The Homeless
Excuse me, but I’m the type of person who attends art fairs and charity benefits. Not only am I sophisticated enough to pay vast sums of money for any of the extremely new, hyper-contemporary paintings on the market, I am also a caring, paternalistic model for all you people that only care about yourselves.
If you could hold a candle to me in these areas, then you maybe would have known about the fourteenth annual “Art From the Streets” show at the Austin Homeless shelter last Saturday. It sort of tied together all the society types who excel in being patrons of the arts and the homeless.
Yet, it also illustrated in loud acrylics our experiences with homeless people, or bums, or drag rats or really whichever words you want to use for the people who are foreigners to our land of dreams and opportunity or whatever word you want to use for this cushy chair I’m sitting in right now. No matter how much food or money or anything you’ve handed a homeless person, you know you’re not giving he or she access to our world. But you just might see them every day on your way by to plow through a massive burrito that could probably feed one of them for days.
But, then, you and I really don’t have to worry about that guilt. We really do ignore them usually, either thinking that the stoop outside Jack in the Box is the place they want to be or just not wanting to make the type of eye contact that can confirm how goddamn easy we have it.
But my roommate and I didn’t have to worry about pulling off our blinders when we went to this homeless art show on Saturday. The Austin shelter is actually one of the most stylish buildings I’ve ever seen, and it was covered with vibrant, original paintings, apparently the work of homeless people. I say apparently because a guy whose painting I bought told us about a piece he had done of all the stereo equipment in his house.
No matter who the artists really were, the place had a lots and lots of art. They had walls and chain link fences covered with works of all sizes. I was up close to a fence to get a good look at one piece, when I was able to look through the fence to the alley between the shelter and the building next door. There were a handful of bums loitering out there, the same kind as the ones we passed on the way into the art show. I had to restrain a reflex to just give the money that I was going to use on art to them because I knew they weren’t going to draw me any pictures.
And why the hell would they? Feeling intense middle class guilt, I found a drinking fountain in the shelter and took a huge swig of water to demonstrate our common humanity. I’ve worked with homeless people before. My senior year of high school, I fulfilled the graduation requirement of sixty community service hours by helping kids who lived at a downtown shelter with their homework. I grew to know a few of the kids, and I think I did help them complete a lot of assignments, but I could never escape the feeling that I really wasn’t doing shit.
It was all too easy to have this same sensation at the festival. I didn’t really feel right taking the food HEB provided for the event from the mouths of people who needed it, and it was hard to focus on the art.
The pieces were really quite striking, though. Homeless people are entitled to the sharpest of voices because we turn a blind eye so much. You can say, wear, or do anything you want when other people will walk by you without look. In the absence of the surveillance of society, you could create whatever the hell you want without worrying about offending anyone.
That’s probably why I’ll never be able to cross the bridge we feel between ourselves and homeless people. Deep down, I’ll always know that if I was sitting on a stoop somewhere without anywhere to go, I would resent all the people who walk by in such straight and static lines. And I’m damn sure that I wouldn’t care whether or not the walls of buildings forbidden to me had pretty pictures on them.
Fortunately, these artists had no disdain to share, just their art. So I got an amazing painting of an island in the middle of an ocean sloping down like the curve of the Earth. You really should come see it sometime.
If you could hold a candle to me in these areas, then you maybe would have known about the fourteenth annual “Art From the Streets” show at the Austin Homeless shelter last Saturday. It sort of tied together all the society types who excel in being patrons of the arts and the homeless.
Yet, it also illustrated in loud acrylics our experiences with homeless people, or bums, or drag rats or really whichever words you want to use for the people who are foreigners to our land of dreams and opportunity or whatever word you want to use for this cushy chair I’m sitting in right now. No matter how much food or money or anything you’ve handed a homeless person, you know you’re not giving he or she access to our world. But you just might see them every day on your way by to plow through a massive burrito that could probably feed one of them for days.
But, then, you and I really don’t have to worry about that guilt. We really do ignore them usually, either thinking that the stoop outside Jack in the Box is the place they want to be or just not wanting to make the type of eye contact that can confirm how goddamn easy we have it.
But my roommate and I didn’t have to worry about pulling off our blinders when we went to this homeless art show on Saturday. The Austin shelter is actually one of the most stylish buildings I’ve ever seen, and it was covered with vibrant, original paintings, apparently the work of homeless people. I say apparently because a guy whose painting I bought told us about a piece he had done of all the stereo equipment in his house.
No matter who the artists really were, the place had a lots and lots of art. They had walls and chain link fences covered with works of all sizes. I was up close to a fence to get a good look at one piece, when I was able to look through the fence to the alley between the shelter and the building next door. There were a handful of bums loitering out there, the same kind as the ones we passed on the way into the art show. I had to restrain a reflex to just give the money that I was going to use on art to them because I knew they weren’t going to draw me any pictures.
And why the hell would they? Feeling intense middle class guilt, I found a drinking fountain in the shelter and took a huge swig of water to demonstrate our common humanity. I’ve worked with homeless people before. My senior year of high school, I fulfilled the graduation requirement of sixty community service hours by helping kids who lived at a downtown shelter with their homework. I grew to know a few of the kids, and I think I did help them complete a lot of assignments, but I could never escape the feeling that I really wasn’t doing shit.
It was all too easy to have this same sensation at the festival. I didn’t really feel right taking the food HEB provided for the event from the mouths of people who needed it, and it was hard to focus on the art.
The pieces were really quite striking, though. Homeless people are entitled to the sharpest of voices because we turn a blind eye so much. You can say, wear, or do anything you want when other people will walk by you without look. In the absence of the surveillance of society, you could create whatever the hell you want without worrying about offending anyone.
That’s probably why I’ll never be able to cross the bridge we feel between ourselves and homeless people. Deep down, I’ll always know that if I was sitting on a stoop somewhere without anywhere to go, I would resent all the people who walk by in such straight and static lines. And I’m damn sure that I wouldn’t care whether or not the walls of buildings forbidden to me had pretty pictures on them.
Fortunately, these artists had no disdain to share, just their art. So I got an amazing painting of an island in the middle of an ocean sloping down like the curve of the Earth. You really should come see it sometime.
posted by Tobias Salinger | 12:49 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home