January 2021: The Art of Making Sure to Remember
Dear lovely readers,
In Kogonada’s Columbus (2017), a disillusioned son travels to Indiana to care for his sick father. While there, Jin (John Cho) befriends a young woman, Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), who deeply admires architecture and its cultural influences—she has studied each and every landmark in the town of Columbus. Throughout the film, Jin and Casey, seemingly at odds in terms of life philosophies, become close friends. They spend their time visiting the town’s innovative structures and debating what, exactly, art means. Here, the film offers a contemplative meditation on art, parsing two critical questions: What does art owe us? What do we owe art?
During one scene, Jin and Casey stand in front of the Regional Mental Health Center, a building designed by renowned architect James Polshek. Usually critical of the alleged social merits of architecture, Jin pauses, thoughtful, and crosses his arms in the afternoon light. He says, “[Polshek] had this idea…of architecture being a sort of healing art, that it had the power to restore, that architects should be responsible…All the details of this building are mindful of that responsibility, especially since it was structured for mental health. This building was meant to be both a literal and metaphoric bridge.”
In a 2014 interview with Metropolis Magazine, Polshek himself voiced his personal ideology, explaining, “I became an architect because I understood even at the age of 19 or 20 years old, that every building had consequences. Every building was inherently a social critique. I’ve had arguments with other architects about the indivisibility of politics and architecture, but that’s something that I grew up with and it has never left me.”
As a writer and filmmaker, I, too, have considered the indivisibility of politics and art. While in graduate school, class debates often centered on the amorphous ethical limits of documentary filmmaking. Like all forms of art, a critical relationship exists between intention and execution. Many documentaries attempt to fulfill lofty social principles: to combat cultural alienation; to empower marginalized communities; to deconstruct crippling taboos. However, it is important, always, not to dehumanize the participants that we ostensibly hope to “empower.” Too many times, I watched films that treated their film participants like symbols, rather than people. They were “messages” that the documentarians could construct—and aggressively provoke. In turn, casting their intentions as admirable efforts of justice led to a normalization of their unethical behavior. What I learned is that it is incredibly tempting to service the art, the story, above all else—but these are real people with real lives.
In this way, I do not think you can “remove” politics from art. In fact, I think the attempt to do so is itself a political move—it is a clear example of privilege, of erasure, of ignorance. It is a privilege to not have to think about the hard realities of identity-based discrimination and, even worse, to pretend it does not exist.
Consider the paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Robert S. Duncanson.
During the nineteenth century, American landscape painting frequently emphasized the supposedly benevolent accessibility of colonization, particularly as it related to land expansion. Many of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings, such as Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868) and Rocky Mountain Landscape (1870), frame the untouched waters of America as a peaceful, highly traversable opportunity for geographical growth. In both paintings, the river is smooth and placid; celestial beams of light grace the edges of the water. Bierstadt’s immersive composition suggests that the colonization of American land is predestined: a holy glow pierces the water’s edge, as if beckoning its viewers to come forward and reap the benefits of a land that God himself has approved. In this way, his works function as a narrative compass, guiding a positive emotional response to westward expansion.
Yet, Bierstadt’s paintings further propagate the oppressive myth of the empty land—no indigenous groups appear in his painstaking constructions of an “untouched” world. The bodies of water, their unmarred surfaces, highlight a sense of amity that quells the violent reality of colonization.
In contrast, the myth of colonial predestination is quietly dispelled through the work of Robert S. Duncanson, a landscape painter of European and African heritage who lived as a free man in Cincinnati. Produced in 1851, Duncanson’s Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River subverts the hallowed depictions of American soil. In contrast to the waters of Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain Landscape, the river is a darker, deeper color, untouched by a symbolic divine light. Across the way, travel is blocked by fallen, blasted trees.
In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, “The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”
In this way, Duncanson de-sanctifies American colonization; he quietly strips away the self-aggrandizing touch of God’s approval. Duncanson’s painting rejects the colonialist mythos of the “ways of God” as seen in Bierstadt’s art; he disavows the consecrated “ways of the master” and instead shows the American landscape from the perspective of one who has had to validate his freedom in the face of oppression.
