Not trying to change the world.

I been obsessing over something for some months now, and I think I need to go into a little more depth on the subject here than I did in those 3 or 4 sentences I posted on Facebook a couple of weeks or so ago.  I'm a big fan of TED talks and just yesterday I was watching this video on their website, TED.com.  It's a talk by a French street artist calling himself JR. It's really inspiring stuff.  He travels the world and goes to places where he's heard about terrible things happening to underrepresented populations, and uses his art to give those people a voice (and some cases, their first-ever waterproof roofs).  It's really amazing what he does, and I have to admit that there were a few points in his presentation when I teared up a little bit at the poignancy of the whole thing.  In the end he wraps up with a plug for a new global art project he's starting which is designed apparently to bring people together to essentially clone his work all over the world.  It's really really amazing.  Watch  the video.  I put a link above, but once more, to make sure you see it so you understand what I'm talking about here's the full URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/jr_s_ted_prize_wish_use_art_to_turn_the_world_inside_out.html. Go and watch it.  Preferably before reading the rest of this post, if you have the time.  It's about 25 minutes long.

All of that having been said (and I really can't stress how important I think JR's work is, and how much I respect what he's doing), I just feel the need to say for the record that this is not something in which I have any interest whatsoever in being involved.  At all.  Why?  Because I'm not here to change the world.  My art is not a political tool.  I don't want this to be interpreted to mean that I don't think there's a time and place and a even a need for there to be artists doing that sort of thing, but it's not for me, because I feel I have an even greater calling: Beauty.

That's it.  Just raw beauty.  And the places where I find it-- mixing my cream into my coffee slowly, following rainbow-splayed auto oil as it runs in street puddles, staring at clouds that striate across the sky tiered upside-down making impossibly huge waves, and in splashed paint-- are not places that are easily politicized.  In fact, I think it might be fair to say that if I assume the optimism that must be present in any revolutionary trying to change the world, it must be possible that one day in the future, there will not longer be a need for JR's poignant images to be plastered across the world.  No one will care anymore about those faces in a few hundred years if the revolution is successful and global controls are set in place which make things like famine, thirst, disease, corruption, poverty, human rights abuse, climate change, war, rape, inequality, and a whole host of other human weaknesses and blights obsolete.  An artist who is a true optimist and who believes firmly and unalterably that humankind can become a better species has an opportunity, and perhaps even a duty, to find ways to communicate beauty which transcend politics.  Beauty for its own sake.  Beauty that is beautiful at any time, in any place, under any political situation, to any person.

I won't go so far as to say that my work achieves this ideal, but I will say it's something for which I strive.  I'm not trying to change the world.  I'm trying to create beauty within it, knowing that nothing I can create can make the world more beautiful than it already is, but can perhaps help other people see beauty they might have otherwise missed. 

That this is anything other than a noble ideal is one I can't fathom, but somehow, seeing work like JR's (and other revolutionaries like him) is making me feel lately like kind of a jerk.  I mean, who the fuck am I to say that the pursuit of new and better ways to make swirly paint more swirly is somehow more important than bringing impoverished communities together under a banner of hope and giving them a voice, right? 

For the moment, I have to admit this is something with which I'm still wrestling. Perhaps I'm wrong, but for the moment, I'm going to continue working and experimenting under the assumption that Beauty, not Politics, is the highest ideal. I'm not trying to change the world, I'm just painting in it.

-JRB