Arlene Goldbard

“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”

Stew, Passing Strange

I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)

I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely beautiful and rich musical story of the musician Stew’s coming of age, as an artist and a man, a journey that took him from a two-story home with all the mod cons in L.A., through cannabis coffeeshops in Amsterdam, post-punk clubs in Berlin, communes, collectives, love affairs that ended on the border of realness, and back again.

Repeatedly, Stew’s story draws a hard, straight line between the redemptive, clarifying, transcendent capabilities of art and spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment. I’ve drawn a few hundred of those lines myself in talks and essays over the years, I admit. But I have resisted tethering myself with them, because when I contemplated joining the Church of Art, my feelings about some of my prospective coreligionists made me think again.

You see, my nature and inclinations are deeply democratic (despite the disappointments of that faith). And so many of the stalwarts of the Church of Art are anything but egalitarian. At the extreme elitist end of the spectrum, worshippers eschew the mundane, living for sublime aestheticized moments involving the exhibition or performance of classic works requiring vast skill and capital to achieve in the form they crave: La bohème or La traviata, Giselle or Coppélia, the Eroica or The Magic Flute.

I heard my favorite story of high-church aestheticism when working as a consultant with a small theater company in Minneapolis. A feature story in the local paper had included the cost of authentic, handwoven tartans the Guthrie Theater had commissioned for a production of MacBeth. That single expenditure exceeded the annual budget of the excellent small theater.

My response to the grotesque excess of this type of red-carpet display—and after all, its utter irrelevance to the actual art being mounted—can be compared to liberation theologists’ repulsion at the Catholic Church’s willingness to invest in material splendor while countless faithful starve or endure severe hardship and oppression.

The gilded frames in which high art is so often presented serve not so much to enable its full expression as to call attention to its place of pride in the pecking-order. I wrote a few years ago about an experiment in which the superstar violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito in a Washington, DC, Metro station, failing to attract either attention or donations from passers-by. I imagine that even the most fervent devotees of the highest Church of Art close their eyes when a particular passage of music touches their hearts most deeply, blotting out the glare of chandeliers on red velvet and white marble so as not to intrude on the essence of the experience.

In London on Wednesday, an anonymous bidder spent over $100 million for Alberto Giacometti’s bronze “Walking Man I.” (Sotheby’s had expected it to sell for less than $30 million, still a remarkable sum.) This has nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the piece itself, but with the glorification of its owner. However much an encounter with the work might touch or engage you or I or anyone else who passed time in its company wherever it were to be installed, that experience has little connection with the thrill of ownership at a headline-grabbing price. The transaction comments not on the power of Giacometti’s work, but on the economic power of its buyer, and on this ravenous beast, the high-art market, that—even as the global economy falters—grows in size and appetite, not even troubling to notice the ocean of suffering that could be alleviated by equivalent investment.

Having joined the Church of Art, I place myself among its liberation theologists, interested in the essence of its teachings, in the expansion of their practice, rather than the glory of its institutions.

To be sure, the DVD of Passing Strange represents significant investment: productions at the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep before Broadway, workshops at Sundance, and more. If the artists had been content with a one-off show in some small club, I never would have seen it at all. But Spike Lee’s production is a concert film, the record of a performance, modest as films go, and very right for its subject. I suppose that is one of the church’s tenets for me, a sense of purpose twinned with a sense of proportion.

Late in the play, Stew, as the narrator, recounts a conversation with a friend at a bar, a friend who sells pretzels for a living:

[H]e said, “The Real.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “The real is not real, my friend. The real is a construct. The real is a creation. The real is artificial. The kid in your play is looking for something in life…that can only be found…in art.”

I keep working that blind spot in our social self-understanding, our inability to see the astounding extent to which our lives are infused, uplifted, and deepened by the experience of art, whether it comes to us via iPod or YouTube, the multiplex, the Met, or the work of our own bodies and spirits. I am hopeful we are going to awaken soon out of the trance that prevents us from seeing, understanding—and therefore pursuing—the public interest in artistic creativity, in beauty and meaning and all they bring. In the meantime, I do my bit to clear out the idols, and I worship.

The epigram that started this post introduces a remarkable moment in the play. Consumed with regret, the main character (”Youth”) creates an imaginary redemptive encounter with his mother, who has died as he lingered in Europe, refusing her entreaties to come home. His older self, the actual Stew as the narrator, sings that he will never see her again. Youth replies:

That’s it? You know, you’re right: you cannot bring her back. But why lose faith in the only thing that can? I will see her again…. Because life is a mistake…that only art can correct. I will see her again…Every night….

Amen.

I don’t know if this is a political problem, a spiritual one, or a psychological one: I’m fairly certain it’s all of the above. Or maybe it just feels that way based on all the space it’s taking up in my mind. How do people overcome the obstacles—fatigue, disappointment, magical thinking—that make them reluctant to invest in the often time-consuming and painstaking work required to build something, brick by brick?

