Put a Bird on It
Mixed media
O’Connor, 2015

This is a public art project by my friend Brendan O’Connor entitled “Put a Bird on It.” Brendan is a local artist whose mission is to “art-up” the city of Orlando. His medium, interestingly, is the ugly stuff that’s all over every city… the stuff you train your eye to look past or ignore, like dumpsters, bus stop seats, or in this case traffic signal boxes. It’s subversive in a way, because while it’s transforming something utilitarian into something whimsical, it’s also drawing attention to the very thing everybody is trying to ignore.

Somebody got the message, because yesterday the Florida Department of Transportation took down this signal box on the flimsiest of pretexts. Too close to the road, they said. This despite their having signed a contract with the Mills 50 district to initiate the project. You could ask why they just discovered this now, after the box has been there for decades; you could ask why the box was there at all if it can be removed in a day with no effect on traffic. But of course you’d be asking the wrong questions, because those are questions of logic and this was obviously about something else.

And although I love Brendan, I understand this decision. As an artist myself, I live with decisions like it every day.

One of the central wars of humanity is the ongoing, endless war between the Artists and the… let’s be polite and call them the Non-Artists. The N/As have damaged or destroyed countless works of art in this war. In 1924, MGM producer Irving Thalberg whittled down Eric von Stroheim’s masterpiece Greed from eight hours to two. In 1963, the government of New York City demolished the original Penn Station, a soaring 1910 landmark of breathtaking beauty and elegance, and put a squat, faceless monstrosity in its place… one that could only have been approved by a committee of bureaucrats. In 2001 the Taliban dynamited two enormous Buddhist statues that had stood silent watch on the side of a mountain in the Bamyan Valley of Afghanistan since the 6th Century. And the list goes on.

Art and beauty and creativity are subversive because they draw attention, by contrast, to what is not artistic and beautiful and creative: greed, intolerance, power, control, and the raw fear that lies beneath those things. Many people, the N/As, live in this consciousness of fear, and many of them don’t even know it. And so creativity, with its positive and uplifting vision of possibility and potential, does not inspire them. Art, with its window into new ways of looking at things, does not uplift them. It terrifies them. It makes them aware on some level of what a small game they’re playing, of how limited they are. And so, like children who violently reject what they don’t understand, they feel nothing but an urge to destroy.

And so if you’re an Artist like Brendan, you need to understand that through your work, through your very existence, you are making some people very, very uncomfortable. Angry, in fact. You are stirring up opposition, sometimes very powerful opposition. Often this opposition has a lot of money, because money is often the compensation for people who have turned their backs on larger possibilities. Making some people squirm and begin to hate you for it is part of the job, and in fact it’s a sign that you’re doing something right. You’re inadvertently shaming these limited, unfulfilled, unhappy people, and they will make you pay a price for that if they can.

Art is in a precarious position in this brutal world, but so are love and joy and peace. Maybe we couldn’t appreciate these things so much if we didn’t have the N/As constantly threatening them. The answer is to keep on creating regardless. The answer is to keep on giving those people the bird.