Art Heals: Anthromorphism

Days became weeks became months, and now here we are, still best friends with our couches.  Never before have we lived in such intimate relation to our furniture.  Pre-quarantine, if you can remember that far back, the objects in our homes were taken for granted, there when we needed them, otherwise pretty much ignored. One of the few pieces of great literature I have memorized is the following poem:

As I was sitting in my chair,

I knew the bottom wasn’t there,

Nor legs nor back,

But I just sat,

Ignoring little things like that.

Unless the appliance broke down, the upholstery ripped, or the vase shattered, my surroundings existed merely as background to the actions of my life.  Until now. The new reality of quarantine has awakened a cognitive dissonance in my brain, in which I have fallen in love with my couch.  This malady is well known to psychologists and has been extensively studied. Archaeologist Steven Mithen submits that in the Upper Paleolithic era, hunters began to empathically identify with animals in order to better predict their movements in their quest to bring home the bacon (or beef, or mastodon; not sure about my Paleolithic beasties).  Modern psychologists have found that anthropomorphism functions as a coping strategy for loneliness, when other human connections are not available. Hence, me and my couch.  And as the French say, ce n’est ne pas ma faute. Psychologist Adam Waytz and his team developed a theory of anthropomorphism that posits when the factors “effectance, the drive to interact with and understand one’s environment, and sociality, the need to establish social connections” are high, we are likely to humanize things.  Add in such factors as the need for cognition and uncertainty avoidance, and that desk chair becomes your new best friend.  How long will this last?  Will we, when we can go out again, share brunch and a hug with friends, share the sidewalk with strangers, will we abandon our highboys and settees to the dust bunnies that previously were their only companions?  Or will we remember fondly the comfort they gave us in our forlornness?  Give the gift of reupholstery.

This is Silla Gris, by the Mexican artist Martin Pacheco.  Art Heals.

Art Heals: Rhythm

My companion in isolation listens to a lot of jazz.  I like it too, but I have never been able to listen to music while I am working,or reading.  Or walking, or on the metro, or the treadmill. (Ok, I don’t really have a treadmill, but I wouldn’t listen if I were on one.) Listening to music, for me, is an activity that requires my full concentration.  I need to be still and be open.

 I am not naturally musical. Piano lessons on a neighbor’s piano when I was about 9 was a dismal failure (exacerbated by a classically trained Russian teacher, whose methods of correction involved a ruler and my fingers). I tried teaching myself guitar in the 60s, but despite my long hair and granny glasses, flower power just wasn’t working for me.  Many years later, I was given a keyboard so that I could accompany my husband, who plays the saxophone, on Christmas carols during imaginary festivities in our home.  The teacher (really nice and patient) quit after four lessons.  Back to silent nights that year. Never sang in the school choir. Can’t dance.  The verdict: ain’t got no rhythm.   But despite all that, I do enjoy music all kinds (stuck in a wheelchair for  a year due to a freak accident, I read translated librettos while listening to operas on tape, and learned to love opera).   And while I couldn’t produce rhythm,  I never felt that I couldn’t appreciate it.   Enlightenment came when I discovered two things.  The first was a book, “What to Listen for in Music,” by Aaron Copeland that gave me a great deal of insight into the principles and nuances that work like an alphabet to unlock the melodic mysteries that I thought only those with “the ear” could discern.  The second thing changed everything for me.   I discovered notan.   Notan is a Japanese word that means light-dark harmony.  All my life I have been a visually oriented person, but I could never reconcile that with my lack of musical comprehension.  I loved the look of musical notation on paper, but I could never learn to read the notes, to translate the visual into the aural.  Yet when I studied art, I found I could instinctively comprehend rhythm in the brushstrokes on a painting, or the sweeping lines of a sculpture.   An artwork is a composition, just as is a piece of music.  The rhythm in a painting comes from its balance of light and dark elements, the underlying shapes that structure the piece, whether realist or abstract, a foundation for the details of color and texture that follow.  When there is a balance, another Japanese term comes into play, ma, the “space in between.”  There must be emptiness to create a space for fullness to enter.  That push-pull between the seen and the unseen provides the rhythmic energy of great art.

I love the fact that looking art can set my inner swing in motion.  And how that cadence can help me get through the emptiness of many of my recent days.  We already have the downbeat, let’s find the upbeat, any way we can.

This rhythmic painting is “My Country,” by Australian Aboriginal artist Tarisse King, who traces the tracks and rivers where her ancestors once walked. Art Heals.

Art Heals: Looking at Art

Let’s talk about looking at art.  Oh, you say, isn’t that what we have been doing since we started reading these missives (I know you call them missives, rather than something perhaps less flattering).  Indeed, that is precisely what we have been doing, in my meandering fashion. 

