Genius at work

Artists are the ones we get to gawk at.

While pundits rant, journalists drone, politicians hedge and various experts wow us with the jargon, artists try to connect, and ask us to think for ourselves.

My recent brushes with art bear this out.

I didn’t expect to like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Sadist murder is not my cup of tea. But friends were keen to see it, so I went. To my surprise, it moved me.

Both protagonists have a strong predilection for justice. Her cyber smarts and his journalist brawn skin the lies off elitist hides. As the Swedish film excoriates malevolence, a US audience, stunned to silence, recognizes our own culture’s obsession with power. I recognize myself, minus the culturalization. What if I’d not been taught this particular version of woman?

Or, take the work of a writer who raised a child in a racially mixed union:

‘White culture persists in holding material affluence as the highest symbol of achievement. The way this plays out in the lives of people of color and those who love them can be summed up in one word: cruelty. We suffer for a lack of basic resources because of the hoarding, the feverish consumerism, and the complete lack of concern by people who have more than they will ever possibly need.’
Ann Filemyr, Loving Across the Boundary

A new play, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, goes to the roots of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tendrils of happenstance and desperation brought two men to a strange discovery 75 years ago: ‘I need to talk to another drunk.’

Stranger yet, Bill W. and Dr. Bob knew they had to pass sobriety on to stay sober themselves. What feat of modern medicine has healed more lives than AA? The play makes you wonder.

I was also there Friday when musicians, actors and dancers told A Soldier’s Tale. Self-awareness hushed us all.

After the show, a man in the audience told us he’d experienced mindless military authority firsthand.

But the play resonated with him even more as a civilian, a playwright pressured to get a ‘real’ job to rake in money and status, coins of the realm.

I think he’s already got the ‘real’ job, one that offers the rest of us a deeper relationship to ourselves and each other than any other kind of job can claim. Artists pour themselves into work that moves us to reconsider our world, change how we treat people, alter how we process information.

So next time you pass a ‘genius at work’ sign, look out for the artists, and look out for you, transforming.

Photo Haw-wee