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Despite the growing art scene in Hamilton, poetry has remained the one artistic medium that does not have as much exposure or contributors as the rest.

With music at the helm and painting hanging on its flank, there doesn’t seem to be any established room for poetry in the Hamilton art scene. As someone who appreciates reading and writing poetry, I have found it incredibly difficult to find a space to share and collaborate with other writers here in Hamilton.

It’s disappointing to not have a dedicated space to poetry. Toronto used to have one called Quattro Books that would host readings throughout the summer. It was a great space, but even while it was running it was difficult for me to make the time to go all the way to Toronto from Hamilton. It wasn’t necessarily “inaccessible,” but it was definitely an ordeal to get to. That’s the issue, though: there should be a downtown space like that accessible to Hamiltonians.

There was only one event during Supercrawl this past weekend that had a timeslot for poetry reading, and that was a quiet event that called itself “Liminal Spaces.” There were minimalist signs posted around town, but even those didn’t draw a crowd to the house just off of James Street North. It was, however, exciting for me to see poetry poking its head up somewhere downtown. It made me even hungrier for a dedicated space.

I have done my own looking around downtown, and I have come up virtually empty-handed. Granted, I found a reading group that I attended once. I stumbled upon it at random, and I was rather disappointed. Barring the summer months, Homegrown Hamilton hosts an event known as “Lit Live,” where weathered writers gather to read old material that lacks a liveliness and relevancy needed to draw the younger crowd. I found myself experiencing this lackluster performance amongst a group of people who were all familiar with each other and, of course, the pieces being read from bookmarked books that were read over and over again for years at these nichey types of places.

For a young writer like myself, these tired events are exactly what I want to avoid. I want to remain active in my writing and surround myself with daily inspirations. I do not want to find myself in the same bars reading the same poems to the same people for years on end. I can only hope to keep my eyes peeled for new venues and new groups of my peers to enthusiastically read and write alongside me in Hamilton. I mean, with it being such a fantastic city for artists to flourish, where is the space for the writers? I hope to find an answer to that soon—not just for myself, but for the other writers who are looking for these spaces, too.

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I found myself ending off this past summer vacation seeking out new niches in the music world. One genre that really caught my ear was something that is known as “industrial.”

Industrial music—if I had to try to define it—is an experimental genre that is a chaotic cluster of lo-fi, harsh noise. The key ingredient to the industrial sound is distortion—not only of instruments, but also of voices and voice clips. Most notably, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Genesis P-Orridge, and Boyd Rice are prominent contributors to the industrial music genre.

When looking for recommendations, I had a song called “Turn Me On Dead Man” suggested to me, which was performed by the latter-most on that list. After the first 30 seconds of that three-minute video, I excitedly began to look up other songs by this artist—also known as Non—because he had the exact vibe I was looking for. After a quick Google search, I was overwhelmed by the results that popped up about this artist. Rice is best known for being a racist, misanthropist, sexist, nihilist, and last—but not least—for playing a large role in Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. I paused the song I had been listening to so that I could focus on reading an essay he had written, titled “Revolt Against Penis Envy.” By the end of it, I was hoping to find out that what I had read was a satirical piece, but I was wrong. The ideas about rape, maintaining superior status to women, and general ideas of oppressing less privileged groups were so outlandish that I could hardly believe that someone genuinely had these ideas and published them on public forums. Unfortunately, the aforementioned essay was written in earnest; every problematic statement featured in this piece really was a recurring ideal that appeared in Rice’s interviews. I was in a nervous sweat by the time I got to the end, which Rice punctuated with reiterations of his philosophies: “Long live oppression! Long live love! Long live rape!”

The unfortunate thing with this sort of situation is that it’s very common in all facets of media and art. Many, many artists are problematic. The spectrum of problems is wide and far; there are perpetuators of archaic ideas, and further enactors of despicable actions. Whether it’s Woody Allen with his adopted daughter, Sean Penn with Madonna, Chris Brown with Rihanna, or Lena Dunham with just about everything, us consumers are faced with making a moral decision: do we value the consumption of art more than we do our own moral standing?

