Death Defying Acts Born out of Boredom

I thought I’d try a trick that Dawn over at Bohemian Valhalla likes to do. She plays with catchy post titles trying to draw people into reading her blog. Did it work? She’s good at it, and me? I’ve never been good at naming things---painting, poems, essays. It’s a wonder my dogs weren’t given letters in the alphabet instead of the names I would have given my babies had I had any. Sometimes it can take me longer to name a post than to write it. I generally start out with a working title but it changes as I work on the content. Death Defying Acts---spelled ‘death defining acts’---was the working title here. Can you tell I’ve run out of things to write about? I can’t wait until Easter is over and this continuum care campus gets back normal. They’re celebrating Easter here more than Christmas and not the fluffy bunnies and pastel colored eggs kind of Easter. Wafers for Lent are easy to come by here but not a a single marshmallow Peeps has made an appearance. I might preform a death defying act this afternoon and venture out to the dollar store to get some yellow Peeps. They were in short supply last year.

I finally made it over to the activities room to see the new jigsaw puzzle table and two hours later I was still there. It’s a pleasant room with widows on both sides, lots of light. They are waiting for a couple of round card tables to make their way across the ocean, but for now there are three oblong long tables set up which I hear tell is filled with some loud and serious card games going on. But in the time I was there not a soul came in or walked by. (It was after lunch and nap time for old people. I don’t do naps so I still have bragging rights to youth---age being relative around here, of course.) 

The jigsaw puzzle in progress is large and complicated and the edges were done. The pieces were all laid out but no attempt to sort them by color or subject or shape was made. That will bug the heck out of me if I make a habit of stopping by and I think I might. I got a 4” x 7” section done and sorted all the pieces with faces on them off to one area before I forced myself to leave. At home when I do puzzles I set a timer so I’m aware of how much time goes by. I suspect I’ll need to carry my timer over when I go to that room. Otherwise the night security guard/s will probably find me still there when doing their rounds at two in the morning.

Another afternoon was saved from death by boredom when I signed up to go to our Art Museum downtown, to see an exhibition of work by two black photographers of “great importance” in the field: Dawould Bey and Carrie Mae Weems. It covered work from over forty years of their careers and the pamphlet we were handed called them “today’s most important and influential photo-based artists.” They both worked entirely in black and white and his stuff, which was mostly portraits and candid stuff taken in Harlem, I liked but her work I hated. She was in every single picture she took and she called her stuff “performance art.” She sets up a still life of objects and/or people, sets a timer so can run around in front of the camera and be part of the photograph. Forty years of doing selfies would put me on the train to Crazyville and the bitch factor in me wondered if she is a recognized photographer for her endurance rather than for any artistic quality in the photos. Forty years is a long time to be shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!"

One set of 12 'kitchen table' photos told a story and viewers are supposed to guess what it is. We had one of those I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-understand-this-stuff museum docents you get once in a while who asked questions trying to get us to see what she saw and she was Oh So impressed with the talent on display. In turn I was thinking I was Oh So not enjoying Ms. Weems’ photo-art. I didn’t just not like it, I had a physical reaction to it that felt like anger mixed with wanting to get out of Dodge as quick as possible. And the longer the docent made us sit there trying to get us to cough up answers the madder I got.

And it’s just now dawning on me that I was probably so uncomfortable because maybe I was flashing-back to when my husband was in speech therapy and they’d throw photos down in front of him and try to pull language out of him by pointing out stuff in the photos. On a good day a half hour session would yield 4-5 words. One time they showed Don a picture of a man with a gun pointing at a baby elephant and the entire yield of words that day was “BAD!” repeated over and over again while Don slammed his finger down on the photo. I was sitting behind a one-way mirror and I explained to the professor in the room with her students watching the session that Don was a very ethical hunter and the hunter in the photo obviously was not. The poor student therapist working with Don that day didn’t have a chance of getting a good grade that session. Instead of the student therapist trying to pull words out of him he turned the tables on her and had her doing the word search work. A common error for the students (and families) to make.

I was Don's aphasia interpreter for 12 1/2 years and for six year of that time I helped him with homework using photos of random scenes. It wasn't art. It wasn't performance. At the museum Weems' photos became tools that the gloating docent used to give me a look at my past and my future, should I ever have a stroke and can't talk. If art is about evoking an emotional response then her kitchen table series was a huge success. But somehow I don't think 'my emotions' were what she was going for, do you?  ©

Photo from Carrie Mae Weems' kitchen table series.