Wednesday, October 29

participation

Yesterday I embarked on an artistic expedition to downtown Chicago.

The exhibition of Omer Fast was really thought-provoking. At first I was just confused and not understanding the message. But when I was starting to jot things down I began grasping the point. So often we just look at a piece of art and intuitively label it "obscure" without bothering to understand it. I'm guilty of that myself. I forget that artists do have the desire to make their works accessible, otherwise it wouldn't be on display in a museum. Although often it takes the most imaginative and thoughtful viewer to extract that message.

So what I took from The Casting was a realization of what media have become. An American soldier was interviewed and at the end of the interview, the interviewer explained that his story took 30 minutes, which was too long for anyone's attention span. Then the interviewer asked the guy to improvise, which he did, telling a story about his first date with a self-destructive German girl. When I realized the effects the two different narratives had on me (they were told simultaneously and interchangeably) I was ashamed. I felt very little emotion when watching the clips of the guy shooting at some civilian's car. A guy died, there was blood and a crying Iraqi woman, but it was what I expected giving the context. For some reason, because war is not occuring before my eyes, it's almost surreal to me. However, during the other clips where events of his date were shown, I was so much more interested. When the girl took off her clothes and showed all the scars on her body from cutting herself, I was so appalled, disgusted, but also sympathetic.

For some reason, the narrative of some emo girl just affected me so much more. How is the girl's pain any less than that of the Iraqi woman? Why do I identify myself with sappy love stories but not true stories of soldiers at war? Why have we desensitized ourselves with the truth about war and instead choose sappy tearjerkers as our emotional outlet? What roles do we expect media to play in our lives? Is it merely entertainment? Or is it something that requires participation and action? Do media make us passive and complacent? So for the duration of a movie, we feel things we want to feel and can resume our lives after we leave the theater? Or can media be more? Is it something that can get us to think more deeply? So we are not a passive audience, generating feelings on command? Can media force us to see things we need to see? For us to come to conclusions on our own? Those are my aspirations.