My wife and I had a running joke about this little rural town-let where we recently moved. It's a pretty small place - the post office doesn't even recognize it; the official address is the nearest (but not really near) little city.
For convenience, let's just call this place Figtown. Close enough to the name, but not so close as to disturb the privacy of the chihuahua mentioned in the title.
Our running joke was that the place is so small it surely can't have an Occupy movement. So we wanted to come up with some sort of photograph that could make a visual joke about what Occupy Figtown would look like, given how small it is. One guy, maybe. Or perhaps that horse we keep seeing as we head down the road. Or one of the huge freaking millipedes who occasionally make their way into the house. Or our neighbor's dog, who we feel could use something constructive to do.
Anyway, as with many of our ideas, we had an animated discussion about it at dinner last month, came up with all sorts of ideas, then promptly moved on. (We're both Aquarians. It happens).
Imagine my surprise when my wife told me what she saw today at the gas station
(I know you want to read below the fold. I know you do)
Figtown has an Occupy movement! Today six people and a chihuahua were Occupying the gas station parking lot. The people were determined and joyful. The chihuahua was bored.
I don't have any stories to tell. I wasn't even there (I was, however, close to there by virtue of the gas station being down the road). But anyway, hey! Our tiny little town-let has an Occupy movement!
And speaking of Occupy, here's my wife's most recent artistic work (followed by my analysis – which of course is required for any true understanding of any work of artistic genius – underneath the picture):
Obligatory analysis of the art (reprinted with my own permission from ThatzEffedUp):
This deceptively simple yet highly complex work shows one hundred stick figures, or at least their faces. A stick figure in the front holds up a sign, clearly evoking the Occupy movement of 2011: “We are the 99%” Another stick figure in the back holds up another sign. This one says, simply, “1%”. At the bottom of the work is the statement: “There's one in every crowd.”
The creator of the work - who does not even sign her work but who I know personally - says that her art never makes political statements. “True art has no meaning. It just is. That's what I do.”
Despite her heavy philosophical bullshit, however, this piece is clearly a political work. The question is, what's the actual point the artist is trying to make despite her best intentions?
Is the artist simply drawing our attention to those members of the 1% who are in solidarity with the 99% - asking us to not paint all 1% with the same brush, so to speak? Or is she making a more sophisticated and probably completely incoherent point about the complexity of class identity in the postmodern age?
Or perhaps she is warning of provocateurs in the movement's midst – not the kind that actually manage to be effective, of course, but the ones who carry signs that announce that they're provocateurs. Or perhaps she is suggesting that we look for signs of (not on or near) provocateurs.
Or maybe it really is just a pretty picture that she made because she got to duplicate a hundred stick figure faces and she finds that kind of repetition soothing.
Hope everyone is having a good Sunday!