ART CAN CHANGE THINGS

A scene from Academy Award winning South Korean movie "Parasite"

“Parasite” won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, 2019.  It also won Best Director for South Korean film maker Bong Joon-Ho, and Best Screenplay, and Best Foreign Film.  

The movie is astonishing! First, the color saturation! Color is so intense that immediately you “get” that this is a fable. The setting is modern urban South Korea. When have you ever seen that on the big screen? For today’s wealthy Westerners, the movie focuses its lens on the squalid living circumstances of a poor city family (but the younger adults are all computer savvy — one of the many dichotomies of this place and era). But wait! Don’t feel sorry for this clan. They “work the system” — parasites. And they latch onto a rich family who live in bucolic modernity behind high walls just a few blocks away, insulated from the squalor— parasites in their own way.

Today, a news story reports that the South Korean government has passed a resolution to grant 3.2 million won (about $3000 in U.S.) to every urban household living in subterranean and semi-basement apartments. The grant is to improve heating systems, ventilation and replace floors, windows, and fire alarms.

The movie is directly responsible for that standard of living upgrade. The power of art. Is it the best way to form public policy? No, probably not, but wide spread public scrutiny cuts through a lot of red tape.

Art can zoom in on hard topics and sometimes, radically change public attitudes. Here’s a partial list of examples.

WEST SIDE STORY opened on Broadway in 1957, and was the first major musical to deal with the serious issues of gang violence, immigration, discrimination and police inadequacy to address changing mores. (It also happened to have a brilliant score and lyric…Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim!)

Part of the Keith Harding mural for "The Normal Heart"

THE NORMAL HEART, Larry Kramer’s play, opened in 1985. The set included posters and art by then-unknown pop artist Keith Harding. The topic was HIV-AIDS. This was at the beginning of the epidemic — the Reagan Administration was not responding to this health emergency.  The play and Harding’s popular posters and murals broke through the barriers between high and low art and poked a hole in the silence of these deaths.

Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” was recorded in 1939. The lyrics are about black lynching in America. The song became a global hit and helped launch the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"

Pablo Picasso’s dramatic black and white mural “Guernica” was painted in 1937 to memorialize the 1930’s Spanish War. The painting illustrates the brutality and absurdity of war. It traveled throughout the world as part of the World’s Fair, crossing culture and linguistic barriers to carry the message globally.

Each of these examples relied heavily on a world stage from which to cast its message.  We sang a song in Sunday School when I was a child “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Hide it under a bushel, NO…” 

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(A small commercial break: anyone interested in purchasing my book ART TALK…AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS can dial me up on Amazon Books. Price: $8.95. The book is an edited version of ten years go blogs — 2008 thru 2018. Thanks.) 

VALENTINE'S DAY AND NEW LOVE

"Ursula" by Bill Hastings

Meet Ursula. She’s about three feet tall and nearly as wide. She has very little face, poor thing, but hips to die for. 

All those petals forming her exterior were once shiny. She’s aged a bit in nearly twenty years. But age has been kind to Ursula. The obnoxious glint of youth mellowed into a lovely multi-hued coat of lavenders, blues and grays with just a smidge of glint. 

It’s very tasteful. 

Ursula doesn’t run. Those little legs are sturdy enough to hold her upright but couldn’t possibly stretch out into anything like a trot never mind a full-out run. She has small toy wheels standing in (excuse the pun) for feet. Poor Ursula. What happened to her feet? For that matter, what happened to her face? Is Ursula a laboratory clone that went bad? Ursula is much more seductive from the backside than from the front. I wonder if it’s the same for me? I can’t actually see my backside but I’m pretty sure it isn’t nearly as curvy as Ursula’s.

Let’s take a minute and give thanks for wheels.  Ursula’s wheels are charming and sweet and transform an almost-animal into a toy. All she needs is a cool necklace with a long string attached. With that, some kid could drag poor Ursula around the block. I never actually understood the pleasure of dragging around a toy.  My own children totally ignored pull toys. I give them a lot of credit for showing good sense at an early age.

But wait a minute! Wheels play a big part in war too! Tanks! The Trojan Horse! Caissons go rolling along.  And Ursula has that full metal jacket. Ursula is not as innocent as she first seemed. Ursula could be an agent of war! 

I have the Trojan Sheep coming to live in my living room!

Ursula sprang from the imagination and hands of Bill Hastings who teaches art at Ithaca College.  I saw Ursula in an exhibit in the early 2000s. Mr. Hastings was new in town. I became somewhat obsessed with Ursula and corresponded with Mr. Hastings once or twice over the years. (Ursula lived in his barn.) Finally, a month or two ago, I decided that Ursula needed to come live with me.

In about two weeks, I’m giving a talk in Pittsford about collecting art. I don’t really have much to say on the subject. Except this: look at a lot of art. Go back sometimes, and look at the same thing more than once. Think carefully. Things in our surroundings own a piece of us. What are you willing to make space for? 

Sometimes, you maybe can make those decisions instantly but at others, time is your friend. Contact artists. They want to know you still remember something they made and put out there even if the “something” is gone.

On this Valentine’s Day, it maybe isn’t too late to express a long, lost love. You might get your Ursula.

MEMOIR; THE EARLY YEARS

February 7, 2020 - my back yard

It never snowed in Oklahoma when I was a kid. But once — I must have been four or five years old — we had a massive ice storm. A willow tree stood a few feet from our house, odd now that I think of a willow tree growing in that dry, played out soil — the same tree that donated supple branches that Mom used now and then to whip across the backs of our legs in punishment. “A switching.” That’s what she called it but like any whip, the result was the same: stinging, stinging, burning, thin raised red welts on the backs of tanned bare legs. As my memory spools back on those days, I reach my calves to rub away the pain, seventy years later. 

That morning, incased in inches of ice, the willow morphed into one of those clear glass trees — the kind we watched a man with a blow torch make at the State Fair — “lamp work,” the technique I’ve since learned to name. Not only the tree but the entire universe outside our door looked clean and shiny and impossibly alien.  

Pauline, a friend of my older sister, came skidding down the middle of our street on ice skates. It never occurred to any of us to wonder how Pauline, a teen ager growing up in the Dust Bowl, happened to own ice skates, just waiting in back of her closet for just such event as this natural ice arena. That she could actually use them is as great a mystery. Watching her, I couldn’t wait to put on boots and try that slide-walk. 

Boots. We called galoshes. Mine were red. Rubber high top overshoes that were the devil to get on and off even with the Wonder Bread plastic bags we put over our inside shoes first. Galoshes were designed for rain. Or maybe dirt. With no bottom tread, they were not so good for ice but that’s what we had. Not skates. Not those special lace up pure white Cinderella slippers with impossibly thin blades on the bottom that let you whoosh across the road’s glassy surface. 

Maybe it didn’t really matter; the ice melted with an afternoon sun. But for that morning, it mattered to my sister. She watched Pauline, floating down the street, like I watched older kids who had bikes, innately knowing that with wheels and gears came the twins: freedom and independence.  

February 7, 2020