Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? My own impression is that much of what today passes for politically aroused art fails to transcend journalistic agitation. It does not linger in the mind and heart. It does not furnish the ballast associated with great literature and music, paintings and sculpture. That equation is traditional. It may also be indispensable.
On a Monday evening in the early fall, I arrived in Portland, Oregon, aboard the Coast Starlight, a notoriously late Amtrak train that operates between Los Angeles and Seattle. Sure enough, we were pulling into Portland’s Union Station four hours behind schedule, thanks to a faulty railroad track somewhere around Klamath Falls. This meant that what was supposed to be a 17-or-so-hour journey from Emeryville, California, just across the bay from my home in San Francisco, had turned into 21 hours in coach class. I’ve been traveling by train for the better part of 20 years, and I’ve become used to its flaws and have even grown to appreciate them.
Or maybe I’ll get lucky and butt my way into a fiery debate over whether or not it’s acceptable to skip your cousin’s kid’s third wedding. To quote the late, great Olympia Dukakis in her portrayal of Clairee Belcher in the seminal 1989 film Steel Magnolias: “You know what they say: if you don’t have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.”
“A Thousand Steps,” its title taken from one of the city’s famous beaches, is as powerful as a riptide in summer. And like those deceptively strong currents, Parker crafts this mystery slowly at first, until the cultural forces he’s laid bare threaten to inundate a family trying to stay afloat. In the process, “A Thousand Steps” reopens for our reconsideration the consequences of clashes between authority and freedom, order and chaos, that persist to this day — and the innocents that will always get caught in the tumult.
Free Love examines what happened when the late 1960s sexual revolution going on amongst the young artists and writers of London migrated to the suburbs. In particular, it uses the explosion of one family’s domestic setup to draw a fascinating portrait of a world of politics, manners, morals and the decline of empire in a period of rapid societal change.
In “Women in the Picture: What Culture Does With Female Bodies,” British art historian Catherine McCormack invites us to walk with her through some of the rooms where art reflects and shapes our deepest beliefs. Moving past familiar works, mainly European paintings at the National Gallery and the Tate Modern in London, she aims a feminist, intersectional gaze at women as subjects and makers.
From rocky soil it came
from next to nothing
stretched on the rack of its genome