a more complete history than this simple description, see Jay O’Connell, Co-Operative Dreams: A History of the Kaweah Colony; or Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies.

The Karl Marx Tree Marker was modeled on the design of the NPS’s ‘General Sherman Tree’ plaque but with the name Karl Marx carved into it replacing the former general and left unpainted to indicate an incomplete history, yet to be resolved. Rather than letting the artwork sit idle in storage or be isolated in a collectors house, I decided to gift this artwork to the offices of The Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper—a local paper named after the newspaper of The Kaweah colony—to keep the artwork alive by placing where it would spark further conversations on the history of the Kaweah colony, resistance, collectivity and Utopia.

The facade of the Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper's offices.

Sarah and John Elliot, an editor/writer and a historian respectively, bought The Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper in 1995 changing its name from the Sequoia Sentinel to honor of the first newspaper published in area by the Kaweah Colony. For the masthead of the paper they used the same masthead as the colonies paper, with only slight revisions, but the tag line remains the same,”The Kaweah Commonwealth, A Journal For Those Who Labor and Who Think.” After our four and a half hour drive down to Three Rivers, we were met by Sarah and John, at the newspaper’s office. They had just arrived back from Mexico the day before. John greeted us wearing a shirt he had picked up there, a yellow and black tie-dyed t-shirt printed with newspaper articles featuring the Zapatistas, which is a pretty clear indicator of their political affiliations.

Front cover of the November 7-20, 2008, Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper.

My gift sparked many conversions, from the radicalism of the colonies vision, to revolutionary history, to Utopian visions, to art and politics, and especially the subject of their recent issue, with the headline “CHANGE! Barack Obama elected 44th president in milestone election!” What Utopian hopes does this presidency hold? They also showed us a postcard that the local high school had just sent them, where all the students were posing around the General Sherman plaque in the Sequoia National Park. I thought to myself, ‘how would their perceptions change if these high-school students posed around this marker instead’. For the next two hours Aurelien and I staged different shots of the marker in the KC offices surrounded by various political, protest, or counter-culture ephemera from John and Sarah’s collection, as well as copies of the original Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth newspapers and other tracts. Sarah and John said that they would run a feature on the sculpture in the next issue of the paper being printed on Friday. Here is a link to the online version.

By the time we were done the sun was beginning to set. We had less then an hour of sunlight left to make it up the windy road into the Sequoia National Park to see the giant forest. So we quickly said our goodbyes and forty-five minutes later, as dusk was setting in, we finally arrived at the Karl Marx (General Sherman) tree. There was still enough light to appreciate the magnitude of the 36 foot wide (and a still growing), by 275 foot tall tree. And the dusk lent a peculiar intoxicating ambiance to the experience. Aurelien and I were the only people there, except for a couple, whom we heard but never saw. The woods felt larger, more alive, and I much less significant than the last time I visited, surrounded by so many tourists. It was eerily quiet walking on the path towards the tree and we almost didn’t see a large buck until it bounded away from us through the fallen leaves. The experience left us feeling somewhat delirious and we spent half an hour taking some ridiculous pictures, posing in front of the tree.

The Karl Marx Tree with its erroneous designation "General Sherman", in the background you can see me standing on the tree.

As we drove away from the forest in total darkness, occasionally dive bombed by bats catching bugs attracted to the cars headlights, Aurelien and I talked enthusiastically about our day. Aurelien said when he first saw the sculpture he did not really understand it, even after I had explained it to him. But he said, as soon as we placed the work on the floor of The Kaweah Commonwealth’s offices and began talking with Sarah and John, it’s meaning became completely clear. For Aurelien this gesture was almost the reverse of arts move from the realm of utility in the everyday towards the symbolic and functionless realm of the museum. For Aurelien I was taking a symbolic object and giving it new function by placing the artwork back in it’s conceptual site of origin.

Aurelien and I jumping in the air in front the the Karl Marx Tree at dusk using the flash.

*All Images by Aurelien Froment (2008)