Bilingual

I’ve always considered art to be a language of communication. Sometimes I make art just for the pure joy of playing with orange fabric, but most of the time it’s because I’m trying to articulate something. Like language, art has formal rules and structures, made to be followed, ignored, or flat out rebelled against. They both evolve with their generations, subtracting obsolete phrases and adding new colloquialisms as needed to fulfill their need to say something, to communicate.

We make words when we need them. I love the German fondness for creating wildly descriptive compound words: “the-pants-with-the-pockets-made-of-blue-cotton” kind of words. I also love the American fondness for creating humorous contractions like “bro-mance” that, in their tight shorthand, tell us volumes about the depth of the friendship between the men the word refers to.

You may ask why make art if we have words? Surely we can express ourselves adequately with the richness of our language, right? And, indeed, our language is rich. Consider the myriad ways to discuss the blue of the sky. Deep, cloudless, summer blue. The cold gray-blue of a frosty winter morning. The foreboding grey-blue that says a storm is coming. The clean, sweet blue after it has passed. Yet despite such range, language can still fail – just think back to the last high stakes misunderstanding you had with a loved one, where it was mostly about one of you assuming that the other meant THIS with those words, when what was really meant was THAT.

And then there is the noise, the cacophony of mass media in a busy life. Buy this, buy that. Vote for this, vote for that. Look at this, be shocked by that. Worry about this, fret about that. And so, with a nod to Guy Debord, in the midst of this spectacle clamoring for our attention we tune out, turn off. Only something really big, or really different, might make us look up, take notice. And this is where I think art can function most powerfully. It can deliver the same message in faceted detail or laser focused precision. Through its imagery, design, and color, it can shout all the words that we can no longer hear, not to mention say all the words that we might be afraid to speak out loud. Art can turn a short story into an epic, and deliver a deeply complicated concept in a one-liner. It can translate all that noise into the clear, ringing peal of a bell. In short, art speaks.

And so in the middle of the media’s attention to gay suicides and teen bullying, the humanizing magazine photos and slickly designed infographics, the viral video “It Gets Better” campaigns and the topical plot lines of TV series such as Glee, I offer you this piece of art by David Wojnarowicz: Untitled (One Day This Kid…)

(With thanks to P.P.O.W, the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, the Trevor Project, and Tyler Green).