Art to Soothe the Savage Beast
About 45 years ago I lived in a rough part of Seattle and Gomorrah, vacant lots, drugs, gun running, white slaving, stolen goods sold door to door, my introduction to life in the urban ghetto, quite a wake up call for a young idealistic hippie. A few streets over from my house was a block on Yesler Street and 12th where the cops not only patrolled but parked for long stretches to surveil a notorious tavern that called itself a club, not a bar. One day, walking by, I came across a guy with an airbrush painting the warehouse wall facing that gin joint. I asked him what was up and he told me he was painting a mural the length of the block on that concrete block wall. When I heard that I shook my head and said man, they’ll deface that before the paint dries, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think so. ‘They’ll appreciate the art. They won’t touch this.’
I wasn’t an artist then but I thought this yahoo had been eating fairy dust to think the animals down on that block wouldn’t graffiti up his monumental work in a day or two. 25 years later, when I paid a nostalgia visit to my old haunts, that mural was as vibrant and unmarked as when he painted it. Trust me when I tell you that made an impression on me. When committees would ask if I thought my own murals would be vandalized, I would tell them this story. They were about as convinced as I was back then talking to my anonymous artist.
Twenty years ago I became the project manager for the new Visitor Center on the island when our contractor finally got weary of dealing with us artists and went back to his day job. We put sculpture and art on the grounds, built a small Center with a modern design and dropped a 15 foot by 15 foot stained glass window in the front. Folks would drop by to chat with me that summer, about half just wondering what we thought we were doing, who was paying for all this crap, why were screwing up the rural character of their bucolic existence. Bottles were repeatedly tossed against the building and the glass, pellet guns put holes in the mural, a couple of our sculptures were stolen. My faith in the prophesy of that muralist long ago was a bit perforated too.
So yesterday when I went over to measure the broken window some vandals had smashed, intending to put a stained glass panel in as a replacement, figuring, I guess, that my little library in the old 60’s telephone booth would be vandal proofed if it had more art in it, not just literature, imagine my disappointment to discover the door had been shot out and another large window too. Needless to say I didn’t bother to measure anything other than my despondency. Today I’m thinking about my muralist down there in the ghetto and his art that still resonates nearly half a century later. My own mural at the Visitor Center sports bullet holes and cracked panels and the building itself has been kitsched up with posters of animal butts and adolescent humor. I tell myself someday those posters will come down and the Sculpture Park we built will be honored by the citizenry. I tell myself that as I just finished a 21 foot long mural for the island’s new Administration Building which I’m donating. This is the 20th donation of glass murals, something I do to bring an aesthetic to the island and to the area. That’s what I tell myself. And some days I even believe that. But not today. Today I feel like Don Quixote, not just tilting at windmills but moronically building them. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do with that smashed up Little Library of mine.
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Tags: Art As Panacea, Art Therapy South End Style, Art To Soothe the Savages