Such a question is difficult to grapple with, since the idea of the artist is intrinsically linked to the piece of art itself, which we more often than not happen to take for granted. Really, this question is not one that is answered consciously, but through the act of being ignorant and passive about what is being consumed. It isn’t always necessarily the case where an individual is decisively consuming a problematic piece of media—often, when the problematic history of an artist is brought to the attention of this consumer, they become open to learning about who this artist is as a person and what that means for the art they produce.

The problems come in when an individual is educated about the producer of art, yet chooses to ignore the situation. There is a revisiting of this question posed earlier: is the consumption of art valued above an individual’s moral standing? And if so, why? The argument that art can be separated from the artist and subsequently appreciated by an audience relies heavily upon the idea that a work of art is not an extension of an artist. To assume that an artistic piece is not a reflection of the artist’s ideals and interpretations of his experiences is absolutely unreasonable. I argue, absolutely, that any piece of art is a direct reflection of the artist himself.

In conversations along these lines, I can’t help but bring Roland Barthes into the equation. His essay titled “The Death of the Author” touches on this very issue. Essentially, Barthes argues that the image we get of an author is through his writing. According to Barthes, an author—Barthes is referring to writing, specifically, in his piece, but it is easily applied to all media—is born through his writing: we cannot conceive of the writer without first reading his work. The writing only exists through the interpretation of the reader. In Barthes’ opinion, interpretations of the piece of art as a whole are the basis of our understanding of the author. The author’s role in producing a body of text is a misconception of productivity. The author does not produce the text – he is influenced by many factors.

Through a metaphor posed by Barthes, the author is traditionally thought to “nourish” his writing, much like a “father to his child.” However, Barthes argues that the author is born “simultaneously” with his work. The main idea I am pulling from Barthes’ essay is that the author is a product of his writing, which is then interpreted by the readers. The entire work hangs on being read, and this reading colours the reader’s perception of the artist who has produced the work.

Needless to say, in lieu of all of this, I had to drop Boyd Rice from my slow-growing collection of industrial artists. The good news, though, is that there are many other talented artists in the same vein for me to explore. And fortunately, that can also be said about every other art form.

Photo Credit: VICE Media

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You may not have had time to walk through the corridors of the newest exhibit at the McMaster Museum of Art, but I encourage everyone to make that walk up the stairs to the third floor to see Chris Cran: It’s My Vault. It is a glimpse into the mind of Canadian artist Chris Cran and the works that make him tick.

His criteria when selecting the pieces?

“The works I selected for this exhibition hit me. They hit me first with pleasure and then they hit me relative to others that I had already selected.”

The result is a wonderful collection of paintings that you are unlikely to find in the same place at any other time. Abstract paintings are hung beside impressionist landscapes, which you can find across the hall from wall-sized collages. In Cran’s vault, anything goes.

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Isa is a small portrait by Gerhard Richter of a woman and is hidden inside a little room in the center of the exhibit. The oil on canvas painting is cleverly disguised as, what I first thought was, a blurry photograph of a woman. The piece is so well done that the painting comes across as photo film. It is almost as if Richter painted Isa with precise strokes, yet while the paint was still wet, decided to swipe across the canvas with a paintbrush. It is a simple, muted, unassuming piece composed of greys, greens and blacks, yet the time and detail it must have taken to create the piece struck me. To create something in such realistic perfection and to reverse that completely is astonishing.

Alfred Pellan’s Fondre Un Désir de Plume goes outside of the lines as well, only this time in a totally different way. His painting is a cohesive blend of shapes of colour that sometimes fall within the lines of the drawings, and other times spill out of their sides. What results are two layers of a painting in mutual dualism: the coloured background setting the stage and the black outline of the woman, and feather in the foreground. Even Pellan’s shading is a reflection of the line between rules and rule breaking. At times, his shading adopts the traditional diffusion of colour, while at others, shadows are entire blocks of black. What’s more, Pellan’s painting changes every time you look at it. This piece, maybe more than most, is bound to have you musing about where shapes end and where they begin for a while.

