Art Issue

Art is not truth. 
Art is the lie that enables us to recognize truth. 



I don't want to do anything.  I don't want to deal with my internship or do my ISP proposal (even though I'm crazy excited about my idea) or get on the train and be gone all day, I want to lie in bed and watch The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes on Netflix and read comics and look at BuzzFeed and think about the screenplay I want to write this winter.  But I have to be an adult.

I have not been making very adult dinners.  I've been making mostly pasta, macaroni and cheese, ramen, and soup, easy things that don't require any prepping, and I'll make a salad or eat bell peppers or carrots and tell myself I'm eating healthy.  The most complicated thing I've made is still those tacos.  Also, note to self: do not put produce in the fridge and leave it there for two weeks and expect it to be okay when you finally pull it out.

A couple weeks ago, I went and looked at my mural for our Pilsen Exploration mural assignments, which was at the corner of 16th and Ashland.  We were all assigned murals in Pilsen that we have to research and take pictures of for a website called Pilsen Portal, which will use our information once it's relaunched.  I ended up having the coolest mural I have literally ever seen.  I picked it because I thought "Dead Opossum" would be interesting, and it was.  It's a mural of an opossum, of course, but it's painted on three sides of a wall, and one of the sides slants, so what you see of the mural all depends on how you look at it.  If you look at the mural from the left, you see a whole, cute opossum.  But if you look at it from the right, you can see the middle of it has a huge chunk taken out of it.  It's creepy and amazing at the same time.  Awkwardly, I took these pictures on different days, but that's ok.

 From the left 

From the right 

It's so cool!! So cool.  It's brilliant.  Even though I saw this a couple weeks ago, I'm still excited about it.  In the assignment, we were asked what we thought the mural signifies, and I think it represents how you can look at something, like Pilsen or Chicago, from one angle, and you see a beautiful city or neighborhood with tourist attractions and big parks and art, and then you look at it from another angle, and you see the dirty politics, the crime, the gangs, and the homeless.  It all depends on how you look at it, and the negative aspects are often hidden from view.  So cool.  Apparently, a famous artist from Belgium painted "Dead Opossum" while he was here for Lollapalooza.  

Last weekend, I went to Chinatown with my roommate, who's been wanting to go since she's from China, and another girl from our apartment.  I don't know what I was thinking before we went, I guess that Chinatown would be one street with a couple stores and restaurants and bakeries and grocery stores, and that'd be it.  But Chinatown is like a mini country.  It's concentrated in a couple of blocks, but everything that's there- the packaging, the signs, the advertisements in the store windows, the food itself- is all in Chinese, and I was so glad Wen was with us, because everyone spoke Chinese and I would've had a hard time ordering or finding my way around.  Looking back, I don't know what I was expecting or why I didn't think it would be that way.  I've just never experienced something like that, I've never been somewhere where everything was written and spoken in a language I didn't understand, and then you walk a block or two and everyone's speaking English again.  You kind of cross over worlds.  It was weird, but also really cool, and I didn't say much, I just observed, I was like, whoa.
We went into a candy store, which had some American candy but also had weird (to me) Chinese candy that I was too scared to try because the packaging was beyond me and I had no idea what I was holding, and snacks, like shrimp chips and strips of dried barbecue squid.  Then we went to this restaurant called Hot Pot, where you got to pick two broths that were put in the middle of the table, and everyone chose and shared meat and vegetables.  Once the broth was boiling you put food in, and it cooked it.  It was really cool, and Wen said it's really popular in China.  I've never done it before and it was expensive, but really, really worth it.  I was okay with the chopsticks at first but by the end of the dinner I think Wen lost her faith in my chopsticking skills.
Some pictures:

One of the things I really love about Chicago is stuff like this.  You get to experience food from all over the world by taking the bus for fifteen minutes.  You walk down a street and it's like you're in another country.  And the whole time you can see the skyscrapers in the distance.  I keep hearing how Chicago is "a city of neighborhoods" and about the different kinds of food and culture, but it's completely another thing to actually experience it, and it's really, really cool. 

Anyways.  I was going to make this post mostly about art.  Last Thursday, my arts seminar went to a film screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center.  It was a collection of short films by Jennifer Reeder.  There were three that had a connecting theme, and were apparently taken from one feature-length screenplay that wasn't working, another short, and a clip from her new film that's being released in 2015.  They all centered around women, either teenage girls who were crazy, or grown women who were crazy.  You saw the women break down, and they all seemed to be falling apart in their heads.  The films were really interesting and they got better as they went on, but they were definitely filmed in a very dark, surreal tone, and reminded me of the kind of things I've studied in class.  They're the kind of films that you need to watch a couple times to really understand them and what the director was trying to do.
The one I liked the most was called  Tears Cannot Restore Her; Therefore I Weep, and it involved a woman standing in front of a deaf classroom translating what the teacher was saying into ASL.  During the lecture, she starts breaking down, and instead of talking about science, she talks about the guy who dumped her and gets really angry and frustrated.  At one point the teacher completely stops talking and looks at her and she just keeps going.  She talks about the guy's new lover, who listened to some rockstar whose name I forgot's records, and in the end one of the students gets up and goes up to her and says, "I hate that rockstar."  It was a cool moment.  It was a little cliché, but Reeder made it her own by having the student's nose suddenly start bleeding, which totally broke the mood and gave the film an otherworldy feel again.  Reeder was there too, and afterwards she talked about the films and answered questions.  It was really cool to go see films that were different and a little weird, and were also made independently, and then to have the person whose vision it was there.  The whole thing was seven dollars- less than it costs to go see a movie at a regular theater.  There are such cool things to go to in Chicago.

