Living Our Time: Art in the Recession
In the wake of economic recession, art is about much more than beauty and posterity; it’s about finding a fresh perspective.
“You’ve taken money out of the hands of a mother who can barely buy her kid’s asthma medicine,” wrote Lydia from New Jersey on a New York Times blog. The proposed $50 million in stimulus arts funding irked her. “You people asking for your endowments make me sick,” she continued, before being torn down by a slew of subsequent commenters who noted that, when it comes to keeping money moving, the arts do about as good a job as any sector.
I had more empathy for Lydia’s complaint than many other arts-friendly blog readers. It seemed to me that, with all her vindictive accusations, she had clumsily plunged into the unreality of this recession. If the choice were actually between saving the life of an asthma-afflicted child and funding a repertory theatre in small town Arkansas, the child would take precedence. But nobody’s making that choice.
This recession isn’t an epidemic, or a vicious flood that could wipe through and kill whole families or destroy a community’s food supply. It’s far more abstract than that, which is what makes understanding its impact a headache. Recession challenges our way of life, not our lives directly. It undermines a system that champions individualism and personal space, front lawns and single-family homes. Yet losing one’s place in that system can be as debilitating as any natural disaster.
When the discussion about stimulus funding for the arts began on blogs, radio programs, and news shows, I was surprised by debaters’ stubbornness. The $50 million allotted to the National Endowment for the Arts is a speck compared to the rest of the stimulus, like buying a toothpick after spending 2 grand on a glitzy dinner. But the guardians of the creative class wanted their toothpick badly, and were appalled by people like Lydia who couldn’t understand their reasoning.
That $50 million represents so much more than validation. A refusal to fund art would be endemic of a national delusion. It would suggest that what art offers is somehow less real than what anything else offers, when, in fact, the business of art and design is to question and reconfigure the way we see ourselves. And all of this recent economic collapsing has been about a collapsed self-image. At a moment when self-image is endangered, art seems unusually relevant. Now, the biggest art-related challenge has to do, not with funding, but with figuring out what art can mean to us in this digitally driven, recession-obsessed world.
A lot has been made of the Works Project Administration lately, journalists and historians pointing to the impressive art and architecture that came out of Roosevelt’s New Deal, suggesting that those large-scale murals and public buildings somehow validate arts funding today. But I’m wary about what the New Deal legacy can tell us.
A mural by Lucile Lloyd hangs in the State Building in Los Angeles. Completed in 1937, under FDR’s reign, it gives a panoramic view of California’s history. Mystical mountain ranges loom on the horizon and, in the foreground, a Spanish warrior, Mexican soldier, U.S. sailor, and Californian ranger casually flaunt their pride, holding the various flags that have colored California’s past. In the center, a tall, white man and an equally tall, white woman stare off into the vast landscape that they are about to appropriate as their own.
“The idea was to record the memory of certain periods of history,” Professor Natalie Naylor of Hofstra University told the New York Times, talking about the epic subject matter of depression-era murals. But “recording” gives a fairly limited picture of how design and art can inform public spaces. Not to mention the fact that “recording memory” could easily become “promoting ideology,” as it does on the wall of the State Building.
Whenever I think of this conundrum, I remember that scene from Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There: little Woody sitting on the front porch, playing the blues with a group of middle aged men who are awed by his perspicacity. He embodies their idealized former selves. He’s got a swagger, he’s adapted a working class lilt and he’s got a vision for the future that’s full of Guthrie-inspired sagacity. But he’s a kid and only the no-nonsense woman who serves his dinner can see through his facade. “Live your own time, child,” she tells him, and, the next morning, he disappears. The next time we see him, he’s in a hospital bed after falling overboard and being eaten by an imaginary whale. It’s the symbolic death of his historical self-image.
The problem with using past standards to determine what art should be today is that our value systems aren’t what they were. Nor should they be.
I heard artist Fritz Haeg talk about Le Corbusier a few months ago. Haeg described the renowned Swiss architect’s vision: in planning his “Radiant City,” the structural heaven that would be modernity incarnate, Le Corbusier talked about turning country and city into the same entity, using resources at will, and creating individualized, autonomous spaces for everyone. But what seemed enlightened when Le Corbusier conceived of it now seems like self-sabotage. “The nightmare was planned,” observed Haeg. The Radiant City represents all the industrial bull-headedness that we’re now trying to reign in.
Haeg’s recent work is the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s vision. His Edible Estates are bohemian experiments in urban landscaping, yards that have become fugitive plantations. “I focused on the space of the front lawn as this amazing space of opportunity that we all collectively . . . bought into, this idea of this ornamental space upon which we present our homes,” Haeg explained. “If you grow up in American suburbs, you know that the tending of the lawn is this amazing ritual that happens on the weekends when you hear all the lawn mowers going and it sounds like democracy.” Haeg wanted to see if he could replace grass with the visible trappings of productivity—instead of expanses of green, the only green we see would sprout out of soil mounds. His Edible Estates are far from unruly, but they unassumingly obstruct the facade of middle class neighborhoods, presenting productivity as something that could someday become synonymous with the picturesque.
A Los Angeles based technology lab has taken another approach to re-imagining America. Frustrated by the lack of collective history in LA, the REMAPPING LA team decided to use technology to create a virtual connective tissue between people’s bodies, identities and the city’s histories. It’s an attempt to keep technology from becoming just another centralized vehicle for cultural streamlining. Led by UCLA professor and digital artist Fabian Wagmeister, REMAPPING LA is aimed at helping teens, families and teachers design their own technological systems, systems that will them to explore their cultural and community identities.
The REMAP project has hosted parties at which guests wander around an area of the city with mobile devices, taking pictures of each other and the places they see. These image files immediately become part of a democratic history, one in which people’s personal interactions with their environments join an ever-evolving database which already includes historical figures and events. Individuals become part of living histories.
Art isn’t about prettying things up; it’s about diving into the way we live, messing up conventions, and making dissent fresh again. Which is why Fritz Haeg’s and REMAPPING LA’s tactics seem especially exciting. They’re trying to turn the American Dream upside down and pull it open, so that it can mean more than having a house and a lawn all one’s own. And that’s a promising ambition, whether the arts are $50 million richer or not.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