Soviet/American Array 1 by Paul Rasuchenberg is another work integral to the exhibit. It is a collage of pictures taken in Soviet Russia, however the photographs seem to have been dipped in only one colour. Entirely red, navy or ochre photographs are overlaid over each other, a visual representation of the striking division between the rich and poor. Images of deserted cobblestone backyards are striking when paired with pictures of lavish palace towers. Some photographs are repeated, but not identical– while one picture is sharp, the other is muted as if by a hazy filter. The wall-sized mural is certainly striking as a whole, yet every photograph that makes it up could stand equally well on its own.

These three pieces are only a few among many striking works in the exhibit, among which is Cran’s own The Disputed Sculpture. It’s My Vault is open until May 9, but I strongly suggest the people go long before the snow even has a chance to melt.

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By: Alex Florescu

This past Saturday, Nov. 1 marked the opening of The World is an Apple at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, an exhibit dedicated to nineteenth century French painter Paul Cézanne.

Benedict Leca, the exhibit curator, has studied Cézanne for years and said the artist “has got this kind of power that is very hard to put your finger on. Even the Impressionists right from the get-go when he arrived in Paris in the 1860s were [thinking that] this guy [was] packing something.”

While avant-garde artists like Picasso, Monet and Matisse revered his talent, the general public was not of the same opinion. Leca recounted how “even in 1906, he was big enough by that time that people were talking about the need to include his still lives in the French national collections and they were still all sorts of heavy museum people in France who were like ‘over my dead body.’”

Looking at Cézanne’s Apples and cakes (Pommes et gateaux) hanging on the wall, it is clear to see that his method of painting wasn’t exactly conventional.

“He paints this apple in rough strokes and he paints the background, the wallpaper, in the same way. Usually a regular painter would paint this dish with a tiny brush so that the surface becomes smooth like ceramic.” Back then, this kind of rule-breaking left “people absolutely shocked…they were thinking that this guy is crazy and needs to be locked up.”

Even today, Cézanne is “an acquired taste, he is not as immediately beautiful as say, Monet’s Water Lilies.” This is exactly what makes him so idiosyncratic. Leca would argue that “he communicates a rich imagination and intuition that people still respond to.” With Cézanne, the details of each painting are as important as the painting as a whole.

“Every single touch that he puts down means [something], it’s not just random.”

When asked what the one message he would want people to take away from the exhibit is, Leca responded by saying that “[Cézanne] is a really imaginative guy. I have taught college classes before where students have said they see the face in the clouds, and with any other artist I would [have to tell them] no, there are no portraits in the clouds.”

With Cézanne it’s different, “he allows you to do that, whatever you see is like poetry.”

Leca recognizes that it might be hard for university students to relate to Cézanne’s work, recounting how he wasn’t into art history as an undergrad and would skip classes as a result of that.

The exhibit is open to the public until Feb. 8, 2015. A trip to see Cézanne’s exhibit between now and then would engage the imagination of even those who don’t consider themselves into art.

By: Alex Florescu

If you were an art museum director and you were deciding on an exhibit theme, what would you pick to be your display? Of all the options under consideration, would books be one of them? Probably not.

The McMaster Museum of Art strays from the norm, having an entire exhibit dubbed The Art of the Book. All of the books come entirely from one source – Rabbi Baskin, a generous benefactor who donated over 1,000 volumes to the university museum. It is entirely because of his contributions that visitors to the museum can view the 16th-century Spanish imprints that cover the exhibit walls, or be close enough to touch an 1876 edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Adding to the collection are prints by private press editor Leonard Baskin, the Rabbi’s brother.

