First I want to thank the University of Southern Maine and Robyn Holman for promoting this exhibit — my short talk will make it clear how important I think it is.
(INSERT FROM END OF TALK: This show of Natasha’s is very important because it rejects the creative economy in favor of the sustainable economy. It embraces the creative society, makes its allegiance with a just economy and a humane community. Natasha, when most other artists were looking the other way, always recognized that the house was on fire, because she has always had the imagination and courage to identify with the disadvantaged and outcast whose world is always in flames.
The obligation of the artist in times like these is to explore, to report, to reject cant, to spit out the artificial sweeteners in our
commercial, suicidal brew. We honor explorers because they are courageous. William Sloane Coffin said there are no other virtues without courage. So we honor the artists who have the courage to tell us the truth. For this is what Keats meant about truth and beauty, they can not be separated. And if compassion and justice are virtues ( and beautiful), they will not exist if there is not courage to demand them. Without that courage we will not survive — either individually of collectively.
James Baldwin said :
People who shut there eyes to reality simply invite there own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Natasha’s paintings show us the reality we have ignored and the destruction denial has wrought, and they make plain what price the monster exacts from our earth and our souls.
Natasha said recently that she has never been better known than she is now and at the same time she has never been poorer. As long as truth and courage are incompatible with the power and money, we will all be in peril. I love Natasha for her conscience, her courage, her compassion, her great talent, her good spirits, her persistence, her insistence that we attend to the victims of our duplicity, her refusal to never shirk the obligation of an artist in our society)
A Dream of Trees Mary Oliver
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way from everywhere.
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.
I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?
When I ask children why they make art, & how they feel making it, the usual replies are:
Entertainment.
To put something on the wall — decoration
To feel good
To make something beautiful.
And always some kid will say, Making art makes me feel most myself. Unlike other subjects in school, when I make art, I’m an individual.
One doesn’t have to be a cynic, just an observer, to wonder if because art promotes individual thinking, feeling, and discovery, promotes self knowledge, the investigation of conscience, that art programs are not being funded in our public schools.
We all know that our culture no longer values individuals. It values over working, no-time-for-the-kids, complacent consumers. Parents trying to make millions or simply trying to make the most of humiliating jobs — they agree that kids need to know how to divide 130 by 17, and that Custer’s mistake was strategic rather than moral.
Art education is an effete luxury, cute for the first grader, a waste of time for the tenth grader who needs a job. And we’ve got TV for entertainment.
So, if you are not encouraging a generation of children to explore their individuality and consciences through art and not rewarding that search, you are also not teaching them how to respond to art. It’s very hard for homogenous people to understand heterogeneous images and words that challenge their vestigial imaginations. Art teaches us to think & feel deeply and with subtlety. What’s a harried, unsubtle, flat screen mom or dad supposed to find in serious art other than resentment at its demands?
But the problem isn’t just that our society fails to encourage art education, art discovery, many of our artists choose the hermetic gimmickry and ingrown conversation of the art world. Curious people looking to art to explain or tell the stories of their lives, looking for an affirmation of conscience, won’t find it there. Rather they find themselves in the presence of an objet d’art that aspires to be a prestigious investment hung in the lobby of General Electric’s corporate headquarters before moving on to the new wing of the museum, both the wing and the art the tax deductible gift of GE’s billionaire CEO. The more expensive and irrelevant the art work, the better.
It is not a long leap from the corporate world’s expansive embrace and simultaneous neutering (this is an important topic, how our culture seeks to, at once, embrace and castrate messages and people subversive to the status quo) — it’s not a long leap to our own “creative economy.” Tony Hoagland’s poem Hard Rain
puts if very well.
Hard Rain
After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.
You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time—
and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
So, why should we as artists and as a society not be humbled with appreciation for an Arts Commission and enlightened state government that tries to enhance the art biz in Maine? What’s wrong with artists enlisting as the good soldiers in the battle for a positive state balance sheet. Win/ win. The problem is that artists are rewarded then for the tax & tourist money they attract rather than the probings of their unfettered imaginations and their willingness to use their freedom to tell the truth. A good soldier in the creative economy, like a good soldier in the market economy, makes something that sells. Serving the public, the common good, is reduced to ringing the cash register rather than leading people to epiphanies of thought and feeling that they need to know to become fully human and fully humane. What sells is what comforts, not what confronts.
When Arthur Miller said, “I think … the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget,” he was not suggesting that people have forgotten how to be willing cogs in the economic machine, he was saying that those willing cogs have forgotten their essential humanity as they compromised their lives away, in fact, become participants in a great exploitation of humanity for the benefit of business.
There is no true art without truth. So, the first obligation of the artist is honesty, witnessing for the truth. What Brad Will died for in Oaxaca a couple of weeks ago. Witnessing for the truth is subversive because it must strip away the masks of hypocrisy. We also all know that when we have serious problems, we can’t fix them if we don’t face the truth about what they are. If the problem is global warming, installing heavy duty windshield wipers to wipe away the heavy duty rain won’t help because the problem is in the brakes, there are no brakes on the system which is causing the problem.
It’s the obligation of the artist to air out our minds & hearts, to throw open the windows & doors of a self-satisfied society whose economic engine runs on exploitation and collateral damage, to show us what’s gnawing in the walls, swaying the roof, and grinding away under the floorboards. I know, some of you are thinking, but what about Matisse, don’t we all need Matisse? Of course we do, but not when blood is dripping from the ceiling onto his old easy chair. Not when the house is on fire.
This show of Natasha’s is very important because it rejects the creative economy in favor of the sustainable economy. It embraces the creative society, makes its allegiance with a just economy and a humane community. Natasha, when most other artists were looking the other way, always recognized that the house was on fire, because she has always had the imagination and courage to identify with the disadvantaged and outcast whose world is always in flames.
The obligation of the artist in times like these is to explore, to report, to reject cant, to spit out the artificial sweeteners in our
commercial, suicidal brew. We honor explorers because they are courageous. William Sloane Coffin said there are no other virtues without courage. So we honor the artists who have the courage to tell us the truth. For this is what Keats meant about truth and beauty, they can not be separated. And if compassion and justice are virtues ( and beautiful), they will not exist if there is not courage to demand them. Without that courage we will not survive — either individually of collectively.
James Baldwin said :
People who shut there eyes to reality simply invite there own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Natasha’s paintings show us the reality we have ignored and the destruction denial has wrought, and they make plain what price the monster exacts from our earth and our souls.
Natasha said recently that she has never been better known than she is now and at the same time she has never been poorer. As long as truth and courage are incompatible with the power and money, we will all be in peril. I love Natasha for her conscience, her courage, her compassion, her great talent, her good spirits, her persistence, her insistence that we attend to the victims of our duplicity, her refusal to never shirk the obligation of an artist in our society.
