art – Thoughts from Rose Avenue

Among the newsworthy events during our stay in the UK (such as the death of the Queen and the self-destruction of the Prime Minister) was the attack on Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” by soup-wielding climate activists at London’s National Gallery. Debra and I happened to be in the National Gallery a few days after the incident, and we were surprised to see “Sunflowers” looking as good as new, with not even a residual mark on the wall to which the perpetrators had reportedly superglued themselves. Still, each succeeding attack on a piece of art increases the danger that permanent damage will be done.

Climate change is the most urgent crisis facing humanity, but doing anything about it has proved to be politically challenging. The protestors’ aim was clearly to shock our leaders (or to shock us into pressuring our leaders) into taking action, but — as with most such stunts — they don’t appear to have succeeded. Everyone was shocked, all right, but the outcome has not been bold action against climate change; it’s been bold action to curtail the smuggling of groceries into art museums.

I remember, about twenty years ago, hearing an interview with a skateboarder on public radio. At the time, many people were upset about the damage done to public and private property by young people doing tricky maneuvers on skateboards. The skateboarder being interviewed said that he had no desire to cause harm. “Look, all I want to do is skate,” he said. In short, if skateboarding caused property damage, that was regrettable; but if the alternative was not to skate — that was unthinkable.

I think of that skateboarder when I consider the tactics used by climate activists. I know that they have no real desire to ruin priceless works of art. But if the alternative is to let the world continue burning fossil fuels as if there were no consequences, then that alternative is unacceptable.

Of course, in each case we’re being presented with a false dilemma. In the case of the skateboarder, it turned out that the options were not limited to skating or not skating. The problem of property damage was largely solved by cities building skateboard parks that were designed to accommodate skaters’ needs. In the case of climate protests — or, for that matter, any political protests — there must be other ways to draw the public’s attention to an urgent cause.

Here’s my idea: Every day, a variety of serious crimes make their way into the news media. Theft, assault, vandalism, fraud — local TV newscasts love them! For obvious reasons, the people who commit these crimes generally prefer to remain nameless. So, why not set up a registry that allows activist organizations to attach their names to otherwise unattributed criminal acts? Imagine, for example…

“This is Channel 11 news, live on the scene at an Exxon-Mobil gasoline station that was robbed earlier this evening. Three intruders made off with an estimated $2,000 in cash. The identities of the robbers are unknown, but the advocacy group Just Stop Oil later took credit for the robbery in an effort to call attention to the dangers of fossil fuels.”

“Police now believe that the fire that consumed a suburban convenience store last night was intentionally set. While arson investigators continue looking for definitive proof of how the fire began, an organization called Extinction Rebellion has claimed responsibility for the blaze, citing it as a warning of more fires to come if global temperatures continue to rise.”

“A spate of carjackings that have roiled the downtown area in the past two weeks have led to an increased police presence on city streets. Although the carjacking incidents appear to be unconnected, the environmental group Climate Emergency Fund claims to be behind them, hoping that they will encourage commuters to abandon their cars in favor of public transportation.”

If more than one group wants to attach its name to an event, a system could be set up that allows naming rights to go to the highest bidder. The result would be better all around: Rather than engage in further lawbreaking to get the public’s attention, activist groups could concentrate on fundraising to sponsor criminal acts that have already been committed. The money raised could go toward compensating the victims of those crimes. And the public would be forced to take notice of environmental and political issues that they might otherwise ignore.

Am I totally serious about this? Of course not. But I hope that similarly outside-the-box thinking will lead to a way for us to curb humanity’s worst instincts without causing unnecessary harm to some of humanity’s greatest achievements.

There’s a literary device called synecdoche, in which a part of something is used to represent the whole. The example that’s usually taught in school is “head of cattle,” a phrase that refers to the whole animal, not just its head; but I’ve never liked that example, because the phrase also contains “of cattle,” which makes it less than pure synecdoche.¹

A better example is the use of “hand” to represent a person, as in “ranch hand” or “stagehand.” I find that use of synecdoche particularly significant, because for me, a person’s hand physically does represent the person. I’ve always paid close attention to hands, to the extent that I tend to recognize and remember people by their hands.² There have been a few occasions when I’ve been reunited with an old school friend whom I haven’t seen in thirty or forty years, and I feel awkward because their face has changed so much as to be virtually unrecognizable; but as soon as I look at their hands, I immediately relax — “Ah, yes, that really is So-and-So.”³

Even better is if I can feel someone’s hands as well as look at them. Unfortunately, as I talked about in “People Say Things,” our society offers very little opportunity to touch each other. Usually all I get is a handshake, which allows me to take at least a brief impression, but in the age of the coronavirus, even that opportunity seems like it’s gone away permanently.

When I go to movies, I tend to sit very close to the screen, mainly because I like to be immersed in the action — I want it to take up my whole field of vision. But another advantage of sitting that close is that I have a really good chance to see the actors’ hands. Looking at their hands is a way to get beyond the artifice of lighting and makeup and costumes, to get a visceral reminder that those were living, breathing people in front of the camera.

My attention to hands tends to show up in my creative work. More than ten years ago, I did a project called “100 Hands,” which took the form of a black-and-white computer display that pulled up random data screens containing photos and quantified assessments of people’s hands. (I especially liked making that, because it gave me a chance to hold one hundred people’s hands and record my pseudo-scientific impressions of their temperature, texture, and degree of moisture.)⁴ More recently, I made “Humandala,” a sort-of mandala made up of body parts, and “Simple Dancers,” a series of images in which dancers are reduced to their most elemental components — hands and feet. This year, in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, I was inspired to make “Chain of Hands,” for which I asked people to send me “hand selfies” from wherever they were sheltering in place, and linked them into a long, unified chain. Not only did that project give me something useful to do during that long lockdown period; it also helped me feel connected with my friends, because (at least virtually) I had their hands in front of me.⁵

As much as I rely on people’s hands to give me a sense of who they are,⁶ there’s a part of me that knows that it’s only an illusion. There’s an old saying that “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” and we do so often get the feeling that when we look into someone’s eyes, we’re seeing deep down into their essence. In reality, while we certainly get lots of subliminal information from minute changes in the size of people’s pupils, we’re not literally seeing inside them.

I’m sure it’s the same with hands. I genuinely sense, when I look at or feel someone’s hands, that I’m getting a glimpse of something beneath the surface. I have to always remind myself that a person’s bodily appearance — whether hands or anything else — does not reveal anything about who they really are. As with eyes, I’m sure that that tiny changes in a hand’s muscle movement, blood flow, and amount of moisture are giving me a sense of someone’s emotional state from moment to moment, but there’s no rational way that a person’s hands can reveal anything essential about them. Still, it feels like they do. I can’t help it. I hope, once this pandemic is over, that I’ll once again be able to get close enough to people to see their hands.

Tag: art

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