It is these prints by Baskin that seem to be a dominant and reoccurring presence in the exhibit. Two of his prints stood out to me, with the first one being a simplistic ink drawing of a flower with detailing around it. What I loved about the piece is that the details have not been drawn on. Instead, the background has been inked in black, while the flower and other parts of the “drawing” are starch white, unchanged from the original piece of paper.

The second of these pieces is a large mural of a man, created solely by overlapping black lines. What is remarkable is that when looking at this mural, it seems as if the pen was never lifted from the paper. Rather, it appears as if the entire piece was created in one continuous motion. While it is essentially just an outline, the man portrayed has impressive form and three-dimensionality. The varying thickness and repetition of black inked lines make the man’s calf muscles look as if they are bulging and his face appear to be hiding half in the shadows.

The books themselves were interesting, mostly because they are incredibly antique. The careful detail that went into the calligraphy and penmanship of these volumes is evident, and the illustrations are simplistic but beautifully done. While they are encased behind glass and cannot be reached, you get the sense that they are so old that they could crumble the second you touched them.

While there were prints and books that I found fascinating, there were also other pieces of the exhibit that did not impress me as much. Many of the prints featured grotesque half-animal, half-human composites that were slightly too morbid for my taste. Some of them had deformed faces, with misplaced eyes and mouths. Others were entire bird bodies that also happened to feature human anatomical parts. While they weren’t necessarily pieces of art I would put up in my own home, I could definitely recognize that to others, the pieces would have meant a lot more.

While The Art of the Book isn’t exactly my favourite exhibit, it features many interesting pieces – especially for a literary nerd fascinated by old copies of classic novels. On the other hand, the prints that hang on the wall definitely offer something for those into modern art; and if none of the above interests you, then it wouldn’t make for a bad place to curl up and do your readings for the day.

By: Alexandra Florescu

Your thin fall jacket is no match for the whipping wind, the crowd is a tide of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder and your head has started to ache from the pounding music.

For those who attended Hamilton’s annual festival called Supercrawl, the previous description might have applied to you. At the very least, it applied to me. I had gone on a mission over to James Street North with a couple of friends on Sept. 12 to enjoy the live music, art and food vendors. However, after a few hours of admiring the attractions, we decided to pick an indoor art exhibit at random and explore it away from the cold and bustle of the street.

We happened upon an exhibit named Art Forms Youth Art Studio. After walking through a brick-walled corridor, we came upon a cavernous room whose white walls were covered with art. Initially, there was nothing that quite caught my eye. The wall to the left had an array of hanging photographs, in the back there was a video projection and in the center of the room there was a geometric art installation. Walking around the dimly lit room, I happened to stop in front of an informational poster on the exhibit.

As it turns out, we had unknowingly walked into an exhibit put on by Art Forms, a youth arts organization that provides free weekly visual arts sessions, acting classes and dance programs to 16 to 25-year- olds of the Hamilton community, specifically targeting at-risk youth. What I had previously believed to be just another Supercrawl art exhibit turned out to be unlike all the rest in one key factor – this exhibit was created with the artists, not the audience, in mind. With a renewed understanding, I turned back to the pieces I had already seen in order to truly acknowledge them for what they were.

To the left was a wall adorned with photographs of the youth that had participated in the program and poems or stories they had written. While the poems painted a dark image of what life for these troubled teens looked like, the photographs were what struck me. Some featured people laughing, others had people singing, and in some they were playing musical instruments. Moreover, their smiles bore no traces of a difficult life, their demeanor light and jubilant. Through something as simple as a photograph, it was clear to see that Art Forms had given them the chance at life without addiction, or homelessness, or illness.

To the right of the wall, in the center of the room, there was an art installation made of a wood frame draped in a tapestry of bright, mismatched cloth. The shape and size of a small tent, it was impossible to miss. The wooden frame supported what seemed to be a shelter; its duality was apparent in its role as both an art piece and a comment on homelessness. Despite all this, the installation seemed hopeful. Strings of lights within the tent caused it to glow from the inside, the warm-yellow light filtering through the cloth as if it were a giant lantern. At points throughout the structure, the cloth was not secured to the wooden posts. Rather, it was left to trail out as if it were billowing in the wind. In other parts, cloth was interjected with pieces of paper scribed in black writing.

