Come Together, Right Now, Over Me

So thanks to Mike Davis I was supremely depressed by the state of things in this world and why can't things be better than they are. (see blog February 9th, 2009 "We Built This City, We Built This City on Rock (and Greed)" to find out why.

Luckily, my favorite magazine ever (!) Juxtapoz Art & Culture magazine just put out their February 09 issue. juxtapoz.com For those of you not in the know, or who have not been subjected to my incessant ranting about the awesome-ness of Jux, Juxtapoz is a magazine that shines the spotlight on supremely talented contemporary artists who fall under the low-brow/ Pop Surrealism/uncategorizable umbrella. This is not to say that they're not talented in the more technical aspects of art. Some are more on the "graphic/illustration" side like Shag, but others like Ron English and Sas do work that borders on photorealism, with a surreal twist. And one of their most prolific artists is Shepard Fairey, the man behind the Obama "Hope" screenprint that generating lots of love and controversy. (for more see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/arts/design/10fair.html?_r=1)

The reason I bring up Jux is because Marco Berrebi did a great article on this artist named JR, "Art 2.0 and the Apostle of Participative Art." (Juxtapoz, February 2009, pages 60-73) JR takes pictures of every day people, blows up the images, and then literally integrates them into the urban fabric, landscapes, etc., His execution reminds me of the multi-storied "live picture" fountain/"sculptures" by Jaume Plensa in Millennium Park in Chicago, right off South Michigan Avenue and across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago. (see my photos)

If you've never been to Millennium Park, go during the summer so that you can really enjoy these "fountains." They are videos of real people, not celebrities, projected on at least a three-story high scale. As you can tell from my pictures, the people's faces are closely cropped and are passive. They blink, yawn, and stare. Then, every once in a while, they pucker up their mouths as if to whistle or spit, and a fount of water shoots down, often on the delighted children that splash in the water below. (see photo on right) Everyone I've observed that goes near the fountains, there are two of them that, er, face each other, is always delighted by the spectacle. This is how art should be- funny, accessible, and integrated into the landscape.

JR, however, has a more political bent to his work. The work I was most moved by was his piece "Face2Face" www.face2faceproject.com (see photo below left) Together with a writer named Marco, they launched the biggest street art exhibition ever and took photographs of Israelis and Palestinians. But they asked the people to make silly faces.

Now, when you think of the Israelis and the Palestinian people you see in the news, you rarely, if ever, see them making funny faces. However, for this work, people pulled out their slapstick grins, their crossed-eyes, their stuck-out tongues. And I was deeply touched by this respectful but also joyful expression of humanity. Regardless of what you believe, regardless of where you are from, we are all human and we all love laughter. It was a simple feat, but a significant one. And literally integrating it into the urban landscape made it physically impossible for people to ignore our shared similarities. The people displayed on giant images had vastly different creeds, but for a moment they were able to see deep down how similar they really are. For more information on JR, check out his site, Jr-art.net

I would love for every city every where to host an exhibit like this, to have us literally come face to face with our humanity and the humanity of others. Perhaps by blowing up our similarities so big that they cannot be ignored we might be able to really see "the other." Ah, the restorative power of art!