Hisham Matar recently wrote in the New York Times, “[a painting] is never finished, [it] must continue to do its work long after it has been hung on the gallery wall…a picture relies on us to complete it.”  He posits that our culture depends on free access to museums, because the art depends on it.  “How can those paintings in the museum, hanging in the dark, function?”  He observes that an artwork, previously ignored by the passing viewer, can suddenly become significant.  “Art is in constant dialogue with history.”

Matar has expressed the core of my belief and explained why I offer you an artwork each day. Art not only has a function, it functions as a living thing. It lives as it is being created but continues to live more vibrantly when it is seen.  Almost as soon as I began my quarantine, receiving information and stimulation second hand, I realized that I missed more than my friends, and brunch, and travel, and shopping and an endless supply of Pringles. I missed looking at art.  It had become so much a part of my daily life, I only became aware of its allegiant presence by its absence.   And as I began to reflect on the fear and sadness brought by the pandemic that was not going to end soon, and on the resilience and ingenuity of people around the world living in their own isolation,  I knew I had to find some way to incorporate art into my daily life again.  As the news turned ever more dire, as death and job loss and loneliness began to consume people, I turned to art and the artists I knew, who were struggling with all this too.  I thought art might heal. In these last days, with the broken bodies and souls demanding to finally be heard, demanding long-delayed justice, I hoped art might play a small role in healing, too.  I certainly have no answers, but I hope art helps me to ask the right questions.  And I hope looking at art with me has given you some respite, a little laughter, a different point of view, a little healing. I want to share the work of one of “my” artists (they are my family, too), Lukman Ahmad’s portrait of George Floyd, painted, I know, in empathy by an artist who understands injustice and shares personally in pain. Art Heals.

Art Heals: Future

We are still in our days of rage.  We are heartsick, our adrenalin spikes are exhausting us, yet we feel we must persist.  Some of us can protest with our bodies.  Others do what we can through donations, through writing, through documenting, through educating ourselves, and understanding that all the things we think we know are merely a fraction of the things we need to know.  That the outrage is global is heartening yet frightening too.  We can feel overwhelmed.  Everywhere we look now, we see—not only on our screens, but out our very windows.  The impact of this is somehow more powerful because we have been living in isolation for months.  While we complained, and worried for our health, for our loved ones, for our livelihoods, we had achieved a certain acceptance of our lack of control over the circumstances of our home confinement.  We started listening to the silence, we started watching the birds.  For a while, it seemed our world had taken a pause.  We rejoiced in the small victories, cleaner air, cleaner water, while we waited for the final victory of a vaccine that would carry us into the future, return our lives to us.   But the reality, the real real of our lives,  the inequality lurking in the statistics of vastly disproportionate sickness and death and job loss among communities of color, was waiting beneath the surface of our daily preoccupations to erupt like a volcano, spewing the fire and ash of injustice in eight minutes and  forty-six seconds of inescapable, authentic truth.

The rage must take its course.  But like the fires that burn to allow new growth, we will, we must, clear the underbrush of our prejudices and misconceptions and privilege and systemic injustice.  In that cleared space lies the future.  It will be on us to sustain those who will occupy that space, who will create new ways of thinking and acting and being, not forgetting history, but using it as seeds of progress to nourish a new society.  Despair is not an option. The only option is hope, and faith in the youth that are raging now, in preparation for the renewal that they are capable of creating, with our help.

This is “Our Children Are Our Future”  by Manal Deeb.  Art Heals.

Art Heals: Dear Friends

Dear Friends,

I write this salutation automatically.  It is a phrase, like “how are you”  that simply oils the social wheels.   We don’t really expect an answer other than “fine”or “fine, how about you?” (Except for those awkward moments when people reply, “ well, I have this pain in my  toe….”)   The phrase exists in other languages, eliciting the same sort of answer. “Comment ça va?  Ça va bien, et toi?”  “Come stai?  Tutto bene.” “ Wie geht’s? Gut, danke.”   Even if answered in the negative, “not bad” is the fallback position: "pas mal," "non c’è male," "nicht schlecht."  Positivity is the default position.  But no longer.   That simple question has become fraught.  The last few months has brought us Covid 19 and the economic crisis that followed, the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising, with the many families of those harmed or killed by racial injustice and the protestors on the front lines of danger and pain and death, health care and essential workers on the front lines of heartache and fear and death,  and the heartache and sorrow of the families of the over 100,000 people who have died, and the nearly 2 million sick in the US alone.  How are you now? 

