[Suffer the Little Children] on Apolo Torre's [Girl on Side the Building]

by Dontrell Lovet't






            Street art can be defined as everyday reminders and representative of the beauty we can easily lose in melancholia during our everyday monotony. Perhaps the most fulfilling of mention, too, one of the most hideous of street art able to be found the world over, is Apolo Torres’s [Girl Reaching Above the City].

            There are skyscrapers, a sea-set in the sky above the city, an adorable child on the tip of her toes, extending herself, a backpack on her back representing growth in intellect and education. At the base of her feet, there is a snack she’s unaware of, winding around her legs and a Pit-Viper impishly looking up at her. We cannot assume but we can establish what snakes have always represented since biblical times and how childhood, that moment where the future generations grows, learns and blooms, are ensconced in potential victimhood, surrounded by a jungle of predators seeking to prey upon their naivety.

            Apolo Torres’s depiction, which can be found alongside an apartment building housing families, is a necessary image, a frightening image, the sort one has no desire to see yet find themselves unable to turn away when the event unfolds. If ever there are any visions the masses should take in, it is the art, representing life, representing danger, representing a will for longevity in the form of caution.

[American Studies] on Gordon Parks [American Gothic]

            The study of the African-American and the study of America are one in the same; a people struggling to make a home in a hostile condition made hostile by their very angst.

            If a people are rendered invisible, it is a twofold-fault; the oppressor wielding intolerance and the oppressed for allowing what is being wielded to continuously hit target at will. The oppressor knows how to oppress, as once upon at time, they were the oppressed and possess the memory and methodology of how their dethroned oppressors were so effective until their sackings; the oppressed knows only the blindness that comes from the swollen, blackening eyes were clouts cease to land, because the oppressed knows from their former oppressors the mistakes those oppressors made which allowed them to break free; they allowed them to see, to gather and obtain visions, they allowed them to dream.

            History never repeats itself, every event in history, whilst having all the seemings of similarities, are bred by different circumstances and different events. A woman holds a broom in one hand and a mop in the other, a background of the American Flag. Her black skin represents the oppressed, one of the few of the American lands, her gender implies she must also mind men of all races, lest she fall victim to an opposing gender only content with her subjugation, the mop and broom, cleaning tools, are the tools used to sweep injustice under the rug of an American Ideal gone awry, which we see in the background, fifty stars, fifty states, fifty separate tales of horror and heinous forging of an American Empire.

Dontrell Lovet't

[Hold on to Nothing] on Bresson's [Simplified Pool]

            Wrap your legs around me, throw your body back into the effortless, lazy tides and feel how the breeze blows for you, how the water chills your skin and my touch a-lines……..

            You are naked before me now, then again, you’ve always been, a spectacle a man as myself adores, always with a sense of drama, always able to cajole a smile, lift you free of anything that may dare to keep the true you from me, from nature, from all that belongs to us at any given moment.

            Now if this tide turns, I’ll turn you along with it. If the water chills you more than any body should be chilled, I’ll find a way to bring myself closer, an impossibility we both would be astounded to witness. So hold on to nothing as I hold on to you, never let go of your drift and buoyancy a-top of the surface as I stand on both feet, waist deep, waiting for you to wake from your dream world, and come into the one I am brewing of you……

Dontrell Lovet't

[Fall of the Jazz Season] on Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again]

[Fall of the Jazz Season] Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again]

Even if we have never enjoyed nor heard them, most can recall the names of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker and the likes. What too can be injected into the knowledge you may or may not have known, is the shared opiate dreams they all once frequented in dreams. Heroin itself can be blamed for the fall of the decline of the Jazz season.

Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again] can be seen as an idiom, or rather, step upon the already ailing corpse where Jazz lay in utter agony, cries unheard, aid unwilling to be sent. Whatever the obsequious of reasoning, the power and might of Jazz never saw the 80's and Miles Davis's [Kind of Blue] was the sum of what Jazz was, and still might be again, when life again is lived and books again are read.

The weary musician rests after a set, the set in representation is the era where Jazz rose, spread like an unrestrained, uncontrolled ravish upon Swing and Bebop, staining Europe with the scars of having once been the last great hub of an art then, as now, underrated and misunderstood.

[To Paint is to Love Again] on Henry Miller's A-plenty Passions

Any man who can take into account the reality of his very own destitution, smile, thenceforth uses this poverty to draw hunger as a means of non-conformity, is familiar with Henry Miller, even if they've never heard of his having once existed.

-then too are they familiar (without actuality of being) with Langston Hughes, Selby Jr., Bukowski, William Burroughs; all loss and all that will be loss allots only the very life demanded if the individual indeed desires unvarying individualism rather a collective passivity.

It doesn't take much gumption to follow a crowd, even being completely unaware, to aim, to not, bout face to walk against the heavy tides of zombies, takes an artist who has lost the fear of death, embraced a physical decline, an embrace dictating; if we shall die our individual clash against bouy
s bumping like herds heading submissively to slaughter, has been enough to take us farther beyond our physical end, if even a second following, it says, it has been enough.

[When They Come] onHenri Cartier-Bresson's [Acapulco Market, 1963]

            They come, they go, but she stays and never goes.

