BAD ART: The Upside-Down Un-World Among Us

Everything travels with its opposite.

There’s no you without not-you. You’re like a you-shaped space moving around amongst literally everything else.

No night without day, or up without down. We are all part of a giant system of energy and matter trading places.

Extending this a bit: for every person who does a thing, say invent the phone or the lightbulb or harness fire or what have you, there are gobs of people who also did that, and we never heard about them. Or who did something kind of similar.

The wheel and axle, a thing that doesn’t occur in nature, arose as a concept all over the place, in the same time period. Way pre-telephone, you guys.

For every person famous for holding certain positions in society, there are all the people who don’t, but who could.

Here’s a spectacular example:

Hilda af Klint was an abstractionist painter before abstraction was a thing. She was into the whole spiritualist movement in the late-nineteenth-century. So she made paintings, her brush guided by unseen forces. And then, she said nobody should see them until twenty years after she died because she was pretty sure her work would freak everybody out. She knew how out-of-the-box she was.

There’s an exhibit of her work at the Guggenheim — Just LOOK. Holy COW. This was the beginning of the 1900s, pre-Kandinsky. Just — wow. WOW.

We mostly hear about abstractionist art in terms of Picasso and the Cubists, the Fauves, the Expressionists, and the Impressionists as sort of the “fathers” of all this.

But Hilda, she was doing her thing — and not on the dominant, male-driven timeline or the accepted art history timeline in the textbooks.

The shadow-world is all around us. Talent that we don’t hear about, that isn’t documented in “the” history.

Here’s a kind of sobering thought. We humans are really into keeping each other from doing stuff. We like to tell each other where people can live, what rights they do and don’t have, heck, whether certain people are even fully human.

Imagine the snuffed potential. People with the capacity to expand on Einstein’s ideas who never got to write a paper. People with the talent to cure diseases or lead people or so many things.

Imagine what women, if we had not put so much effort into keeping them from doing things, would have done by now. What all of us would have done.

It was David Bowie’s birthday yesterday. The first time I saw him perform, it was as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live in 1979. He and his backup singers wore dresses. One of those singers was Klaus Nomi. There was a little electronic dog on a string and wheels with a TV screen for a mouth. They did “TVC15” and “Boys Keep Swinging” and “The Man Who Sold The World.”

Can you even imagine how many people saw how David messed with gender, and theatricality, and music, and had all the doors in their heads swing open at once?

There are many minds like this, imagining things right now. Getting weird ideas.

Klaus Nomi was doing a lot of things in a similar vein to what David Bowie was doing. None of this happened in a vacuum. What David did, was to give a stage to it all, bring it together, make space for it in a big way. It’s all one big effort to grow ourselves, together.

I think a lot about history and the non-world that hasn’t happened. People with incredible talent or intellect or curiosity who never got to approach any of it. Maybe didn’t even know it was there. Were shut down by other humans, for various societal reasons. Never did anything.

Our job going forward, is to try our very best to keep that from happening. We have a really, really long way to go, but I hope we keep trying.

May you listen to your favorite Bowie song, may you find a painter you didn’t know about, won’t you be my neighbor?

— Betsy