Artists! Aroused witnesses! Awaken our stunned senses! Daily, even hourly, our outrage has not dimmed, nor has our courage.
Our work rises from our darkness and aloneness, out of nowhere yet now here, unfiltered, unrequested, insistent, necessary, true as wind, sea, sky. We have work to do, and we are doing it. Together, each of us creates the groundsong for our time of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society.
Let us keep singing our future and never stop.
Recently, with new-found COVID time to clean the studio, I came upon a Fall 2010 edition of Aperture, the contemporary photography magazine. The magazine contains a wonderful thing critically relevant to today: a traveling exhibit of 150 artists in all media titled America: Now and Here, organized by painter Eric Fischl, and accompanied by an E.L. Doctorow essay. The title rhymes so well with the current MAJ theme of Here/Now, and my near-palindrome variation: America: Nowhere/HereNow. The two decades are like bookends, and this issue of the MAJ matches Fischl’s (though traveling digital threads, not blacktop roads).
The art in the 2010 exhibit is wickedly and excitingly diverse, some overtly political, some oblique, sly, surreptitious. But all the work stops cursory looking with the impact of passion, and grants the viewer the privilege of a clear moment of free thought.
Doctorow’s essay feels too familiar in the current moment, it is sobering to realize that so little has changed, and so much has worsened. The great writer has inspired me to mix my words freely and respectfully with his in the summary that follows:
“Artists in America…. Independent entrepreneurs of the imagination, influence each other, though they work and think largely alone. But there are critical moments in our national life when artists do come together as a constituency.”
“Some terrible deep damage to the nation in the aftermath of 9/11 allowed devious arguments to misdirect the American government and the people to adopt the policies of an authoritarian state. Americans found themselves sponsors of torture and endless imprisonment without charge or trial. They discovered themselves subject to illegal government surveillance, and they saw the Constitution disdained, ignored, and disregarded.” Artists of conscience felt impelled to object.
In 2010, a propaganda campaign of fear, wielded like a club, beat the best out of us all. Today, a decade later, we find ourselves riven as a nation and, through the anonymity of social media, beating each other without mercy just for the dark thrill of doing it. Winner take all.
In 2010, Doctorow said, “The realities of scientific evidence are being widely ignored and disparaged. Religious literalism is put in the way of medical advance, and regulatory agencies have been given over to the very industries they were created to regulate.” Sound familiar?
“A government mired in lies and corruption severely alienates its people by supporting gross economic inequalities and provides its public with a passionate, but deeply-flawed rationale through shrill media demagogues shouting down all principled disagreement.” Today, outright lies dubbed “alternate facts” discourage public discourse and reduce it to public scream-fests. From American values that respect and negotiate with differences of opinion, we have become a “my way or the highway” nation; so divided that we actually kill each other regularly and then justify those murders as if they didn’t involve actual lives, families, loved ones and were dry examples of social disorder, partisan politics, opinions, polls, and their heartless ratings.
“We have not wanted to believe that a sitting president and his advisors could have so given themselves to an agenda of social, economic, and environmental deconstruction with such relentless violations of constitutional law as to render themselves, definably, as subversives.” As disgraceful as it was in the early 2000’s, it has become even more so.
How could today, a decade later, feel so much the same and even worse? How could our intentions and progress towards a more equal and peaceful world have reverted to the fatal concepts, industries, and personal behaviors that openly support hate, lies, racism, misogyny, censorship, disease, and indifference to the future? All of these are set in such a poisonous nationalistic rhetoric, rife with hypocrisy for the very Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights that we hold so dear.
I submit that the Trump worldview has undermined our self-understanding as a nation and has shaken our identity even more deeply than 9/11. Today, Democracy itself feels not only actually threatened but imminently at stake.
There are fully 300,000,000 entries on Google from artists around the world responding to COVID, the economy, hunger, fascism, racism, misogyny—the growing critical concentration of today’s memes. Humankind is a family, and this issue of the Maine Arts Journal is our Maine cousin of artists coming together, as Fischl’s 150 did a decade ago, in a loud and impassioned constituency intent on countering this spectrum of negativity with the transformative power of Art.
And so I say, and will say, again and again:
Artists! Aroused witnesses! Awaken our stunned senses! Daily, even hourly, our outrage has not dimmed, nor has our courage.
Our work rises from our darkness and aloneness, out of nowhere yet now here, unfiltered, unrequested, insistent, necessary, true as wind, sea, sky. We have work to do, and we are doing it. Together, each of us creates the groundsong for our time of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society.
Let us keep singing our future and never stop.
Image at top: Alan Crichton, Semaphore: Disaster, watercolor on paper, 7 x 6 in., 2020.