to make and unmake
It’s been a kind of whirlwind week, as I’ve been balancing many life transitions. I’m taking on new responsibilities that involve equity in arts spaces, and it’s made me think about how often, when issues are complex and provocative, we find ourselves stuck, circling around the wrong questions. Some memorable examples:
In a conversation about a museum's response to racially-charged work: Whose fault was it? The museum's? The artist's?
In discussing content warnings: How far are we supposed to go?
In planning for student accommodations: We want to be supportive, but where do we draw the line?
and the evergreen, in representing others in art: Don't I have a right to create whatever I want? Isn't that what artistic freedom means?
These are false choices, and the energy spent trying to wrestle with them is wasted and depleting. The questions back us into a corner, where we have to take a side, where we think that the only way to respond is to “draw the line” or “take a stand.” That to show leadership means to claim certainty, finality, to girlboss our way through.
This poem — Ars Poetica by Nabila Lovelace — arrived in my inbox the other day, and it landed like a physical blow.
And how stunning and disarming the questions this poet asks:
Objects have meaning even when they are couched in the banality of games. In the ‘Ars Poetica’ is a question worth daily consideration: what are we willing to do with language? Where are we willing to make, and unmake, with what we say?”
What do we make when we say blame
What do we make when we say supportive, but
What do we make, re-make (and what do we break) when we invoke our rights
There are many contexts, it seems, in which we know to say the words "anti-racist," and "white supremacy" and "decolonize." We are well-versed in naming our privilege and acknowledging the land we occupy. I am interested in what we don't yet know how to say, what we don't yet say, and the possible ways of using language that we've not yet embraced. Fuller, broader questions. Questions that place us in community and in context with others. Questions that acknowledge the complexity and entanglement of people and systems and institutions and histories:
What does this conflict reveal to us about how value is created and distributed?
What does this request reveal about what we invest in and what we don't?
and to return to Nabila Lovelace, What are we willing to do with language?
Are we willing to wound? Are we willing to dismantle? Are we willing to build up? Are we willing to show love? Are we willing to imagine a different future? What kind of future can we make?