In the physical world as in other realms, it takes remarkably less time to destroy something than to rebuild it. A house burns in a matter of hours; perhaps a thousand such intervals are needed to make it habitable again. A single executive order unleashes a war; decades are required to repair what can be fixed.

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This is a profoundly confusing (and almost irresistibly depressing) moment in our political culture. Reactivity is at such an all-time high, a visitor from outer space could be forgiven for concluding that in the U.S., anyway, we humans lack any access to the neocortex, while our reptilian brains and limbic systems are shooting as many sparks as a wayward match in a fireworks factory. Danger! Panic! Despair!

Under such circumstances, confusion is an intelligent response. What is going on!?!?

Well, a lot, obviously. Start from your own center and work out. We all know the personal version of the reactivity now sweeping our political culture: something pushes a button, unleashing a swirl of memories, images, emotions. Flooded with brain chemicals, our thinking minds come unglued. A small setback turns into a hopeless failure; a major challenge triggers the kind of fight-or-flight response our brains were built for back on the savannah, being chased by sabertooth tigers. It happens to every being with a body. I’m guessing that even the Dalai Lama goes reactive now and then, and obviously, most of us warrant no comparison with the Dalai Lama’s mastery of automatic emotional responses.

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My friends tend to a few views of President Obama and the Democrats at the end of Year One. They seem different, but actually, all are part of the Disappointment System, my new name for the combination plate of hurt and response which has become our national dish. As is so often the case, what we are as political animals in the wide world is largely due to what we eat in the little world of relationship and emotion.

Right now, the political buffet is piled high. There’s a heaping portion of cynical gloating: See, the gloaters say, I didn’t get my hopes up, I didn’t fall for all that magical thinking about Obama as messiah, and guess what? I was right! There are full platters of bitter disappointment: He had us on his side from the get-go, the bitter ones say, and instead of standing tall for progressive values, he’s compromised everything away. And there is a veritable smorgasbord of Measured Response: Better on Haiti than Bush on New Orleans, better on health than nothing, too bad about Afghanistan but look at the pressure, and let’s be realistic, I mean, it’s the system, so what can you expect?

The cynics are pre-disappointed, having decided at some point to insulate themselves against further pain by never allowing their hopes to rise. The cynics’ remedy doesn’t work, of course: the result is a constant, dull ache, an addictive pain that makes up in duration whatever it might lack in intensity. The bitter ones have hit their pain threshold, deciding that opening to their hopes has gone far enough. But there’s a cost to pay too: the cocktail you get by stirring regret into disappointment delivers a hangover likely to endure for the rest of the President’s term.

The measured responders never really perceive how disappointment came to be their medium; they just live in it, like fish in the ocean. By allowing themselves less imagination, they feel less pain, of course. But unfortunately, also less of everything that transcends the limitations of the moment: as it has been, so it shall be.

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I spent the first part of this week in Sacramento, where I gave a talk to a statewide “arts visioning retreat,” an audience of about a hundred artists and administrators who wanted to help lead a conversation about reframing the arts’ public purpose. (Download my brief introduction and keynote at California Arts Advocates’ Web site.)

The drive, a little over an hour through rolling hills and vast flat stretches, was a little surreal, a scene from a personal sci-fi picture in which time folds back on itself, with uncanny echoes. I haven’t made that journey for many years: no reason. But long ago, I lived in Sacramento for a year or so, running a cultural project in the now quaintly kooky days of the Jerry Brown administration.

When I drove away from my rented house in Sacramento for the last time, it was exactly half my life ago. Today is my birthday, so I am able to make this calculation with some precision. Back then, the trip was a drive in the country. At night, when I usually made it, there were long passages with no illumination but the stars and moon. Now most of it is a repeating tableau of discount malls and tract houses, spotlights on billboards tinting the night sky pink.

In between trips to Sacramento, the politics of culture have morphed through several incarnations, including a very long time in which my ideas about culture and democracy (and others like them) have been in official disfavor. But as I am discovering, if you stick around for half your life (so far), you may see the wheel start to turn. Right now, many mainstream arts people—by which I mean leaders of institutions and agencies, mostly—are concluding that the old support strategies are no longer valid, whether on account of their intrinsic flaws or the poor state of the economy, or both. … Read the rest of this post»

Judging by how many impertinent questions I asked in childhood, I came into this world with an inquiring mind. But in some ways, I have only just become a seeker, and I am only now beginning to understand what this means.

