Connective Cube

As many people know, I am not a fan of relentless positive psychology and thinking. Perhaps it has something to do with my suspicion of binaries in general. I also don’t like it when people tell me to smile, diss people who are quiet, and generally link positivity to success and a happy life.

Those are loaded statements, and my opinions about such things are reactions to the same judgmental people who do not acknowledge the diverse range of human experience. Telling someone with breast cancer that ‘everything happens for a reason’ or ‘this will make you stronger’ doesn’t acknowledge the sheer terror that someone feels when they are potentially decomposing very soon.

Silencing pain is a form of terror. If someone covers up someone’s pain with an empty positivity platitude, then they may mean well. The intent of kindness does not mean it silences a deeply felt human emotion.

That aside, when I am animated and comfortable, I am expressive. When I am unfamiliar or uncomfortable, the wide eyed stone face emerges. Since I was a kid, I have a resting face that appears stoic, expressionless and mute. I wouldn’t call it resting bitch face, but rather resting aloof face. On the same note, I am not someone who likes to put all of my emotions on the table to just anyone. Maybe that makes me a snob, but I like to think that I don’t clutter other people’s lives with unnecessary emotions.

People who are very emotional and expressive tend to have plenty of judgments about this type of expression – apathetic, long-suffering, unconcerned, indifferent. You get the picture. That is, the what you see is what you get types just think you are a major jerk or anti-social.

How do erasing pain and judgmental talkative emoters link? I guess the point I am trying to make is that extroverted and expressive people erase the existence of stoic people when they call them cold or rude. Why would anyone who is called that based on a simple facial expression want to open up to people who throw such judgments? And why would anyone want to discuss their feelings when someone shoves a bunch of ‘everything happens for a reason’ around the conversation? I think the people who make such judgments and statements are the ones doing the distancing.

More on this another day.

This question of judgement continues to occupy me. This could easily be the legal variety of judging, one where an authority – a judge, a police officer – determines whether a person breaks a law or causes harm to their surroundings. Someone with a high level of authority can determine how long a prison sentence lasts, how high of a fine to pay or how long a person must spend to determine the system that they have reformed.

The concept of fairness and equality within a capitalist system has always been cracked, a sham, a goal that will never remain at an equilibrium. Capitalism depends on the haves in relation to the have nots. This is not a new trope, a new idea.

With the advent of social media and rapid reporting over the past decade, people and corporations continue to reshape the dogma that everyone get a fair chance towards wealth, health and access to information. There is no fairness, and the 1% is not going to part with their wealth without a major public relations campaign announcing their inherent goodness for donating $1 million to ending childhood poverty.

It still exists.

***

An idealists ideal would be to soften judgment, to understand the relativism and messiness with people’s decision making process. This softening of judgment leads to detaching from emotional responses and judgments, and understanding that most people don’t act with all too much intent.

Yet judgment persists, and it doesn’t escape. Intentionality, thinking before speaking, and always remaining aware that words offend works for some people, those who only want to converse with their kind, or even those who don’t want to be reminded of how terrible people can be.

**

What happens when intentionality means not speaking to someone because they don’t fit your idea of normalcy? I perhaps have experienced this more from my own identity groups than I have from society as a whole.

As I muse my desire to lack judgment, I look back to experiences I had clinging heavily to a queer identity right after graduate school a few years ago. Disgusted with binaries, I sought people who also wrote off cisgender straight people who worked too normal of a job, who were artistic in the right way, or who liked urban farming. I didn’t want to befriend anyone who wanted to participate in civil society, so to speak.

I had just moved to Atlanta from New York. Living in NYC, I had to participate in society in order to pay rent. In Atlanta, the cost of living was cheap enough to work a couple of part time jobs and pursue other projects. Perfecto! I could work part-time, pay cheap rent and pursue my artistic projects.

Given that I had just moved from NYC after a decade of living there to Atlanta, I figured that finding people who shared my identity learnings would make for friendships via close confessionals and fun dancing.

It worked at times. I enjoyed the communal bonfires, the dance parties and brunches. But most of the time, my clinging to an identity felt isolating. I felt like others had more authentic experiences with being queer than I did – after all, I dated both male and female identified people across many spectrums. A connection is a connection, right?

I did not enjoy the cuddle puddles, the incestuous nature of everyone sleeping with each other (I don’t kiss and tell, ever), and the utter feeling of not being connected to many people because I didn’t like to be touched by people I didn’t know well. At times, I felt like I had to watch what I said, hide my thoughts and feelings and conform to some other group’s idea of queer. I stayed quiet, hating that I didn’t flirt, sad that I was perceived as too straight, sad that the confessionals and dance parties happened with so few people.

In reality, most of the people I met in Atlanta utilized their identity to connect with people, whereas in New York, identity was not tracked, and documented for its authenticity. Who the heck had time for that? No one.

Or maybe I did that because very few people asked me. My introverted, monogomy desiring self scared people away, as if I was a carnivores plant.. Polyamory isn’t for me – I just get overstimulated by in-depth bodily intimacy with too many people that I don’t know all that well. I don’t want people to talk about how good I am – or how terrible I am – in bed. I don’t want my body up for discussion. I like to get to know people before I sleep with them, at least some one-on-one time. And just because I spend one-on-one time with someone doesn’t mean I want to sleep with them.

For me, clinging to that identity didn’t make me feel any more connected to people. As someone who is cisgendered, I carry an enormous amount of privilege, despite any leanings I have towards loving anyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.

