Not Another Art Paper

Don't let the title fool you. It is, in fact, totally another art paper.

 Last week, I went to Gadsden to find a work of art. I scoured the Cultural Arts Center and the Gadsden Museum of Art for that single perfect work that would truly speak to me. I saw numerous paintings and photographs of portraits and landscapes, sculptures, abstracts, and drawings, but there was always something missing. I had all but given up when I saw one that evoked stronger emotion than any I had ever seen. It was called Mama Bird.

It held more color than any painting I had ever seen, had more moving parts and texture than even the most dynamic sculpture in town. It was a curious thing, in the diverse reactions it generated. Personally, I felt horror and disgust at the sight of it, while others didn't seem to react at all. I daresay that nobody around me was even aware of this masterpiece's existence. There was a certain mock naturalism to the lighting, as though machines were trying to simulate sunlight. The pieces moved without thought or motivation, yet it was remarkably structured and industrialized. If you looked closely, you could see that it was a pointillist monster built of hundreds of tiny people trapped within the skin. The pinpricks of color were masterful, to the point that you had to really draw yourself back to see what the work truly was.

Machines worked across its skin, operated by slaves, the faces of which were dramatic caricatures of misery and shame. These men and women were made to look the same, to blend in with the machine. It almost seemed to be making a statement about the shame of individuality and humanity as a whole. The grand focus was on the Machine, the mechanism for which they all lived. The dredges pushed and pulled, dragging vain people down the belts to the juicers. These braggarts and swaggerers were no different than the workers, were made from the same materials, yet were glorified as they were robbed. The workers fed them into the Machine where they were squeezed of their very lifeblood. The liquid gold was toted to the top of the work and it finally became clear that you were looking at a pyramid of meat. At the very top, perfect and beautiful, wearing only the finest clothes, were vampires.

They drank of their willing victims, eschewing all dignity and drinking like dogs from their buckets. They gorged themselves until they made themselves sick, and would purge their stomachs into the mouths of the overseers beneath them. The overseers, in turn, would sick into the mouths of the underseers beneath them, who would feed the seers beneath them in such a horrific manner. By the time the blood reached the slaves, the feeding had been reduced to a few oily drops.

I looked at this artwork, this “unstill life” and wondered why nobody else could see it. They stared with glazed eyes and empty hearts, stepping through the artwork and feeding the Machine. I wanted to tell them that this was insanity, that nobody should ever help make such a monstrous and foul work...but I felt the tidal pull, that drive that dragged me inexorably down those belts to the slaves and their juicers. For all of my pomposity and assumed wisdom, I had inadvertently contributed to Mama Bird by going to Wal-Mart with the rest of them.

Some would say that what I saw had nothing to do with art. They call me pretentious and vulgar and a fool, telling me that I have no concept of real art. Art is painted, art is sculpted, art is performed, art is written. But these aren't art, merely the methods of artists. Much like biology, geology, and physics, art is one of the highest sciences. Art is, at its very core, the science of metaphor. Going all the way back to the most primitive cave paintings, it has served as the most beautiful lie of human existence: The statement that this is that.

It's easy to look at the Mona Lisa and the Sistene Chapel and declare it art. You have to, because you're told to. To compare an abstract to the works of Leonardo and declare them equals borders on heresy, but an honest man can't help but do so. The observer may be able to more easily identify what the “great works” are, but that doesn't mean a thing. Anybody can paint a dog and make it a dog. A computer can print a dog of such detail that no human artist can match it, but a printer was never declared an artist. Art is the ascription of meaning. Any copy machine can draw a dog, but it takes an artist to say the dog represents faithfulness.

Oftentimes, it's not even the creator that intends the meaning. Sometimes a dog is just a dog and a knife is just a knife. Abstracts are truly beautiful in this way. A brushstroke here, a brushstroke there, and you have a pretty picture. It's colors on a canvas, nothing more. You show it to your friend and he sees an expression of anger. You show it to another, and they see the texture of flowers. From cave art of mammoths to the realistic and grotesque skulls painted by Bob Eggleton, we lose sight of the big picture: Both are nothing but paint. Whether the viewer (or even the artist) can readily identify with the work, it doesn't matter. Art is what is made of it. What moves one man to tears or laughter or shrieks of terror is another man's everyday life.

All men are artists, whether they admit it or not. From dullards to pragmatists to pretentious toffs, we all see the world as metaphor. Nobody looks at a painting and dismisses it as nothing but paint. It's obviously people in a boat. The pixels of television and computer screens are pointillism at its most basic level. To make sense of any of this requires imagination. The goal of the artist is to only take this further. To see Wal-Mart as a menagerie of horrors only requires a slight change of perspective.