And weird things.  Sunday night, my arts seminar went to a concert by Ikue Mori, an audio-visual artist who performs concerts using digitally created soundtracks and visuals that she put together herself.  It was at Constellation, a small blackbox theater that had a really shady entrance.  I was really weirded out because it was way north of Pilsen, and on the way there we went by the blue line stop I get off at to go to my internship, and I totally thought Wicker Park was in a completely different direction from the Loop and now I feel like my concept of the city was totally wrong.  I am completely lost without the Rocky Mountains to tell me which way is west (unless the sun's setting/rising, or I know which way Millennium Park or the lake is).  

Anyways.  Ikue Mori's performance was kind of… weird.  There was a big screen in this theater that showed her visuals, and it was set to the music and kind of like a very abstract music video.  It was a live performance; it was kind of like she was a dj, she was adding and mixing the sound.  It's hard to explain, you kind of had to be there, but the screen was a blend of colors and shapes, and it reminded me of the Ring, there were flies and bugs and skeletons and these creepy dolls that were moving like puppets. Then there were moving bubbles and shapes that blended and repeated that, as Susannah put it, were like screen savers. The music is hard to describe.  I don't think it was instruments.  I think all the sounds were created digitally, and they sounded like raindrops, screeching, the crush of a static-y TV screen, drums, and little plops and dinks.  Basically.  

There's some art I understand, and some I don't.  The art I understand I'm like yeah this is beautiful, I could stand here and look at this for a half an hour and I feel awed standing in front of it (like the "Dead Opossum"), and then there's art that I feel like is just weird.  People say "that was amazing" and they go into some ad-lib, crazy interpretation and I do not get it at all.  This was one of those things I felt was just weird.  Some people in our class really liked it, and some people really hated it.  I was ok with it.  It wasn't something I would've paid for on my own to go see, and when it first started I thought it was going to be two hours long and I thought, we get this for two hours?  But it lasted maybe 45 minutes, so it wasn't that bad.  Definitely the weirdest concert I've ever been to.  And now I have something to compare to, I can think, at least that wasn't as bad/as weird as the Ikue Mori performance.

Another thing that we went to that had weird art, but art I understood a lot more, was the Intuit, a gallery for outsider art/self-taught art, which is just what it sounds like: art created by people outside the mainstream, and people who teach themselves their craft.  It's amazing art by invisible people. We got a tour of the gallery, and the stuff here was also pretty weird but I liked it.

Here's a painting of a buff Bill Clinton: 

And some clay heads:

A really creepy head whose eyes melted during production:

Also one of the coolest paintings I have ever seen.  The picture is awkwardly sideways.  But I could study this for hours, and I would totally buy it with my imaginary money for my imaginary apartment:

Again weird, but understandable.

The day after the Intuit gallery, the whole group went to Little Village and had a tour with Kim Wasserman, an amazing activist who organized the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) and was a major voice in shutting down the Crawford coal plant in the neighborhood.  For decades, the smokestacks from the plant (which wasn't even producing coal for Chicago or Illinois) emitted toxins and coal dust would settle over the neighborhood.  People began to realize the health effects of this; kids were having asthma attacks, thousands were staying home from school and work because they got sick, and eventually it was discovered that the pollution was killing 40 people every year.  The community came together to shut the coal plant down.  They've done other incredible things like create a brand new park, and have brought environmental issues to politicans' and citizens' attention.  And Little Village has had a lot of environmental issues to deal with that have required the whole community's effort to fix.  Wasserman explained to us how industrial the neighborhood is, and when they've built things like new schools and new parks, they've had a lot of issues with contaminated soil.  For the new park, they literally have to build it eight feet above ground because the soil there is contaminated up to twenty feet underground.  Basically, you have to climb a little hill to get to the park.  

Wasserman was so passionate and so tough.  She really believed in making her community better, and in the power of the people.  Robyn also said that she never gives tours for anyone except our group, and I really appreciate the tour, because it was amazing.  

At the end, we went to this great ice cream shop, Azucar, where you could get two scoops of two different flavors for $1.75.  It was like the Cheesecake Factory, we were overwhelmed by all the choices.  Each one looked so good!  There were crazy ones too, like corn and rice.   Nothing makes me feel like a little kid more than getting excited over ice cream.

It's amazing because Little Village is so close to Pilsen, but it seemed like another world.  Like Chinatown, it exists in its own space.  Chicago can change so much, within just a few blocks.  It's things like this that makes me feel a million miles away from Golden, or Knox.

Anyways.  This was going to be about art and I always end up talking about food.  

In my classes at Knox, I've studied the theory that art is never the truth and never can be the truth.  It's always a reproduction, a copy, never the real thing.  I went to the Art Insititute last week with a couple friends, and we went to the René Magritte exhibit, and we actually saw the painting "The Treachery of Images," which I've only ever seen in books and I was so excited and I was actually standing in front of it and looking at the real thing.  It's literally a painting of a pipe, and it says, "This is not a pipe."  Example: 

I saw the real thing!  Ahh.

That painting perfectly captures what I'm going to try to say.  A painting of a pipe can only be that- a painting of a pipe.  We look at the pipe and think, that's a pipe, but really it's not, it's an image of one.  The real thing is the object, placed in your hand.  And few art pieces can be placed in your hands.  Art is a reproduction of what we see and hear, and an attempt to portray what we think and feel.  But it's never the real thing, never the truth.  It's a lie.  But it enables us to recognize the truth, it enables us to see it and feel what the artist felt when they saw it.  And all the different art things we've gone to this week- the films, the outsider art gallery, the weird concert, Magritte- they're lies.  All they are, is expressions of something the artist can only hope we understand.  And it's only through the lie that we get the truth, only through the expression that we understand.  Art is one of the few things that allows us to see through and understand other windows.

- Laura