As I studied the vibrant reds and purples of the cloth, I noticed a crowd growing towards the back corner of the exhibit. The object of their fixation was, what I discovered to be, not quite an art piece. On the wall there was a long piece of white paper with only the outline of a large, sideways triangle and the title “Tell Me a Story… (True or False)” displayed across the top.

Underneath the poster was a box of coloured crayons that people could use contribute whatever they wished to the piece. Some lines people chose to write were inspirational, others comedic, and others confessional. What was clear, however, was that every person that walked by took the time to read the wall before making his or her own contribution. Starting at first with a few lines like “A life without reflections is not worth living” to “It all happened because I went in the labyrinth,” the mural soon became cluttered with each person’s distinct scrawl. Incredibly imaginative and well executed, the wall got a plethora of praises for its ingenuity and interactive nature. Yet this mural was not the only piece to which the public could contribute.

A table bearing the sign “Create Your Own Hamilton” had been located outside the venue all night, but as the night drew to a close, it was brought inside. The piece consisted of a metal wire frame draped in long rectangular pieces of fabric. As they had walked by, people had been beckoned to write one thing that would improve the city of Hamilton on his or her own piece of fabric. Upon completion, their piece of fabric would be added to the collage already building on top of the metal frame. The finished product resembled a pile of trash, but the vibrant colours of the fabric draped over the structure symbolized the hope for a better Hamilton and the hope for at risk youth to rise out of the rubble into a better future.

Unfortunately, having been so wrapped up in the exhibit, I noticed too late that the crowd had left and the doors were being locked. My visit cut shorter than I wished, I left Art Forms with an inexplicable feeling of having discovered a gem underneath the rubble and I vowed to return.

Bahar Orang
Senior ANDY Editor

There is no complete metaphor to express the loveliness and complexity that is John Ford’s House not a Home. The works do not announce, proclaim or insist. Instead, they quietly draw you into a world where broken lighters matter, where dirty little shoes are beautiful, and where chess pawns hold together entire structures. It’s a playpen for the imagination, a bed for sharing dreams and nightmares, a garden where discarded bits can grow again. It’s a mouth where “iloveyou” and “imissyou” can live, a mended human heart where blood cells and memories are stored. It’s a poem for things close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to hold.

I came to the exhibition in a restless mood, tired and anxious from all the noise and business around me. But when I walked into the dimly lit room, everything suddenly shifted and I felt somehow suspended. I had stepped into a slightly different realm, and I was both far away from and intimately connected to the works. The exhibition comprises three house-shaped vitrines that form a row across the middle of a large room. Each glass case is held together by a thin wooden frame and contains innumerable little objects. There are toy trains, toy airplanes, winding railroad tracks, playing cards, pulleys, ramps, a doll’s plastic thigh, maps, twine, tiny pictures of people, stickers, and stuffed cloth in the shape of hands and feet. In each “house,” the pieces create a complex architecture that resembles a small child’s elaborate science experiment, or an enormous toy factory, or the internal machinery of a fantastical music instrument.

The various parts are essentially bits of garbage, but they are placed as if they serve a specific purpose or fulfilled a particular, almost mechanical, function. They become valuable, as thought the whole thing might fall apart if a single object is removed. The parts work together and create a story. Perhaps that story is a symbol for a complicated family structure, or maybe it is a microcosm for the entire universe – in all its gorgeous order but ultimate meaninglessness. There is a dreamlike quality to the art, and the contraptions could be the hardworking hearts of stars drifting in a night sky.