I also look like a women, even though I have an ambivalent relationship with expressing myself in an overly girly way. Yet I still wear dresses, have a mustache most of the time and got irritated by wearing a bra.

I have set my queer identity free over the past few years. And guess what? I am still queer, a wierdo, annoyed by people who mindlessly consume culture without contributing to it in some way. Now I moisturize, wear a bra regularly, and I have a partner that I love dearly and who also likes monogamy.

Also, I am somehow less hard on people who don’t fall under the LGBTQIA umbrella. I would rather have that kindness and gently roll my eyes at some of the ill-informed yet well-meaning assumptions straight and cisgendered people make rather than walk into a room full of judgey queers. Let’s save that judgment for those who even bother to hate others based on their identity.

A few months ago on my ride to Center City on the Chestnut Hill West line, my ride became suddenly interrupted by splashes of hot pink, orange and green over grass, concrete and abandoned buildings.  Figuring this was additional graffiti by artists in the city, I mostly turned my nose up at the hideous clash with the landscape, and I wrote it off as a graffiti artist in Philadelphia with a large crew of helpers.  Most mornings I would spend mornings marveling at the bluish-green colors of the windows, the cracked brick, and the hints of grass that peek through my window of my morning commute. Now, I see creamsicle.

Now I had to deal with neon colors that were in fashion when I was an emerging tween in the late 80s/early 90s.

Disclaimer: I am not anti-graffiti by any stretch of the imagination.  I can’t say I am a graffiti artist aficionado, and I typically notice this type of art in a fleeting manner – on a bike, train or car.  Even when I enter abandoned buildings, I am often struck by the faded infrastructure of the building and certain tags or symbols. Usually graffiti artists know how to stay away from the public eye and create intricate type, landscapes and symbols.

A few weeks later, I learned that artist Katharina Grosse – she recently showed at MassMOCA – had a grant from The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create jarring landscapes to help us unwashed masses really look at the landscape we all ride by everyday.  I immediately was insulted, and angered that someone had this answer to ‘helping’ people view their surroundings in a deeper manner.  This was hardly a ‘beautiful disruption’ to my daily routine.  It looked like some privileged artist got to dump paint in places she will never live or encounter besides her glorified paint project with her friends.

The exhibit, called Pyscholustre, is viewable via the SEPTA regional rail (Trenton and Chestnut Hill West lines) as well as The Atlantic City line and from Amtrak trains traveling from New York City/Philadelphia.  This geography hits people coming in from points in the metropolitan area that range from quite affluent to extremely destitute.  The transportation network this covers is quite expansive, networking major global metropolitan areas, weekend tourist arenas, sleepy suburbs and parts of Philadelphia that don’t come to mind for tourists eager to see Independence Hall.

This brilliance of light highlights areas of blight so the passerby can simply notice them. Is the hope to inspire entrepreneurs to tear down the factories and build condos?  What lies behind the thin veneer of hyper color?  Somehow I have a hard time believing that Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and the artist took a minute to get to know any of the people who inhabit the nearby space.  The border may be an invitation, but how about you invite people who live in the city to capture and define those borders?

What also angers me is the people who produce graffiti along the same train lines – dare I say, people who aren’t white – face high risks of arrest and scorn for their cultural production.  Why does Psycholustre get to be legitimate?

This comes at a time when Philadelphia’s ant-graffiti network via The City of Life, Liberty and You department begins aggressively regulating and tracking graffiti art.  The department recently started using the ArcGIS application to document locations of graffiti.  While it is easy to demonize the owners of private property in this instance, they do pay the brunt of expense for removing graffiti. It isn’t a wonder that city officials are listening to property tax paying citizens who don’t want to foot the bill for removing spray paint.

Sure, this is a gray area, especially if you are wary of property ownership.  This app also targets graffiti artists who are doing their projects on the same industrial building where Grosse completes her work.  Grosse and her well-protected comrades don’t have to worry about getting first, second and third degree misdemeanor charges or getting beat up by the cops in order to place paint onto buildings.

There is a certain dystopia that emerges in the once populated factories and dried out grass next to the train tracks.  It doesn’t take more than riding a bike, or even driving a car, to see that people live amongst the abandoned buildings. With widening inequality emerging in late capitalism, certain property is deemed more worthy of routines of cleanliness, often brought to you by private contractors and taxpaying city services.  Rarely does a person go to any of these buildings unless they want to admire the durability of the structures that still stand – and yes – the graffiti art.

Nor do I go to the extreme of David Lynch, who sees any graffiti as a defacement of the artistic structures of the industrial era.  He too thinks that Katharina Grosse’s work  is a ‘travesty’.  In addition, he thinks any graffiti defaces properties and doesn’t draw anyone to understand the structure as it is.  While many of these buildings are works of art given the craft that went into creating the brinks, steel and glass structures,  these buildings are unoccupied and serve as a canvas to rework the city landscape.  While I do think some graffiti can highlight the aesthetics of a structure, I also think it has the potential to help rethink landscape and structures that have remain abandoned for decades.

If the point of Psycholustre is to get an artist that is deemed legitimate by the art world to rethink space, then I consider it misguided.  There are graffiti artists The Philadelphia Mural Arts could have consulted for a widescale project.  How about the artists who create graffiti everyday?  Don’t they know more about the space they reshape?  Why is their art considered defacing, and Philadelphia Mural Arts approved work considered an exhibition?  If Psycholustre is a mural, then I want the muralists who painted work far before her to come back and tag her mural.