June 30, 2005

Art and Activism

by KATHERINE ALMY

ONE OF THE THINGS THAT FASCINATES ME ABOUT ART is its broad scope and the way that it defies definition.

For many people, art is something beautiful that hangs on a wall or sits on a pedestal. Viewing art can be a contemplative or calming thing. It can be entertainment. These are the lighter aspects of art. It can, however, be argumentative, controversial or downright ugly. I like the definition I found in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Skill; its display or application." Of course, that's not all it says. In fact, it goes on for three-plus columns, but I won't bore you with the details. I like th Photo of Rhodessa Jones is definition because of its simplicity and sweeping implications. That means that a plumber who really knows her job is an artist! The sense of the word that we are more familiar with, that applies only to painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater, is actually a relatively recent one. The OED states that this is "the most usual modern sense of art" and that it "does not occur in any English Dictionary before 1880." Our modern concept that the word "art" only applies to a handful of specific skills and that artists are somehow different from the rest of us is only about 120 years old.

I'm interested in contradicting the notion that artists live in a separate world. They don't -- they live very much in this world, and the best art is the product of their careful analysis of the world around them. One genre that intrigues me is "Activist Art," so when I saw that Dell'Arte's Ensemble Theater Festival included a panel discussion on the topic I decided to check it out. I went to the panel, and I also got to sample a performance by a group that produces and performs "art as social activism." Cultural Odyssey is headed up by Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones [photo at left]. One of their projects came out of Rhodessa's California Arts Council residency in the San Francisco County Jail. The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women is described on the group's website as "a visionary model for using art to transform a population in need." The performance I saw came out of that project.

I'm not a theater critic and I can't speak about the quality of their work as actors. I am principally interested in their role as artists and activists. What is the effect of their work? Well, personally, I was in tears after the first minutes of their performance, and I cried and laughed through the whole thing. Others were equally affected. I got to talk to Rhodessa after the show, and what was telling was the fact that she could not complete a sentence without someone coming up to her and thanking her for the performance and for her work. Complete strangers hugging her and saying, "It was beautiful, thank you so much," "It really touched me," "I love you gals!" The topic of honesty came up a lot in the various conversations I had with the performers and at the panel discussion. I think it was the raw honesty of their performance that made people react so strongly.

Their work also has a beneficial impact on the performers. Some of them were women who started with the project when they were in jail and stuck with it when they got out. Others had never been in the prison system, but valued working closely with other women from different walks of life. Whether they had been in jail before or not, they all had something to teach one another and something to learn from one another. And the effect is multigenerational. One woman, Angie, didn't see her son during the years that she was in prison, but Jhosea, now 8, was with her for the performance. What a different world, new ideas and possibilities he's being exposed to now than when his mother was using drugs or in prison.

Art becomes "activist" when artists are responding to social issues that they are involved with in their communities. Most of us are familiar with Dell'Arte's Korbel series, which spoofs local politics and affairs. Their work is partly entertainment, but it's also part of the social dialogue about matters that concern us all. Michael Fields, artistic director of Dell'Arte, describes it as an opportunity for voices that might not otherwise be heard to express themselves. I brought up the recent Wild Card as an example because it was fairly fresh in my mind. The play originally showed shortly after the Blue Lake Casino opened and imagined Blue Lake after 10 years of the casino's operation. He explained to me that the show was funded by an organization called Animating Democracies and that the grant required them to work with partners. Dell'Arte actually partnered with the casino to produce the show. They brought together several groups of people who wouldn't ordinarily be in the same room to talk about the concerns and benefits of having gambling in the community. Through the show and events following it, residents were able to publicly express their fears about the casino -- fears which, on the whole, have not been realized. Another direct result was that after seeing the play, Marlene Smith ran for City Council and won on the platform of open communication between the council and the casino.

One of the festival panelists, Michael Goodfriend, a senior artist with the Irondale Ensemble Project, said, "If you're an artist and you're trying to tell the truth, you are an activist." He told us about the time he came upon the scene of a murder during a daily run in his neighborhood. He experienced the event as a resident and community member, familiar with the victim and the killer (both teenagers). He also experienced it as an artist, thinking about what it meant to his community and the larger society and how he would express his ideas and feelings. An artist studies what he sees around him, analyzes it, makes sense of it and translates it into a meaningful experience for others. As consumers of art, we do not passively take it in, we respond with our own thoughts and are perhaps inspired to do something. Art is our cultural dialogue, our way of passing down ideas through generations. Because of the complexity of life, there is no way to talk about our experience of it without the use of symbol, gesture, exaggerated movement and color. Thus, we create art -- sometimes a thing of beauty, often ugly. But if it talks honestly about something in someone's life, it is art.

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