Imagine what would happen if we were more courageous in the ways we created space for things such as this. What would change about our world?
The Art Bus Project from Portmanto Media on Vimeo.
Tag: Art
A Year of Wonder
I admit: I’m the type of person who sees every New Year as a chance to reboot, revisit and refresh.
And this year, 2016, I want to try and sustain a yearlong exploration of wonder.
Part of the reason for that is pretty straightforward: on January 1, I officially became a partner in a global design studio that helps communities reimagine learning at the intersection of space, culture and story.
Our name? WONDER, By Design.
But part of it is also a desire to wrestle with some questions my colleagues and I want to understand more deeply:
- If wonder is to learning as carbon is to life, then what are the neurochemical underpinnings of wonder itself?
- In what ways does our capacity for wonder help explain what is most essential to what shapes and drives us as human beings?
- What blocks our ability to wonder widely about the world? What gets us unblocked?
You can imagine my excitement, then, when I saw that the Renwick Gallery, a century-old museum in Washington, D.C. once described as the “American Louvre,” had recently undergone its own reboot – a literal, massive, two-year renovation – and was reintroducing itself to the public by having its first new exhibit transform the entire building into an immersive, multisensory work of art.
The inaugural exhibit’s name? WONDER.
So, last week, just before a massive blizzard ground the nation’s capital to a halt, I decided to visit on a random weekday morning.
A mixture of locals and tourists, old and young, prepared to move their way through the different exhibits and rooms with a hushed reverence. A sign on the wall, however, reminded us not to let any initial silence be mistaken for any required sense of formality: “Photography encouraged,” it read.
I walked into the first room, where I found a termite mound of index cards – a landscape of detritus, reconstituted into something both foreign and recognizable.
I squinted to see through a diaphanous indoor rainbow, made entirely of string.
Strangers and I peered at one another though a round opening in a human-sized bird’s nest – two sides of the same mirror.
And I walked alongside a Plaster Paris cast of a massive tree laying on its side, its bark recreated by the careful stitching together of small wooden rectangles, its empty center providing a portal through which to view . . . what exactly? The other end? The eternal? The unnameable?
What drives us as human beings to spend thousands of hours making a plaster cast of a living tree? What is sparked in us when we experience it here, in this distinctly man-made space? And when I tell you that in two years the cast will be laid at the base of the actual tree it was based on so that it can gradually decompose and become part of the forest floor, what does that information make you feel?
Then I walked to the second floor of the exhibit. Other museumgoers were scattered on their backs underneath a giant, colorful, undulating map of the energy explosion that caused the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. I wandered into a magenta-hued room whose walls were covered by constellations of actual insect bodies, impossibly large. And in each room I jotted down framed quotations from people across the past 1,000 years who have wondered about wonder.
“Wonder – is not precisely Knowing And not precisely Knowing not – A beautiful but bleak condition He has not lived who has not felt.”
“Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.”
And my personal favorite – “It is not understanding that destroys wonder; it is familiarity.”
I thought about that one as I returned to the hollow tree, and stared again through its open center. All along the outside, the tree’s branches jutted out like natural antennae, thin wires suspending it at eye-level.
This, I realized, was what this exhibit had led me to wonder about: What suspends us? What do we suspend?
Over 800 years ago, St. Albertus Magnus offered his own take on those questions. “Wonder,” he said, “is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”
It’s not an answer, just another layer to peel off and examine. I hope you’ll join me in the search, and add your own thoughts, in the months ahead.
This is why we need schools that stir in each of us a “blessed unrest”
According to Martha Graham (and courtesy of my friend Renee Rollieri, whose inspiration from this quote led in part to the founding of the Blue School in New York City):
The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.“
This is what community building through art looks like
Imagine if it occurred everywhere?
Art in the Ownership Society
If you’re looking for the latest signs of America’s cultural descent into inanity, look no further than this past weekend’s Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, and its review of Maria Abramovic’s performance piece at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent fundraising gala.