Moreover, while both Bierstadt and Duncanson paint the reflections of their landscapes in bodies of water, the meanings differ when acknowledging their separate histories. As noted above, Bierstadt’s works embrace the warm light of the sun—this same pious light bleeds into the rivers as a way to summon travelers forward. While Duncanson’s Blue Hole, Flood Waters can also be read as a site of possibility, his river’s “possibility” likely differs from the hope of American expansion. Instead, this new landscape, as depicted in the water’s reflective light, may indicate the significance of how a change in space can be the difference between freedom and enslavement. Duncanson spent much of his time in Cincinnati, painting landscapes with a view of the Ohio River. Across this same water, the violent reality of slavery endured. He was presumably aware of the potency—and chance for great change and freedom—that a body of water could offer.
The powerful kinds of art, the architecture and the films and the paintings that stick to your skin, are moments of respite. To be “political” is to acknowledge the humanity of all humans—and to fight for those who are so often dehumanized. As I have grown older, I no longer feel the need to force myself to “enjoy” a piece of cinema that displays misogyny, no matter how subtle or “subconscious.” Frankly, I’m over it. The reality of violence against women too often becomes a conversational talking point, an opportunity for people to dissect and discuss “art vs. the artist” and whether it is rational to turn our backs on a canon of supposed classics because an artist has engaged in unethical behavior. It hurts, of course, to witness the ways in which misogyny is happily ignored to make way for cinematic “masterpieces.” It hurts, of course, to witness the ways women and their lived experiences are cast aside for fiction.
In an excellent essay titled “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” Rebecca Solnit asserts, “You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”
And so, again, I ask: What do you want to say with your art? What do you want art to say to you?
Of course, it is not necessary to like protagonists in order to enjoy the story—far from it. But there has to be some shred of human truth within their arc that demands attention, that makes the reader understand (if only a little bit) their motivations, their reasons for why they act the way they do. The character has to be compelling, even if what is compelling is a dark, mean thought usually pushed to the side.
It is why I enjoy Hamlet, which follows an entitled prick complaining in empty rooms just to hear his own brilliance. It is why I enjoy Wuthering Heights, which details the story of two terribly selfish people tearing their lives apart over an unhealthy obsession. It is why the television show Breaking Bad has thousands of viewers rooting for an increasingly evil meth dealer. Their pain, their apathy, their savagely ignoble desires, ignite a sense of catharsis to those bearing witness to their destruction. Sympathizing with them—rooting for them—is an uncomfortable, but familiar, feeling. These characters have enticed us with their rich storylines and their unsettling need to probe both literal and figurative wounds.
As such, they succeed as innovative, thought-provoking works of art when their characters exhibit a complexity, a spark, which allows the reader to burrow in their skin. Understanding someone once considered inscrutable, understanding someone naïve or irrational or downright cruel, is both terrifying and captivating. It forces us to mentally stretch beyond the confines of a comfortable, familiar perspective and think.
And I suppose that is what I am looking for—some kind of connection.
As an editor in high school, my most clarifying moments involved the articles where I sought to question and push back against misperceptions within the hierarchy of my Catholic high school. Here, I wrote about my summers in Brazil, sharing conversations I had with Benedictine monks in São Paulo, with teenagers in Santana, with my grandparents in their home on Rua Salete; it was an attempt to bridge the chasm between this small school in Rhode Island and the grounded reality of other experiences, other dreams, other people. As a Latinx student, I wanted to show that “difference” was not a flaw, but a strength, and that we all possessed unexpected truths linking us together.
While a teenager at the apex of Twilight fanaticism, I reviewed and analyzed a few of the franchise’s films as they premiered; I broke down the moments that stuck in my brain, pondering the uneven power dynamics between Edward and Bella, his controlling personality, her unassuming passivity. In a sneaky way, I was trying to draw connections between these characters and the frustrating relationship tenets propagated in my Faith & Life classes. The double standards imposed upon the young women and men in my class infuriated me. I needed to talk about it. I wrote because I had to write, because I needed to explore and poke at and make sense of the world around me.
Sometimes, it seemed unclear whether anyone else was really listening.
Then, one morning, Brother Francis, a monk and physics teacher, approached me. He told me that he always read my articles in the paper. They made him think. It was here that I realized the wide-ranging capacity of art to reach readers with opposing viewpoints, opening up opportunities for reflection and recognition.
With art, I have learned, over and over, that we are all people who are simply trying to do good—and sometimes we will fail. Not because we are evil, but because we do not know everything. Not because we are stupid, but because we have all internalized damaging messages that we must actively work to unravel. I want my art to show that it is okay—to make mistakes, to say the wrong thing, to not be a “perfect” human.
As long as we get up every morning, we can begin again.
Love,
Meesh
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