IMG_7795 By Pooja Pant

It all comes down to that urge to fascism — maybe a big word to use for art, but I think the right word — it comes down to that urge to fascism to know what’s best for people, to know that some people are of the best and some people are of the worst; the urge to separate the good from the bad and to praise oneself; to decide what covers on what books people ought to read, what songs people ought to be moved by, what art they ought to make, an urge that makes art into a set of laws that take away your freedom rather than a kind of activity that creates freedom or reveals it. It all comes down to the notion that, in the end, there is a social explanation for art, which is to say an explanation of what kind of art you should be ashamed of and what kind of art you should be proud of. It’s the reduction of the mystery of art, where it comes from, where it goes… 

Mask

Tsimshian

1800-30

National Museum of the American Indian

The immense hope, and forbearance Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day  Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled  As night returns bringing doubts  That swarm around the sleeper’s head  But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning  Installs again in cold hope  The air that was yesterday, is what you are,  In so many phases the head slips form the hand.  The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:  What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;  The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream  Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize  The secret sweetness before it turns into life—  Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,  Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves  Its mountain-broad chest. “They were long in coming,  Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them  To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,  Their names honorably grafted on the landscape  To be a memory to me. Until today  We have been living in their shell.  Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,  Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,  And our further progress shall be terrible,  Turning fresh knives in the wounds  In the gulf of recreation, that bare canvas  As matter-of-fact as the traffic and that day’s noise.”  The mountain stopped shaking; its body  Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,  As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls  Who walked here before the great change,  Before the air mirrored us,  Taking the opposite shape of our effort,  Its inseparable comment and corollary  But casting us further and further out.  Wha—what happened? You are with  The orange tree, so that its summer produce  Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently  Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were  Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.  And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,  With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,  We have rolled into another dream.  No use charging the barriers of that other:  It no longer exists. But you,  Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,  We shall soon give all out attention to you.

—John Ashbery, “Spring Day” Art Credit Lottie Hedley

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