Then again, maybe it doesn't.

Simulated Poverty

Source

This past Friday, I went to the Gadsden Museum of Art to see the works of graffiti artist, Scape Martinez. Beyond using the prolificacy of street art to determine when I was in a bad part of town, I've had very little exposure to this artform. I feel as though my inner art critic failed me. I was unimpressed by the works that I saw. Allow me to elaborate. I couldn't hope to paint such intricate works, certainly not with spray paint. The best I've managed was when I, in a fit of idiot teenage rebellion, tagged my bedroom wall with a massive pentagram. My parents were of the strict, religious breed, so this made sense in my enraged state of mind. Afterwards, when the bloodhaze of anger had lifted, I hid my “masterpiece” behind a rug I nailed to the wall until I moved out. That being said, none of the artwork spoke to me. It was very elaborate and colorful, but even if I could spare the funding, I would not have paid the four thousand dollars that was being asked.

I was struck with the strangeness of what I was seeing. What was now hanging in a museum had been called criminal activity for countless generations before this one. Perhaps it strikes a chord with our love of rebellion, but could it be considered counter-cultural if it wasn't done in protest? It seems almost a parody of freedom and poverty. This seems to be a prevailing theme in our culture of excess. Rap music is the urban equivalent of bluegrass, where a poverty stricken sub-culture finds solidarity through art. It’s what makes the works of Ralph Stanley and Tupac Shakur, two musicians one would rarely compare, beautiful in their imperfections. This, though, this was only aesthetically appealing and nothing more.

It may be my rural upbringing that robs the works of emotional value. I have nothing to associate them with. I know that greater artists than me have documented graffiti and have garnered an appreciation for it. The famed author-turned-painter, Clive Barker, did such in his wonderful novella, The Forbidden. This was later Americanized and re-titled Candyman. Mr. Barker used this story to describe the ugly beauty of the street art he had seen. Indeed, the most notable scene of the film, when the boogeyman’s lair was discovered by entering the mouth of an elaborate painting of a screaming face, was taken second for second from the story.

As I write this, I think of other street art I've seen. Horrible obscenities standing side-by-side with such beauty as to move the viewer, these are a reflection of urban humanity. For every “thug-nificent” gangsta wanna-be, there are dozens of people struggling just to keep their children fed. Though often viewed as the just being kept under siege by the unjust that roam the streets, the lines between these two classes are often blurred. Many gangs are clans of rogues, led by their pauper princes. Though violent and brutal to outsiders, they are nothing more than the bottom rung of society struggling to survive. Love and hate permeate their struggles for what destitute scraps of power they can steal.

I guess that’s why this art has such an appeal. Life is empty without struggle, for to struggle is to truly live. By looking at these sanitized paintings, we can approach this vagabond life without concern for dirtying our hands with the soot and grime of poverty. Living in our shells, we can only observe images of actual struggle, so that we can tell ourselves that we understand it. We float in our clouds of safety and claim to sympathize with our fellow man, but at the end of the day we go to our air-conditioned homes, feed our children, watch television, and slip into our clean beds. Are we really alive when we only live vicariously?

I stepped away from this simulated poverty and saw the photography exhibit. There were dozens upon dozens of photographs showing dogs and cats and birds, spruced up with the occasional lizard; essentially the closest that the domesticated modern man comes to seeing actual animals. There were a few exceptions, such as the face of an elephant, but these were depressingly few. Animals, scenery, portraiture, we surround ourselves with such lovely things. It seemed almost to compliment the insult to poverty: Look at the lives of poor people, now go back to your real life of pretty things.

But there was one that gave me pause and I hate myself for not remembering the name of the artist. It was a black and white photograph of a middle aged woman, with all of her hanging skin and scars. Time had turned her belly button into an inverted V of wrinkled skin. Her face wasn't pictured, but the folds of her neck were clearly visible, as were the spotty patches of skin that are caused by years of exposure to sunlight. She was topless, but there was no nudity. She was using her arms to cover her one remaining breast. She was a breast cancer survivor, somebody who had endured true pain and suffering. Her scarred and aged body was ugly, but so remarkably beautiful I wanted to cry. There she was, naked and vulnerable, but strong and defiant to the hateful stars above.

Her nude form spoke more of pain and struggle than any sanitized street art ever could.