Remaining untouched takes on new meaning too.  Covid enjoined us not to touch, not to embrace.  The protests enjoin us to do the opposite, to hug, to express our pain and solidarity in physical ways.  Both ways, contradictory as they are, charge us to manifest our care for each other.  We are brothers and sisters in pain.  The words “how are you” must  now be followed by “what can I do to help?”   Each in our own  way, we have the means to help.  There is no right way, there is just everyone’s individual way.

In the Thai language “ how are you” is expressed as “have you eaten?”   Dear friends,  and friends I haven’t yet met, how can I nourish you?

This piece by artist Ben Belghachi  speaks to my hunger for connection, and to say Art Heals.

Art Heals: Resistance

I woke up this morning to sunshine and balmy temperatures.  And grief.  How is nature not shedding tears of rain, hurling thunderbolts of lament, blackening the sky with clouds of sorrow?

How to find healing in these days?  Most of my concerns in my life as a curator have dealt with art as a tool and a voice of social justice. Resistance is hard. Especially now, when no one feels really safe, or in control, when doing what is necessary, staying home, seems passive instead of active, where does resistance fit in?

Given the injustice we have all seen this week, and the systemic injustice faced by communities of color throughout our history, how to protest, how to resist?  A quotation from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has been frequently cited these last few days. What stunned me is that he said this 53 years ago. It could have been said today.

“Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. ... But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard…. [America has] has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. [Martin Luther King Jr., "The Other America"]”

This is a brutal reminder, but for me, I do not want it to be a dispatch of despair.   What can I do to give voice to the unheard?  The artist Joseph Beuys has said, “The only revolutionary power is the power of human creativity. The only revolutionary power is art.”  It may not be the only one, but it is a strong one.

Resistance art has taken many forms, including what I call the presence of absence—boycotts, refusals, repudiation.  Others harness the power of the visual, painting portraits of anguish that howl louder than screams. 

 

  

 Resistance by Zahi Khamis,    African Guernica by Dumile Feni,                    

Arab Spring Exodus by Helen Zughaib

We must use the tools we have.   An artist is supplying information on organizations that can use our money to pay bail for those jailed, especially now during protests, helping to prevent the injustice of incarceration for the poor, while the wealthy walk away.   Some artists use canvas or paper, or the walls of the city.  Some use their own bodies (look up Waafa Bilal, Tattoo Casualty, too graphic to show here).  Writers, poets, lyricists, supply us with words so loud and poignant and truthful that they explode ignorance and hate.  From the Bible, through James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time.”   Next time is now.  The fires are here.  Fires burn, but they cleanse as well.  Resistance must give birth to renewal. If we do what we can, it may not be too late.  I pray art heals.

Art Heals: Making It

I am so lucky to have many friends who are artists.  For many of them, despite the hardships, this time of quarantine has given them a period to explore their creativity in new ways.  They are “relooking” (A French word, believe it or not, even if not officially sanctioned by the Académie Française)  their art or their process, experimenting in new directions,  addressing issues of reuse and recycling born out of environmental concern, but nurtured by the present scarcity of available materials (one artist posting that she is painting over older work, reusing the canvas  to express new concepts).  The gift of time can be inventiveness.

But I have come to realize that all my friends are artists, in one way or another.  My friend, artist Mona El-Bayoumi said it best, “Like everyone else I was born an artist, but I seriously continued to express myself since.”  She believes, as do I, that we are all born artists.  We create our world with every childhood act, because everything we do as children, a thing, a thought, a sound is created for the very first time, unique to us.  Then some of us grow up, and circumstances and inclination move us away from our artistic roots, but our artistic souls remain, dormant within us.

Corona has brought with it much pain and heartache but has also awakened that dormant creativity in many of us.

In her 1982 essay Material as Metaphor, fiber artist Anni Albers said “Most of our lives we live closed up in ourselves, with a longing not to be alone, to include others in that life that is invisible and intangible. To make it visible and tangible, we need light and material, any material. And any material can take on the burden of what had been brewing in our consciousness or subconsciousness, in our awareness or in our dreams.”

A longing not to be alone, to include others, defines perfectly our covid-contained lives.   Making takes on new meaning, as people bake bread, sew masks, build backyard amusement parks for their children, compose poetry, sing, keep diaries, and yes, draw and paint and sculpt and quilt and stitch and weld and use light and materials, any materials, to express themselves, to comfort themselves, to release the creativity with which they were born.

We are making it, in both senses of the word, making the bread or the painting or the pillow fort, and making it through these horrific times. Art truly does heal.

I offer a colorful construction seen in Australia.  Make of it what you will.