[American Studies] on Gordon Parks's [American Gothic]

            The study of the African-American and the study of America are one in the same; a people struggling to make a home in a hostile condition made hostile by their very angst.

            If a people are rendered invisible, it is a twofold-fault; the oppressor wielding intolerance and the oppressed for allowing what is being wielded to continuously hit target at will. The oppressor knows how to oppress, as once upon at time, they were the oppressed and possess the memory and methodology of how their dethroned oppressors were so effective until their sackings; the oppressed knows only the blindness that comes from the swollen, blackening eyes were clouts cease to land, because the oppressed knows from their former oppressors the mistakes those oppressors made which allowed them to break free; they allowed them to see, to gather and obtain visions, they allowed them to dream.

            History never repeats itself, every event in history, whilst having all the seemings of similarities, are bred by different circumstances and different events. A woman holds a broom in one hand and a mop in the other, a background of the American Flag. Her black skin represents the oppressed, one of the few of the American lands, her gender implies she must also mind men of all races, lest she fall victim to an opposing gender only content with her subjugation, the mop and broom, cleaning tools, are the tools used to sweep injustice under the rug of an American Ideal gone awry, which we see in the background, fifty stars, fifty states, fifty separate tales of horror and heinous forging of an American Empire.

[The Exterminating Dream III] Moveable Easels

            A true artistic ideal is the one that obliterates all in the name of its very creation; the artist, is this creative animal that lives a quiet life amongst the noise, behaving only recklessly on paper and canvas. With every urge to create arrives a frantic urge to recreate, what they have created and what has been created by another, ideal in need of updates, albums left to wither and denied their right to bloom in a new generations forfeiting their own right to turn around, take a step back and discover what it is that caused what they love today to become.

            Every man (anthropos) must account for their bruises and heal those very wounds if indeed they are to move past them; the artist deny such healing, expose the grotesque of the deep, impacted injury, photography, paint it, describe the hideous preludes and epilogues surrounding the impact, becomes the wound and becomes beautiful because of them. The trends of today, they are embrace and are happily left to be had by the sycophants fixed on being misers of gray matter; the art of yesterday becomes the billboards for the artist of today to not aspire to become as, to be aspire to become as they are, as for every individual, comes an individual stylism unique to their personality, their environment, fears, indifference and ambivalences, the very thing that breeds them.

[To Be a Man] A Poem

[To Be a Man]

There’s only one way to be a

better man; & that way,

is not the way of a manufactured

man,

A phantom of a phantom,

where compromised become of

defects, defection,

& feet falling forward cease

to footsteps from behind;

So there is a flaw,

there seem to be many,

I hear tell, as the census takers

take no time in figuring,

then from them,

the man,

who is not so much more worse off

than the next being applauded,

sees in himself acclimation,

henceforth never a change,

a wink dwindling beyond as far

as I will ever see-

[From the Age of 5] on Dorothea Lange's [Damaged Child]

            Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “From the age of 5 to the man I am now, is but a step; from birth to the age of 5 is an appalling distance.” Every childhood can be said to be plagued by the length it takes to cross such appalling distances. Every adult can remember some point in time in their childhood where they first experienced danger, peril, a closing window or a grip suddenly slipping loose of its object, sending them into what might have seem the longest free-fall, the true lesson and introductory of physics.

            When a child receives love, a child receives all potential this world has to offer; when denied that love, they become another species manoeuvring off instinct to simply survive. Once survival becomes a child number one instinct, a return to a state of compassion or want of compassion is almost nil or an improbability; orphaned children usually don’t take to crying because they know it’s no point, it’s a waste of energy, and as for skills, they are honed over a long stretch of loneliness in a world that has taken from this, for some unfathomable reason, a family, so what they never find is a reason to care for anyone else beyond what they need and who they need to scuttle, to survive.

[Nourishing Humankind] on Brassai's [Transmutation]

            The objects in this life changing form to continue living this life in innumerable, time immemorial, grandiose. So against all things that change form, or are forced to, those that refuse to evolve, find not a single strand of change, we hail and remain in awe of its ability to survive even the fittest.

            The woman, the female of the human species, has only undergone few shifts, giving over cultures from matrilineal to matrilineal, upgrading their social status to equal those patriarchs in the latter portion of human existence but never a physical or genetic shape shift. The breast, the confidence, the pride, the illicit and nurturing spearhead of the woman can be said to be the representation of woman in all regards; from infancy, men suckle the breast of their mother to gain nourishment to grow, men in intimacy suckle the breast to assuage their own desires and light a flame to her erogenous zone, the double mastectomy necessary to spare a woman’s life when under the plague of irregular and rogue cell production have been said to lead to a woman’s melancholia, feeling that part of their very femininity has been forfeited. And as the world races for arms, kills itself with arms and ends their own lives at the barrel-end of the same arms used to take away the life of the next unfortunate, humanity remains because the woman remains, abundant, at the ready and willing to entertain the faltering male patriarch she’s forever in wonder as to why any culture would have been left in their coarse and incapable hands.

[Mother & Child] On Diane Arbus's [Woman Carrying Child in Central Park]

          William Tammeus once quoted “You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back.” Diane Arbus captures this very image, the bond between mother and child, an indivisible, unbreakable bond, both indefinite and defying all definitions of both natural and social world.

 

          A child nestled in the arms of his mother falls directly into the social compact, the very few, infinite. We were born individually but we weren’t meant to live that way. There is a vast craving for the contact of another, for the love of another, of others, an unspeakable bond which becomes ample to explain all, leaving nothing unsaid even without anything having been said.

