I've always hated Art Museums. Something about them always reminded me of Medieval pilgrimages to see bodily remains of long dead saints - mostly taken from recent graves. There is kind of this psuedo-religious implication that the work on the walls was made by geniuses in touch with the divine, in the same way the humans who wrote the bible were considered to have been speaking God's words - I wonder if that is a hold over from Royalty as patrons - since they served as politicians who ruled by 'divine right' and similarly to own art or commission it implied a value that lower classes were allowed to look at but not touch. Even my grandmother, back in my college days when I tried to talk about/show her my work would fan her hand in front of her face and refuse to look while saying 'I don't understand any of that art stuff'.
My very pregnant friend and I ventured into the tourist crowds on Friday to see the Guillermo Del Toro/Pinocchio show @MOMA before it closes - in part, I brought her because of her background in film as a member of Local 52 - I was curious to see how an exhibit like this landed on someone who's day to day (often very shitty) job entailed the work being upheld as high art at this institution. It felt horrifyingly like being at Disney World, spending all day waiting in lines for a ride, only to be shuffled along by the masses and at the end of the show in about 20 minutes. While it was all laid out in a clean and easy to understand fashion - I think the most valuable aspects of what media has to offer seems to be misunderstood - but I think the problem has existed since the beginning of museums, and even in what I imagine @MOMA's attempt at inspiring new, younger, more culturally plugged in audience members to come to the museum - I feel like I see a deeply unfortunate lack of curiosity in the curation about WHY anything comes in to being. We can't learn math by looking at the final answer - understanding math requires engaging with the process, feeling out which routes we respond to better and supports we need to get to that final answer. Pythagoras was a philosopher who imagined abstract philosophical concepts about space and how we navigate it - but one of the languages he focused on to communicate about his understanding of how we perceive space happened to be mathematical. There are so many languages for human experience - but they are just that. We cannot forget that they represent real things, lived, embodied curiosities from human beings. This is where we have gone wrong in economics - forgetting that those graphs and numbers refer to human beings living their very real lives, so we play them like a casino full of games that might spit money at us if we 'win'.
I watched Del Toro's Pinocchio on Christmas and was underwhelmed and uncomfortable most of the time - a similar feeling to my experience of his other recent film Nightmare Alley. Both are based on preexisting literature and deep familiarity within a broader cultural context, and I am even reminded of Pan's Labyrinth (a pretty perfect film AND story) when I realize that Pinocchio also engages with fascism that threatens our magical reality. I can't say I enjoy his work very much, but I find myself increasingly compelled by directors who are unafraid to work through their internal machinations via such a public format. To bring their curiosity to the masses and see what comes back to them. That feels to me like the kinds of stories and ideas that really have something to say, a space to take up in our cultural development as a species - not just media aimed to please, to distract, to talk for the sake of talking. That's just capitalism baby.
When I teach Aaron Douglas, I start with asking what students know about the Harlem Renaissance. To my constant frustration and dismay, I always am told that it was an explosion or resurgence of Black art, music and writing. There are only about 50 years between the complete abolition of slavery and the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance - Aaron Douglas is part of the first group of Black Americans to have no experience of slavery in his lifetime (when it had also been illegal for black people to learn how to read) and he not only obtained a Masters Degree, but taught at Ivy League Columbia University. The Harlem Renaissance was the first time Black Americans could even fully imagine, let alone have the freedom to create an identity for themselves- what a ferocious, intense, huge huge task, to invent an identity that had never existed before, out of hundreds of years of trauma and being told you were sub-human. I'm not going to just have students cut out silhouettes and layer them and call it a day. This is not just a theme, a style, a time period, a technique. Examining a form of expression without excavating what was trying to be expressed is no different then teaching someone how to use a gun, but having no framework for exploring why or when it might be appropriate to use it, or how it has impacted others in the past or may impact us in the future.
I was at a student event where an exploration on Surrealism was being explained to the audience as making up a fantasy world, somewhere that doesn't really exist - it pulled a similar string that resides between rage and hopeless frustration. A simple google search pulls to the top in a singular sentence that Surrealism is an attempt to articulate the unconscious mind. Any deeper investigation will clearly lay out how the first Surrealists were exploring developing ideas about psychotherapy and how the choices we make and stories we tell are expressions of the buried parts of ourselves. Dali painted a lot of his dreamscapes, and the recurring image of a woman is a specific refraction about his relationship with his mother and how that manifested in his relationships with other women. It began as a response to the emotional impacts of World War I, as a cultural need to process the experience manifested - some of the main players of the Surrealist movement worked alongside Freud as he was beginning to name and understand Shell Shock - or PTSD as we have come to understand it. I don't need a degree in art history to take a second and be curious about something and do the littlest work of looking it up, before bringing it to students and asking them to engage with it. To do any less then that is deeply irresponsible in my opinion to everyone involved, including the artists who's work is being referenced. I have also never seen any of this mentioned in any Museum exhibits, anywhere - and I went to the Dali Museum in high school. Cezanne, who inspired the Cubist and Futurist movements was trying desperately to represent in paint new philosophical and mathematical concepts like the 4th dimension - check out Charles Howard Hinton's 1884 essay titled What is the Fourth Dimension? I see Guernica in school hallways all the time - I hope whoever put it up knows it is an anti-war painting that had a huge impact, and that Picasso was communicating about the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's - which ironically is the same war that Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is taking place directly after.
I heard an accidental admission from an intern that my work is being blown off as 'art therapy stuff' and I am taking a step back to reassess where my values and the values of others actually align - or, as I'm discovering, do not. The questions that I am asking, before getting to the part where we make decisions about media and images - would not be considered 'art therapy stuff' in a writing or poetry class, in character development for a theatre class, and being able to answer these kinds of questions is actually deeply essential to having a successful career in any kind of job that requires creative output, as a fundamental fact - the exact same as an accountant needing to know how to do basic math. When I ask my students about their identities and all they know how to do is draw a flag for countries that some of them haven't even been to, or when murals get made that have random faces of color but no clear story or message - we have flattened the concept of social justice and Art so much that it is meaningless. Therapy exists to support those of us who for a variety of reasons were unable to develop certain skills needed to engage as full human beings in society and in their own lives, but since those skills are as essential to functioning as any other knowledge or skill set, should be built in to all education. Knowing how to resolve conflict productively without losing myself is probably more functional then me being able to pass a physics test to be honest - and Art is literally a language of expressing the self, where skills around cultivating our personal languages are what every aspect is doing, all the time - if I am losing work because someone in power misunderstands the point of Art, the problem is much larger then me.
I was told recently I would make a good Art Therapist. I appreciate the sentiment, but honestly - I'm not interested in healing people. I'm much more of a cultural anthropologist, and while I am deeply invested in pulling apart and understanding how we make meaning as human beings - I want to engage with the time scale of centuries - and I deeply believe that the notes I record along the way are the actual gifts that I will leave behind - because that is how we eventually come to understand each other, by telling you how I came to the conclusions I did, what I was feeling or thinking when I made a choice - the process is the Art. The piece at the end is just the residue of an experience. Proof it happened, but by the time you look at it and have your feelings about it, I will already be on to the next series of questions - getting lost with new people on a journey with a totally different destination. A common phrase amongst the visiting artists (working in the gaming and animation industry) for my character design class is "if you don't enjoy the process, then this isn't the job for you". Unless a museum is creating spaces to more fully engage with the process of Art Making, then it is just a Mausoleum.
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