Art Doesn’t Wait to Start Healing Process

I was elated when I discovered that much of a Sunday Calendar section was devoted not to the “latest flicks” but to (dare I utter the word?) “art” (“After the Riots: How Can the Arts Help Heal L.A.?,” Sept. 6).

“Hallaloo!” I shouted . . . a bit too quickly, as it turned out. Sad to say, the Calendar writers’ view of artists and the role we might play in the “healing” process Los Angeles presumably is undergoing, following the April-May violence that wracked the city, differs sharply from my own.

What first jarred me was reporter Diane Haithman’s statement in her cover story: “. . . the news media were the first . . . to document the events . . . months later, visual and performing artists . . . arrived on the scene.”

First of all, the “riots” were not an “event.” Second, artists have been documenting the continuing turmoil for generations.

Haithman, though wrong, was simply reporting. In the same issue, Max Benavidez (in his commentary, “The City, the Riots, the Creative Response: Not a Pretty Picture”) set out to provide the philosophical underpinnings needed to clarify the role art plays in our troubled society.

He begins well: “By the time Los Angeles imploded . . . every other avenue of . . . expression had been proved bankrupt . . . all that was left was art.”

“Hallaloo!” I shouted once again. Unfortunately, Benavidez quickly abandons us, writing “. . . art and the change it engenders are articles of faith.” And then Benavidez, who was to give us reason to believe, says, “You either believe it or you don’t.”

Having exhausted my supply of “Hallaloos,” I feel compelled to make a statement of my own. I don’t “believe,” I know artists can and will play an essential, problem-solving role in the life of this nation, one similar perhaps to that played in the past by the clergy or by scientists today.

It is not clear if scientists or men of the cloth ever succeeded in solving any real problems. Crime, disease, war, mass starvation still exist. Nonetheless, scientists and clergy have provided a degree of comfort for some.

I know artists can and must do far better.

In an age when the human animal is capable of dramatically influencing the environment on which the survival of life as we know it depends, clearly human culture will determine how that influence is exercised. Artists have the most immediate access to the method and as meaning of human culture.

Protestations that the only responsibility artists have is to “entertain” simply will no longer wash. Singing, dancing, beating the drum and molding figures out of clay are not playful diversions but are necessary to an understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Music is an ongoing exploration of our aural environment, its underlying drumbeat a reminder that despite Einstein’s theory of relativity, for us, time is real. Dance verifies the existence of empathy. We are not isolated in individual bags of skin (I feel pain when you are struck, excitement when you become excited).

Benavidez says “. . . art will be transformative.” It also will be transfigurative and transcendental. Whether or not one “believes” is irrelevant.

Artists will soon address their unique knowledge and training to a wide range of issues from space allocation and resource distribution to ethnicity, gender, physical satisfaction and emotional fulfillment.

The ability of artists to address these questions and others even more important will no longer be at issue. The only question: Why were we not called upon sooner to share such experience?

Given “art” as it is presented in today’s “mainstream” museums, theaters and concert halls, Haithman is justified in (incorrectly) assuming that artists simply “mirror” or “reflect” events that “decision makers” (generals, politicians, priests, lawyers) set in motion. This is all about to change, however, so I was sorry to see the word “reflection” creep into Benavidez’s piece as well.

The public can no longer permit the role artists play to be dismissed as that of “sideline commentators” arriving on the scene “months later” after the damage is done. To do so is to overlook what may well be a our most valuable problem-solving resource.

The only way to “heal” Los Angeles is to forge a culture in which dispassion is unthinkable. Benavidez, although he seems to doubt himself, is right when he writes, “All that is left is art!”