 

          The day is a gloomy one, or one advancing quickly, unstoppably into the evening, people are scattering or conglomerate in the backdrop, allowing the scenario to unfold, possessing character into sharp disbelief and what is left, what is stark, apparent and accurate, is an artistic ideal that obliterates everything, a shot of one woman who nourishes a child deep into a dream-world, keeps him safe while he’s dreaming, which nourishes a future, where all humanity finds continuum.

[Suffer the Little Children] on Apolo Torres's [Girl on side the Building]

            Street art can be defined as everyday reminders and representative of the beauty we can easily lose in melancholia during our everyday monotony. Perhaps the most fulfilling of mention, too, one of the most hideous of street art able to be found the world over, is Apolo Torres’s [Girl Reaching Above the City].

            There are skyscrapers, a sea-set in the sky above the city, an adorable child on the tip of her toes, extending herself, a backpack on her back representing growth in intellect and education. At the base of her feet, there is a snack she’s unaware of, winding around her legs and a Pit-Viper impishly looking up at her. We cannot assume but we can establish what snakes have always represented since biblical times and how childhood, that moment where the future generations grows, learns and blooms, are ensconced in potential victimhood, surrounded by a jungle of predators seeking to prey upon their naivety.

            Apolo Torres’s depiction, which can be found alongside an apartment building housing families, is a necessary image, a frightening image, the sort one has no desire to see yet find themselves unable to turn away when the event unfolds. If ever there are any visions the masses should take in, it is the art, representing life, representing danger, representing a will for longevity in the form of caution.

[When They Come] on Henri Cartier-Bresson's [Acapulco Market, 1963]

            They come, they go, but she stays and never goes.

Flocks of tourist descend upon the place she always called home and because she has always called this place home, there is nothing significant that she can place her finger on as to why anyone would love it so much. She looks to her right, apprehensively, with apprehensive eyes, clean bar and bottles, aware that with travel, comes travellers who want to blend their experience with a bit of drunken delirium, one-night stands, lingering nostalgia and hindsight, where all markets, girls at bars and regrets will never be to be no more.

            Henri Cartier-Bresson could have easily been one of those transients to the exotic unexplored becoming the exploited cliché destination, his photograph complicit, an aggravating accessory so beautifully displayed in immortality, still image of a woman who clearly has indifference to who comes, who goes, because she’ll never go to return.

[Hold on to Nothing] on Bresson's [Simplified Pool]

            Wrap your legs around me, throw your body back into the effortless, lazy tides and feel how the breeze blows for you, how the water chills your skin and my touch a-lines……..

            You are naked before me now, then again, you’ve always been, a spectacle a man as myself adores, always with a sense of drama, always able to cajole a smile, lift you free of anything that may dare to keep the true you from me, from nature, from all that belongs to us at any given moment.

            Now if this tide turns, I’ll turn you along with it. If the water chills you more than any body should be chilled, I’ll find a way to bring myself closer, an impossibility we both would be astounded to witness. So hold on to nothing as I hold on to you, never let go of your drift and buoyancy a-top of the surface as I stand on both feet, waist deep, waiting for you to wake from your dream world, and come into the one I am brewing of you……

[No Matter Where We Are] On Kubrick's [Couple Kissing in an Alley]

            It doesn’t matter where we are, who is watching, or why we have not a semblance of understanding of where we are whenever we are near one another; all that we know is that we are defeated when attempting to keep our hands off each other. Amour Fou, the French call it, everything, every desire consumed by fire, every passion falling over the brim, overflowing, flooding every rational state, every sense warning us that we are no good for each other.

            If we can do anything for ourselves, let us not come into each other’s presence, let us divide, even differentiate those commonalities, even lie if necessary, break the enslavement we’ve created ourselves for one another; for once, let’s be attentive to all who witness long enough to know that we will destroy one another and if we aren’t careful, be the death of one another.

[The Dream to the Highest Bidder]

            Harlem through the lens of Parks can be considered America through the eyes of the working class and the underprivileged. A “For Sale” is dictates that one’s lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, that “pursuit of happiness” can be auctioned off to the highest bidder, that one dream can be easily siphoned off if survival of the fittest is the evolutionary term we know it to be, the excuse we see it to be today; an excuse to explain away our own selfishness, murder without regard to the laws, paying the bribe, which is the only thing that separates them and other scofflaws.

            A contract without the lifelong owner’s consent nor consultation, a fee passed between two hands covered with black gloves, heads covered with black hats, no refunds implied in a market where implications are never the need when currency makes it redundant.

            And what is to become of those dreams dreamed so long that they are no longer capable of self-renewing? Those night terrors feared so long that those who have feared them all their life have become inseparable to their very myth? No monopoly in human suffering exists in the grand scheme of profit, and no one is immune to becoming a victim when the buyer possesses more than you happen to possess.

[The Rise & Revolt] On Gordon Parks's [I Am You]

            In an effort to separate ourselves from the most undesirable penalties or events, we vilify; it’s an uncanny, unfortunate defense mechanism but humans, humanity, has proven it is willing to do whatever it takes to survive, even if that survival determines the demise of another species, a dictated lesser species.

            In Gordon Park’s [I am You], an African-American man emerges from a man-hole in the ground. The camera captures this emergence at an equivalent level as would be someone willing to see eye to eye, wanting to see this man rising. Below our feet, there is another world, where all things unwanted are discarded and flow with the collective rest into the oblivion of those walking above short-term memories.

            But what happens when someone discarded refused to be discarded, beyond that, when the one refusing to be discarded, in their very refusal, inspire the rest to denounce their disenfranchisement? Parks photographs the beginning of a revolution, how it takes one of many various forms, and what appears to us a man just emerging from a pot hole, its representation for the capitalist, adrift in their greed, fearing a revolt, fearing a resurrection from the once silenced.