creative forces

Blog # 84…August 2018

Museums connect us with the past: dinosaurs, native artifacts, Egyptian mummies - all fascinating glimpses of what the world was like before we arrived.   Increasingly, they also interpret our present with displays of fashion, media stars and social issues. Right now, a small gallery just inside the front door of the Royal Ontario Museum looks at the role of museums in the issue of artists and sexual harassment, called, predictably, #MeToo and The Arts.

Last Fall, at the Met Breuer in NYC a performance was staged by Jaishiri Abichandani at Raghubir Singh’s show Modernism on the Ganges. Abichandani alleged that Singh sexually abused her when she travelled with him as a young student of photography in the 90’s. Singh, who died in 1999, pioneered the form of colour street photography and a show of his work opened at the ROM on July 21.  Comments on his show and the demonstration at the Met Breuer form part of the content of #MeToo and The Arts at the ROM.

What should be done about the work of artists accused of sexual abuse reaches across all fields...should books be removed from libraries, films from festivals, canvasses taken down?  It resonates a bit with the issue of statues of Sir John A McDonald and other tarnished heroes who abused power. 

Should we remove the reminder of harmful acts from our past or use them as painful memories that make us consider present actions and shift thinking.  The Jews value Yad Vashem as a memorial to victims of the holocaust, honouring Jews who fought the oppression of the Nazis and the Gentiles who aided and protected them.

Our ability to forgive but not forget is complicated and individual, depending on how directly we've been affected. I'm always amazed by Izzeldin Abuelaish's ability to write I Shall Not Hate after the murder of his three children in the Israeli  invasion of Gaza.

There's also a continuum of offences...easier to forgive Al Franken than Harvey Weiinstein. 
I recently saw An Ideal Husband, apparently Oscar Wilde's favourite play.  It's about a wife forgiving a husband's secret... Wilde knew all about that.

Social media has gingered up feelings, getting the information out to us which is important, but often presenting it in a black and white, unconsidered form.  It's not that simple to line up villains and victims. Pointing fingers distracts us from focusing our energy in the right direction...and finding that direction isn't simple either.

News just broke of a noted feminist scholar being found guilty of sexual abuse of a male graduate student. Making the situation  slightly more complicated - the man is gay and married to a man, the woman is lesbian. It points out that there are challenges for all of us, feminists or not, male, female, gay straight or trans, old, young, whatever colour or income level, well you get my drift. We're all together in this struggle to make sense of life. 

I've just finished a wonderful book by Swedish physician and professor of international health Hans Rosling called Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. It's an interesting and important read, helped me on the road to looking at the world with more understanding and less anxiety and hopelessness. And that includes what I began with - art, artists and museums, Things are bad in many places, power differentials exist, but at least there is some movement towards looking. seeing and talking.

See you in September...