This is ART?!

Is it just me or is art weird these days? Now, I am no sculptor or painter. As any Like, Seriously subscriber who has read “’That doesn’t make any sense’ and other truths about Paint Nite” will know, I will not win any art competitions. But while I may not be an accomplished creator, I am an experienced viewer. Growing up in the 1970’s, long before I made it to Europe to marvel at the Mona Lisa, David, and the Sistine Chapel, I had parents who occasionally packed me into a car of chain-smoking adults for an outing to an art gallery or art-filled heritage site like Casa Loma. I also attended grade-school art classes where we were shown DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Renoir before being handed a brush and told to paint a bowl with fruit in it. I spent enough time tacking my unrecognizable blobs of colour next to Rembrandts painted by pre-teen phenoms to know the difference between God-given talent and rudderless ineptitude.

If I needed more childhood lessons on what constituted fine art, I had my Nana to teach me. A five-foot-one French Canadian woman who liked to smoke and laugh, my Nana was a gifted painter with a love for the Old Masters. She painted exquisite oil copies like she was rolling cigarettes, producing enough knock-off masterpieces to allow four children and several grandchildren to turn their living rooms into Louvres salons. On a trip to Ottawa’s newly renovated National Art Gallery in the 1980’s, my Nana even taught me the art of critique.

“What IS this?!” my Nana shrieked as we made our way through Contemporary Art. She marched across a salon, stopped in the middle, and surveyed the room in disgust. Suddenly, a security guard was at her side, lightly touching her elbow.

“I am sorry, Ma’am,” he said gently. “I have to ask you to step off the art.”

My Nana looked down. She had unknowingly marched off the gallery’s polished wood floor and onto a large, grey square of thin, bumpy stone. She gave the stone an incredulous look while thrusting her hands towards it. The security guard could only cringe while she shrieked, “This is ART?!”

Last month, a day in Montreal gave me the opportunity to use my limited art education. I spent an afternoon visiting that city’s downtown Basilica-Cathedrals, Notre Dame, St. Patrick’s, and Marie-Reine-du-Monde. Here were structures designed to do exactly what they did to me. Inspire a gasp at their beauty and a desire to sit quietly in a pew, look up, and contemplate the magnificence of God. In Marie-Reine-du-Monde, while visitors wandered the aisles in quiet admiration, I watched an elderly gentleman perched on a ladder polishing a statue with a small cloth and wondered how long it would take him to finish his work. Seventy-five feet above was the cathedral’s cupola, a soaring embrace of heavenly rest and consolation.

I sat for a while, feeling humbled and thinking that if men can create this cathedral, there is hope for us yet. Exiting, I stood on the steps and smiled, my soul nourished.

And then bubble-gum pink smacked me in the face.

Across the street, a group of enormous, bubble-gum pink blobs were scattered along half a block of city sidewalk. As I got closer, I saw that the blobs were positioned to make a massive, sexless figure seem to protrude from the concrete. A bald pink ball at one end pointed a round nose towards the sky. Two fat columns on either side of the head were outstretched arms, topped with massive hands, palms upward and stubby fingers splayed. Some distance away and giving the illusion that the rest of the body was hidden beneath the sidewalk, two short, pink stumps propped up bulbous feet with short, fat toes. People circled the blobs, snapping selfies and posing for pictures next to feet, arms, and the bald head.

Standing under an arm that loomed a few feet above my head and feeling like I had unknowingly stepped off reality’s polished wood floor of sanity, I wondered, What IS this?? A large pink sign with white lettering flanked the space between the arms and legs. I headed for it, trying to ignore which part of the figure’s anatomy the composition suggested I was walking over, and hazarded a guess at what a giant rotund figure in bubble-gum pink was doing on the city sidewalk.

Maybe this is an elementary school project! I thought. Or a new kind of urban jungle gym for six-year-olds!

“Monsieur Rose,” declared the sign (Mister Pink in English), “celebrates beauty in simplicity and wonderment in the everyday. With his touching and funny creations, the artist turns downtown Montreal into his playground.”

Aha! I thought, triumphant. Playground! Then I looked around. Where are the kids then? Why aren’t they clambering up Mister Pink’s nose to slide down his forehead? Why aren’t they jumping on the soles of Mister Pink’s feet and swinging from Mister Pink’s fingertips?

A second sign answered those questions. “This artwork is solely contemplative. It is strictly forbidden to climb or swing from the Monsieur Rose sculpture.”

Not a playground? Contemplative??

I looked at Mister Pink and concentrated. I tried to find something to contemplate in his fat little nose, some way to connect his bald head to a universal truth, some piece of illumination hiding between his pink toes or fingers. Maybe I need more grade-school art classes, but I came up empty. What I did contemplate was how many children had been dragged away from Mister Pink that day.

“But I want to climb the bubble gum man!!”

“I know, honey, but you can’t. He is art.”

In the end, I gave Mister Pink an incredulous look and thrust my hands at him. The people taking selfies and posing next to his feet could only cringe as I shrieked, “This is ART?!”

Some will say I do not understand contemporary art because I do not know enough about it. Trips to Casa Loma and watching security drag my Nana off a piece of grey stone in the National Art Gallery do not a formal art education make. This is true. However, does a person need an education to know art when they see it? Is it not the artist’s pursuit to ensure they do not? During two trips to the Sistine Chapel, I did not observe anyone walking in and shrieking, “This is ART?!” Nor did anyone need an art education to gasp, look up, and recognize the magnificence above them.

I Googled Mister Pink’s creator and found a snapshot of his other work, a series of distorted, pink faces, one with snot running out of its nose, one with its face upside down, and one with heart-shaped eyes perched over bared, sharpened teeth. The last time I saw art like this, my teacher called the kid’s parents and asked them to come in. Reading about the work, I stumbled on another possible problem lurking under Mister Pink. “For the artist, the goal is to make what might be difficult to bear more pleasant by transforming the unpleasant into something cute.”

You and I know, difficult to bear is not pleasant. Unpleasant is never cute. However, both are inherent to living. Both are necessary for strength. And because both are universal truths, they can, if depicted as truths, move a soul to love and compassion. Perhaps if an artist distorts the truth, they distort the art, and cute becomes ugly.

The builders of Montreal’s downtown cathedrals and the classic sculptors and painters who filled them were charged with communicating the glory of God to people who could not attend art school. They were tasked with inspiring contemplation in people who could not read. They were commissioned to strengthen faith in people who would suffer, and that was all people. In the end, their work spoke the truth without any words at all and that meant anyone who saw their work, regardless of education, could transcend their struggles and gape in shared wonder.

When a friend and I stumbled on the Burlington, Ontario Sculpture Trail near Lake Ontario last year, we knew nothing about it but decided to follow it. After twenty minutes of becoming more and more disheartened at nondescript shapes and freakish distortions, we stopped in front of an ambiguous figure leaning off its display block like a broken toy, spiky metal sticking straight up from a trapezoid-shaped head that leered at us with lime-green sparkle eyes and sneered at us with a blood red mouth.

We contemplated it.

“Yikes,” my friend said gently. She touched my elbow. “Let’s go back to the lake.”

Unlike the National Art Gallery security guard, she did not have to drag me.