I was immediately drawn to the installations at the centre of the room, but then felt disoriented as I looked for the title of each work. After some searching, I noticed the titles written on the floor, at the foot of the art piece. I took this as a clue, and thus noticed the writing on the walls. There is a strong contrast between the vitrines filled with objects and the empty space of the room. I was moved to make use of this space and go from wall to wall, collecting information about the pieces. This process creates a compelling connection between looking into the glass walls of the “houses” and looking outwards at the opaque walls of the gallery room. And I couldn’t help but wonder, who was peering into my room? Who was watching me and noticing my world and wondering how to make sense of it all?

The words on the walls seemed faint in the darkness of the room, and I felt as if I was looking at a material with writing that only appeared under certain lights at certain angles. So when I uncovered those writings, I was intrigued by the analysis they offered, but disappointed that they were not more ambiguous or peculiar. The works are expressive enough to convey powerful meanings, and the experience may have been more profound if I had attached only my own words to my experience with the works. The art calls for contemplation, slow reading, and careful observation (while also being playful in its game of how many different parts can you find?). The work requires viewers to walk around the “houses,” to unearth little treasures and to then try and assemble all those puzzle pieces. While the writing on the wall is poetic, the transparency of the information detracts from the work’s evocative subtlety.

Ford uses objects that make direct references, but then arranges them such that the relationships are more ambiguous. For example, the toy train raises ideas about nostalgia, childhood, and how we collect memories by collecting items (and effectively compiling garbage). But the train travels through a tunnel of key chains and around a mountain of lighters. The reason for this curious architecture is unclear, and alludes to subjective metaphors. Ford is therefore able to pull from the obscurity of abstraction while also pointing to far more specific concepts. This proved to be a very effective technique, and as a viewer I was guided towards certain interpretations, but I was also able to claim personal ownership over those ideas.

And for me, the most coherent and moving narrative is about the fragility of human relationships. The glass cases look incredibly delicate, like they might shatter if you came too close. The wooden frames look quite brittle, like they might splinter and break if a gust of wind somehow swept into the gallery. I was unsettled by such vulnerability, and wondered whether the living, feeling human body is equally helpless and susceptible to damage. The “houses” seem so unclothed, so exposed – is it this nakedness that makes them in danger of breaking? Is such nudity unsafe for humans? Is it honesty, authenticity, and the revealing of our inner thoughts, dreams, and secret collections of toy trains what makes us fragile? How might we draw the curtains while also forming intimate relationships? Does reaching out and making contact require a potentially heartbreaking vulnerability?

As I walked around, I kept returning to the name – House not a Home. “Home” implies warmth, love, and relationships. “House” suggests construction, stoicism, and cold hard bricks. Why were these naked things houses, but not homes? What makes a house not a home? Was my world a house and not a home? How to build a home? The exhibition was safe and soothing, but also unnerving. I remembered the tenderness and shelter of my childhood, but was troubled and challenged by the dirtiness of the pieces and my almost intrusive gaze into the private space of a “house”. How to reconcile the desire for closeness with the fear of falling apart? How to accept that while memories and relationships can be meaningful and fulfilling, they also sometimes create an insufferable nostalgia and a vast emptiness?

In an age of globalization and in a world where technology both connects and disconnects us from one another, these are important questions and ideas to consider. It will become increasingly important to explore the nature of human relationships and to articulate the things that bring us and hold us together. Moreover, this work challenges concepts of consumerism and asks us to take notice of the little things, and to reevaluate their worth. This too is an idea that our contemporary culture needs to understand, unpack, and allow into our collective consciousness.

Ford attempts to “connect viewers to small things in order to gain in our understanding of what it is to be human.” He hopes to offer “a sense of wonder and the potential for shared experience, for self-reflecting, imagining, creating, and telling stories.” The exhibition was successful on both accounts, and was able to utter certain longings and melancholies that we all must feel but can rarely express. The artworks are cathartic in this way, and while they are sweet and sentimental they also evoke a homesickness – a lovesickness – a loneliness that likely connects us all.