What you’ll find is a double-dose of a certain kind of worship; on one hand, there’s Abramovic herself, whose willingness to serve as the evening’s “benevolent despot” stems from her own love of the power to make powerful people do her bidding amidst a surreal backdrop of human centerpieces, heads emerging through holes in tables, and mandatory white lab coats being donned by partygoers whose fancy outfits were intended to provide their own form of artistic expression. And then there’s the Times review itself, which is less about journalist Guy Trebay’s assessment of Abramovic’s ability to surface submerged truths through her art, and more about his own infatuation with the event’s outer trappings, from its 800 socialite and celebrity attendees to Abramovic’s “$1,500 handbag from Givenchy.”
I took note of the article because it was just a week ago that I first heard about the MOCA event, courtesy of the California-based collaborative artist, Brett Cook. Cook’s own work is currently on display throughout the streets of Oakland as part of his Reflections of Healing project, a series of eight murals of local community healers whose portraits, colorfully completed by local residents with spray paint, depict each adult as he or she looked as a teenager – “in order to honor the ways young people have reshaped their worlds and, by extension, transformed ours” – and which are now permanent installations at libraries throughout the city.
“The goal of the series is to remind us of the everyday heroes and heroines who are sustaining life and change in our communities,” explained the forty-three-year-old Cook, who is tall, thin, and buoyant. “And the murals are meant to be just one part of a larger community development effort that is designed to get local residents reflecting on some core questions: What sustains life in the city of Oakland, and how do we model the world we want to see?”
It was through the prism of those questions that Abramovic’s piece came up amidst a small group of artists and friends who were sitting in the center of Cook’s crowded, colorful Oakland studio on a recent weekday afternoon, surrounded by oversized portraits of labyrinthine faces and photographs of Cook’s past public projects. To what extent should we be mindful – as private citizens and/or public artists – of modeling what we wish to see in the world? And if, as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says, “Our actions are our only true belongings,” what is the relationship between what we choose to produce, and what processes we use to (co) create them?
For Cook, the answers are clear: “The process I employ with others to create something together is just as important as any end product we produce. It’s about learning to see in a new way with others, more than it is about me imposing my view of the world on anyone else.”
By contrast, the core questions animating the MOCA event weren’t representative of any shared vision of the world; they were reflective of an ersatz veneration of the art of the spectacle itself. As Eli Broad, the museum’s major benefactor, put it, “I know other institutions don’t do things the way we do, but people should do it more.” (Do what exactly?) Museum director Jeffrey Deitsch added his own coda: “We can take risks. We can break a few rules. That’s who we are as people.”
To be clear, artists like Abramovic, and institutions like MOCA, must be free to take whatever risks they wish. It’s also clear that the timing of the event coincides with the myriad upheavals mobilizing so many of us around the world – from Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park – all of which are based on a shared belief that what will sustain societies in the 21st century are not autocratic governments, invite-only fundraisers, and conspicuous consumption, but a more human scale of life and living, a veneration of process as much as product(s), and a commitment to equip all people with the skills and self-confidence they need to become equitable, visible contributors to the common good.
In a recent piece about the Occupy movement for the New York Review of Books, Mark Greenberg captures these values well. “Speaking to protesters in Zuccotti Park recently, I got the sense that they wished people would stop demanding a demand because the idea of one was of little interest to them. It seemed beside the point. What they cared about was the ‘process,’ a way of thinking and interacting exemplified by their daily General Assembly meetings and the crowded, surprisingly well-mannered village they had created on the 33,000 square feet of concrete that comprises Zuccotti Park.
“This,” Greenberg writes, “was really the main project of the Occupy Wall Street organizers: to acquaint new volunteers with their new version of democracy. Why, they asked, curtail the growing mystique of [the movement] with something as ordinary as a political demand?”
Why indeed? After all, whether it’s an Occupy camp site or a community-based art project, sometimes, in an ownership society that has gone bankrupt, what’s most valuable is not what we produce, but which processes we use to help people recapture the human scale of life, and which spaces we open up for all of us to make visible what we wish to see more of in the world.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
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