All the excess we can't unsee

I've recently rewatched a video about artist Cassio Vasconcellos and his artwork OVER[1]. In it he gives viewers insider's access to his process of exploration and development of this aerial image of a massive junkyard. And he does so with purpose and without a trace of righteousness. It's art about our current reality and it's about The Future.

After rewatching the video, I started asking myself what about it has captivated me and what I tend to like in art, generally. I came upon a few thoughts I want to jot down here.

From a young age, I was discouraged from seeing and asking questions about what I saw. It is dispiriting to reflect on how quickly and effectively I learned to unsee. And once well trained in this sorry skill, to carry on into adulthood in the manner that keeps the assembly lines of family, school, workplace, society and government running without a hiccup. Which implies I also learned to move on from one thing to the next without stopping. To make matters more disconcerting, my life has never ceased to be entangled with events, sightings and experiences that are real and cannot be explained, and which I have promptly buried in that shadowy place that holds, among other treassures, inconvenient truths I've learned to unsee. We pay a high price to witness this mad world go on without hiccups or further questions.

Art, I have found, invites us to remember to remember [2]. Today, art adapts to survive in a world saturated with never-ending novelty and incoming images, and any one artwork rarely captures our attention long enough. In order to yield its gifts, art requires that I stop. Long enough to consider what's in front of me and get to know it intimately, remembering, entering the particular world of the artwork, rather than insisting that art fit into mine [3]. At first, stopping may seem like an act of resistance against the modern world, but it is not. Our survival depends on it. We have more than 50,000 nuclear bombs and yet we can't stop making them [4]. Less existentially threatening but even more stupendously stupid, the United States no longer has a use for pennies, yes the 1 cent coins, and yet the U.S. Mint can't stop making those, either, even at a terrible financial loss [5].

Stopping, then, is not only to stop the negative, but to allow the familiar to be considered anew, and to imagine what else might grow from it. That is the beauty of OVER. A junkyard is a junkyard, but/and what else is there when we consider them from the view of overflying birds? What more do they reveal when many of these junkyards are then brought together into a single aerial image? And what could happen if things go on as they have? Stopping is, suddenly, not optional.

I like to think OVER has captivated me because this image is magicked. Its stillnes shows a trajectory towards possible futures no one wants, yet we all collectively are willing to make them happen. It shows a junkyard that doesn't exist, not yet, giving new meaning and significance to the real junkyards that do. It shows a junkyard the size of a city, where discarded airplanes and figther jets look like their tiny toy replicas against the barren, inhospitable landscape where they will spend the rest of their sad rusty afterlives. And the process of how it was magicked, which starts with Cassio's courage to see and inquire, is a wonderful example of how to methodically craft an illusion so that we may stop, and reckon with reality and its inconvenient truths.

OVER brings back into view the discarded in a clever, methodical way. It manipulates and arranges real images to remind us nothing really ever went away to begin with, and must end up somewhere. More basically, that the march of progress leaves behind a trail of...broken stuff. And so it makes me wonder, and consider not only the immediate question: "is this real?", but more profound ones as well, like: "what makes this possible?".

Art, we dare to remember, is what people make with what they sense, feel, fear, desire and imagine. Art doesn't need to be anything else. I happen to like art that makes me stop and look, and invites my curiosity and my imagination to play. Art that is witty and draws a smile in the mind. Art that brings into focus what is true, essential and urgent in a distracted, forgetful world so plainly burdened with excess.

Footnotes

Thank you

To John Berger, and his wonderful Confabulations.

To Jason Kottke, for the invitation to stop and see