I am trying to notice cues and signposts that come my way, with the result that several times each week, I discover a book, a video, or a podcast by a new teacher. I sincerely doubt I will discover a guru. For one thing, I am not seeking one. It isn’t much in my nature to follow or give over in that way. Periodically, I stop on the path of seeking to try on a particular spiritual discipline with its own boundaries, spiritual technologies and practices. There is always so much to learn; but for me, there is always a place where learning stops, and instead of remaining a seeker, one becomes a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, and so on.

I know that there are many people who find a path of continual opening within those bounded categories. I recognize that some will always describe me: I am a woman, a Jew, even a “Sixties person,” one of those ducklings who was imprinted with love for a unique moment in our collective social inquiry. But in the end, I always feel about seeking as the great James Baldwin felt about art, when he said, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.”

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“Philosophy” conjures dusty places and donnish faces, elbow patches on corduroy jackets, fusty squares straining to split hairs. But when I look back on this year, it is a problem in philosophy that commands my attention and gives meaning to my journey. Anyone who feels the suffering of our fellows and sees the hope of healing has struggled with the same elemental conundrum.

The simple truth is that we marvelous human beings possess both the means and the capacities to transform our violent and indifferent social institutions into repositories of creativity, caring and healing. Can anyone dispute the proposition that a simple change of heart could wrap our aching planet in a loving embrace, soothing its cries as a good mother soothes her child?

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While the rest of the world is ho-ho-ho-ing, I’ve been oh-no-no-ing, pounding out what the friend who advised me to write them calls “anger chapters.” Lately, I’m on this path of inquiry into absolutely everything, and now it’s anger’s turn. You see, I don’t usually get very far with anger. Most of the time, I start out ranting and after a few moments, I crack myself up. It feels silly and juvenile to be blaming others so energetically for whatever ails me. I tend to get a sort of cartoony mental image, something like a mouse pounding on the vast armored doors of a fortress. (Or a scene from Frank Capra, an exhausted Jimmy Stewart confronting the massive barriers of an intransigent political system.)

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this may be a defense against emotions I don’t wish to feel. For one thing, I’m not a mouse, and that self-depiction of utter powerlessness is unlikely to be much help on my journey. For another, quite a few wise people believe that psychological benefit attaches to expressing anger, even if only to oneself. I can’t say I have a firm grip on their point. Beyond the relief of discharging whatever has been suppressed, they hint at increased understanding and compassion, a connection I am still trying to make. In the anger chapters, eyes-only writings, I am allowing those feelings to pour forth without self-censorship.

Something is emerging, and I want to share it with you.

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My ancestors were nomads and refugees, and I have carried on that tradition. Sometimes I think I was born packed and ready to go. I no longer speak the language of infants, so I can’t quote my exact thoughts, but I have the distinct impression that the synapses that fired when I first opened my eyes in the bosom of my family spelled out this message: “Whoa! Look where I landed! Get me out of here!”

By the time I was old enough to actually move out, so many things had happened to reinforce that initial impression, my identity as Outsider had been firmly set in place. When I left home at 17, I knew I wasn’t going to plant my tent in a beloved patch of ground and raise a family. I knew the place I would always feel most at home is in the energy-field of words, images and ideas embracing this planet, reflecting human experience the way snow reflects light, sending it back to us so that—if we choose—we can learn and grow.

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Current controversy around a work of art has me asking this question: what is our obligation to respect what is sacred to others, especially if it has no such significance to ourselves? In this story, four different notions of the sacred have come into conflict. Talk about a teachable moment! What can be learned from it?

First, the story:

Richard Kamler, a visual artist whose approach is strongly grounded in social issues, is charging that his artwork has been censored by the organizers of a show at the John Ely Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven, an exhibit sponsored by the Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project, focused on saving an old synagogue building designated as a historic site. In the words of the organizers,

The Cultural Heritage Project brings together a diverse group of regionally and nationally noted professionals working with a trans-disciplinary methodology, whose work is inspired by community, neighborhood, history, architecture, and cultural tradition. Collectively and individually, the group is creating visual, written and sound works exploring and engaging with the history and changes of the OSS, contributing to its heritage and furthering a dialogue on its cultural relevance and role in an evolving urban community.

In an email conversation with other activist artists, Kamler described his piece as follows:

I’ve taken pages from the Koran and the Bible and sections from these pages and “woven” them together to create a 4′ x 6′ paper table cloth. The common ground. Because the sections are about 1″ wide, there is still a readable narrative, tho, somewhat disjointed. It is placed on a middle eastern looking piece of fabric and in the center is a bowl and the two books are resting in the bowl, corners touching. As in much of my work I contextualize it with series of Community Conversations, a performance event, if you will, that bring together, in this case, two voices from the Muslim community, a scholar and a member of the community, and two voices from the Jewish community, a member of the Shul and a scholar to dialogue round the table, the common ground, the context for communication to occur.

Here’s a link to a story about the controversy from the New Haven Register.

So what might it mean?

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