Dancing in the... Museum?

Last Thursday I took a group of children to the MFA for a late night visit. By 6 o'clock, which is only the time that we get there, the children are typically already hungry and antsy after having been at school all day and then at the club for three hours. Despite this, they normally do quite well in the museum and are excited to be around the art and to be outside of their normal environment.

The whole way there the kids were singing along to the radio and to each others ipods/phones. When, for a moment, I slipped past a station of rock music from some previous decade there were giggles and cries of "What is this?" "Is this music?" and my personal favorite, "No offense to whoever wrote this song, but this is weird." To my ears, this music was perfectly normal and, to run the risk of sounding like an old cranky lady, much more appropriate for the kids than the songs they listen to at 8-10 years old which all seem to reference sex or drugs with varying degrees of subtlety.

The visit itself went well, apart from a short bickering between two girls and some discrepancies over eating in the can. The kids still hold a certain awe for the museum and the artist we were working with. The project wrapped up a little earlier than planned, so the kids and I took a stroll through the museum on the way back out.

In the Contemporary wing there was a small country band set up and we decided to stay for a song. One or two of the kids started to dance, sticking their feet out in front of them in their interpretation of country dancing. Soon enough there were twelve children bobbing up and down in the middle of the new contemporary art wing at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I walked over to the two employees running the event and asked if it was okay that the children were dancing.

"Of course!" cried one of them, holding her clipboard to her chest as she grinned at the kids. "This is what we want to have happen. We want it to be fun!"

It was fun.

The handful of people gathered to listen to the musicians glanced back to watch the group of flailing children, all maintaining a respectful distance from the art on the walls. The musicians played louder, the audience started to nod along, and the kids were all for it. When the song ended we all applauded, formed a line, and walked out.

The children giggled as we made our way to the exit, pausing so that each of them could touch the Abraham Lincoln Statue, the only piece of art in the museum where the sign says "PLEASE TOUCH." In one evening the kids and seen art, reflected on it, created from it, done something "forbidden" (touching an art piece), and had fun.

As I drove the children back across the Tobin Bridge, listening to them sing to the radio once again, I thought about how the kids would have reacted if they had heard the same music that they were dancing to on the radio. I can only imagine the squeals and giggles of "what is this?" But when they were faced with the real live musicians, they couldn't help but dance.

Originality in the 21st century

When I began to work as an artist I wanted to be completely original, wholly singular. I housed a strong disdain for art history; I didn't want to learn from others or to be influenced by anything. To be influenced at all negated my idea of originality. I wanted to believe that I created in a vacuum, that my thoughts were completely my own. For the same reason I avoided, and still avoid, drugs of any kind, even caffeine for the most part. I didn't want to have to question whether it was my imagination and ingenuity or the influence of some outside factor that created my art.

This was before I took my first art history class, before I worked in a studio with fellow artists and had boundless creative conversations, before I read art criticism and educational theory. In Freire's words, I was ignoring the "tension between the individual and the social practice." In regards to my Enneagram type, which is a 7 for anyone who knows what that means, I was emphasizing my narcissism. I was distrustful, viciously independent, and felt like I needed to prove my artistic integrity.

I vividly remember the day I realized that I had already been influenced, that my culture had already formed and informed me. My associations, my choices, my very ideas had been influenced by the world around me since I first opened my eyes and learned what it meant to scream. After that realization, I opened the floodgates. I had always read anything and everything, unconsciously absorbing the thoughts of my favorite authors, artists, and teachers. But at that point I started to do so consciously, recognizing the connections and revelations that other people could already provide. I learned that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, or the bicycle, or the car. Those were already done and I could use those ideas to move onto something new and wonderful; something completely my own and yet indebted to the rich history of the world.

My eyes opened to the power of having people agree with you and the joy of reading what you already thought. When I talked about this with my sister, she paraphrased for me what she believes is a George Orwell quote: "The greatest books are the ones that tell us what we already know." Because in this large and lonely world, its always nice to realize that you aren't alone in your thoughts.

When I studied and read for art history, psychology, music, and my many other classes or talked endlessly with about anything and everything anyone who would talk back, I found a ready-made support system, a vibrant creative community that has existed for millennia and that to become part of all I had to do was acknowledge its existence. Suddenly, I was much less lonely.

Now when I read something new, the page is covered with exclamation points and stars. I veer away from drawing hearts around passages to preserve some semblance of dignity, and because hearts don't encircle paragraphs well. When I read, look at art, or find some wonderfully exciting person to talk to, I can barely keep myself contained. I can never keep myself still. My hands fly wider and faster the more enthusiastic I get and I edge forward in my seat until I fly back only to edge forward again. Journals, scraps of paper, and texts to myself contain the ideas that I simply could not keep in my head anymore because I wanted to remember them, to share them as others have shared their ideas with me.

I've always hated when people say that there is no such thing as originality, that everything has already been done. If that were true we would cease to move forward, to make progress, to create. Simply because something has already been written, has already been painted, doesn't mean that when I do it again it isn't original. It is through our unique lenses of the world that we create our originality. Degas's sketch of Botticeli's Birth of Venus may have been a copy of that painting, but it is the original of his sketch. If I were to sketch my own version of Degas's sketch, it would be a copy of a copy. But it would also be a copy of an original, and an original in its own right.

With this in mind, I embrace the ready-made creativity, ingenuity, community of my predecessors and my contemporaries. I put my ideas out into the world and wait to see what new connections will come back.