Flocks of tourist descend upon the place she always called home and because she has always called this place home, there is nothing significant that she can place her finger on as to why anyone would love it so much. She looks to her right, apprehensively, with apprehensive eyes, clean bar and bottles, aware that with travel, comes travellers who want to blend their experience with a bit of drunken delirium, one-night stands, lingering nostalgia and hindsight, where all markets, girls at bars and regrets will never be to be no more.

            Henri Cartier-Bresson could have easily been one of those transients to the exotic unexplored becoming the exploited cliché destination, his photograph complicit, an aggravating accessory so beautifully displayed in immortality, still image of a woman who clearly has indifference to who comes, who goes, because she’ll never go to return.

[The Rise & Revolt] on Gordon Park's [I Am You]

            In an effort to separate ourselves from the most undesirable penalties or events, we vilify; it’s an uncanny, unfortunate defense mechanism but humans, humanity, has proven it is willing to do whatever it takes to survive, even if that survival determines the demise of another species, a dictated lesser species.

            In Gordon Park’s [I am You], an African-American man emerges from a man-hole in the ground. The camera captures this emergence at an equivalent level as would be someone willing to see eye to eye, wanting to see this man rising. Below our feet, there is another world, where all things unwanted are discarded and flow with the collective rest into the oblivion of those walking above short-term memories.

            But what happens when someone discarded refused to be discarded, beyond that, when the one refusing to be discarded, in their very refusal, inspire the rest to denounce their disenfranchisement? Parks photographs the beginning of a revolution, how it takes one of many various forms, and what appears to us a man just emerging from a pot hole, its representation for the capitalist, adrift in their greed, fearing a revolt, fearing a resurrection from the once silenced.

[Mother & Child] on Diane Arbus's [Woman Carrying Child in Central Park]

[Mother & Child] On Diane Arbus's [Woman Carrying Child in Central Park]

          William Tammeus once quoted “You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back.” Diane Arbus captures this very image, the bond between mother and child, an indivisible, unbreakable bond, both indefinite and defying all definitions of both natural and social world.

 

          A child nestled in the arms of his mother falls directly into the social compact, the very few, infinite. We were born individually but we weren’t meant to live that way. There is a vast craving for the contact of another, for the love of another, of others, an unspeakable bond which becomes ample to explain all, leaving nothing unsaid even without anything having been said.

 

          The day is a gloomy one, or one advancing quickly, unstoppable into the evening, people are scattering or conglomerate in the backdrop, allowing the scenario to unfold, possessing character into sharp disbelief and what is left, what is stark, apparent and accurate, is an artistic ideal that obliterates everything, a shot of one woman who nourishes a child deep into a dream-world, keeps him safe while he’s dreaming, which nourishes a future, where all humanity finds continuum.

[From the Age of 5] on Dorothea Lange's [Damaged Child]

            Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “From the age of 5 to the man I am now, is but a step; from birth to the age of 5 is an appalling distance.” Every childhood can be said to be plagued by the length it takes to cross such appalling distances. Every adult can remember some point in time in their childhood where they first experienced danger, peril, a closing window or a grip suddenly slipping loose of its object, sending them into what might have seem the longest free-fall, the true lesson and introductory of physics.

            When a child receives love, a child receives all potential this world has to offer; when denied that love, they become another species manoeuvring off instinct to simply survive. Once survival becomes a child number one instinct, a return to a state of compassion or want of compassion is almost nil or an improbability; orphaned children usually don’t take to crying because they know it’s no point, it’s a waste of energy, and as for skills, they are honed over a long stretch of loneliness in a world that has taken from this, for some unfathomable reason, a family, so what they never find is a reason to care for anyone else beyond what they need and who they need to scuttle, to survive.

[Faceless; Chrysalis] on Amy Judd's [Mute Butterfly]

She's the woman nobody knows, the one who wonders why wandering amongst millions of people still leaves her without a face to be recognized.

Can there be a more-so double-edged resilient and frail existing things than the woman and the butterfly?

The original named given to a Butterfly was "Futterby," described almost inaccurate in the old English description, as a butterfly's stark colors, darling flight and becoming is of vast wonderment by everyone and everything that lays its  eyes upon it. Color brings dimension,offers an animate state, a zenith to serve as the platform in which to take flight. The woman, the reason humanity exist and why men have many times over waged wars over the rights of them, relentlessly evolves, socially and physiologically, lending to her stock, adding the buy-in to her heart an almost significant amount for the average man to ever accumulate; a greater difference; I've never figured a butterfly,its instincts notwithstanding,to ever feel the need for the natural world around it to validate its existence. It is against any laws of physics that may work against it, any form of modernism displacing its biome, its indication of Spring and a new year where all things bloom as beautifully as wayward flowers, the same bringing about repetition of evolution, events happening as anything inhabiting the earth, becoming disrupted by a new being not purposeful in its ability to usher in a pre-existing species into bondage, then soon after to an extinction not to the will and rights of its own self-destruction.

Will anyone ever know who this woman is? Will anyone ever inquire as to why no one knew before? Amy Judd only gives us the contours, replacing the physiognomy
with the variant visions we know nature never forfeits.