Sarah O'Connor
Staff Reporter

For Coffee:

Homegrown Hamilton

27 King William Street

Phone: (905) 777-8102

Email: info@homegrownhamilton.com

Website: www.homegrownhamilton.com

Facebook: Homegrown Hamilton

Twitter: @HomgrownHam

Fair Trade coffee is probably the first thing people associate with the term. While there are many places around McMaster that sell Fair Trade coffee (such as Union Market and My Dog Joe), it’s nice to explore the city a bit more and experience the downtown core. Homegrown Hamilton freshly roasts their coffee right in front of you using only Fair Trade and organic beans from around the world. They offer a variety of coffee flavours as well as snacks for you to enjoy. The café-by-day, bar-by-night, offers weekly live entertainment by local and non-local artists.

 

For Food:

Ten Thousand Villages

162 Locke Street South

Phone: (905) 522-1626

Email: Hamilton@villages.ca

Website: www.tenthousandvillages.ca

Facebook: Ten Thousand Villages Canada

Twitter: @VillagesCanada

Celebrating its 68 Anniversary as the largest Fair Trade retailer in North America, Ten Thousand Villages is definitely the most interesting of the shops because everything it sells is fair trade: coffee and tea, jewelry, and food items from India, Bangladesh and many other places. Additionally, Ten Thousand Villages also sells a variety of fair trade chocolate and spices for cooking− a great way to spice up Ramen Noodles or a way to liven up dessert!

 

For Art:

The Quirky Crocodile

600 Upper Wellington Street

Phone: (905) 387 0404

Website: www.thequirkycrocodile.com

Email: the qurikycrocodile@hotmail.com

Facebook: The Quirky Crocodile

Twitter: @quirkycrocodile

The Quirky Crocodile is a brand-new store to Hamilton that opened its doors on Feb.1. As well as selling fair trade coffee and tea, The Quirky Crocodile also sells gorgeous Fair Trade metal wall art from Haiti. The wall art is unique as it is recycled from steel oil drums and made with a hammer and chisel. The Quirky Crocodile also sells bamboo wind chimes, decorative masks, and products made by local artists such as hats, mittens, and sock animals.

Though I’m not a fan of his work or the messy celebrity circle jerk that goes on during the Golden Globes, the empty mouthed criticism that has marred Woody Allen’s lifetime achievement award is undeserved. Don’t get me wrong. The allegations of sexual assault on a minor, particularly his adopted daughter, are a very real concern and warrant the utmost admonishment and scrupulous attention. But what is at stake here is not Woody or his combined experiences or his personal failings, but art itself.

Let me step back. Art is a product of humanity’s ingenuity. It is the combination of thought, sound, love, breath creating life, life creating breath.

What is more is that good artists, as Oscar Wilde said, exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. I believe this stands true for Woody Allen. Although his life is important and the minutiae of his experiences are worthy of scrutiny in both good and bad lenses, his personal background does not comprise the whole of his being. This is especially true in his art. He is not fantastic because he is a New Yorker. He does not resonate with me because he has seen some of the places I’ve seen. Nor is he a bad person because he may have voted for Bush, though it would certainly make his judgement questionable (if alleged sexual assault wasn't a big enough indicator).

Neither the personal bad nor good ruin one another. They are isolated compartments. He, and the art he creates, is worthy of merit because despite it all, despite his vulnerabilities, his possible evils, and his warped idiosyncrasies, he kept on living, kept on feeling, kept on directing.

This does not excuse his alleged act of molestation nor does it make it right. Nor, too, does the fact that there is a celebration of the possible perpetrator instead of the victim - the one who was really hurt - go unnoticed. Rather receiving this award is a testament that he was able to transform the pain of his life into beauty through his work. Rather than be a resultant process of his problems, rather than allow them to dictate his lifestyle, he moved beyond his darkness.

With lights, camera, and action, he achieved greatness even if he himself wasn’t, and isn't, great.

Photo c/o ThomasThomas on Flickr.