SPRING: let them keep their children--- tethered          an installation by Andrew Ellis Johnson

 

let them keep their children--- tethered

Beauty’s a trap,

Meaning a snare,

Yet Spring calls us out to play

On scarred cement,

In loaded fields,

If we dare.

 

What’s mine is mined,

What’s yours I tear,

Yet Spring calls us out to play

Mistrust, contempt,

And fear no doubt,

We still share.

 

Lost youth locked up,

Who’s held down where

When Spring calls us out to play

Deprivation

Is found depraved

In our lair.

 

The coast’s deemed clear,

Policies fair,

When Spring calls us out to play

But the shrewd own

Insurance or

Dance with care.

 

“Spring” sings as a noun but gets twisted as a verb: spring, sprang, sprung.   Concerned with convolutions, SPRING bounces between the horrors of daily realities and the refined aesthetics of art, while skipping over the pitfalls of easy dialectics.

 

The decorative urge to obscure substance with surface is a powerful trick to play.  Wouldn’t it be lovely to land upon an innocent art that relieves us from conditions too harsh to witness, much less endure?  In painting terror benign, can one be too demure?  For sure.  Despite every political spin.

 

Getting back to universal form, geometric basics, is a fine, if austere, challenge to heed.  When dealing with the physically concrete we would just as soon banish extraneous content and messy obstacles from the playing field.  But the lines we draw are as mired as the fingers that scratch the board of feigned neutrality. The game function of the hopscotch designs overrides the form as content imperative of high modernism.  Easter egg colors don't quite succeed in making toys of vicious animal traps.  Substance prevails.

In SPRING the snares that interrupt an elegant formalism are both literal and psychological.  Land mines from wars long over still maim and murder, now and for generations to come.  And we continue to produce, sell, and sow, not ban, them (while animal traps are highly regulated, if not illegal).  Recent floods in Mozambique have redistributed these indiscriminate devices, ruining all safe zones that had been cleared.  Abroad such dangers are often invisible; at home, they are often disguised. The poor know danger lurks where help is offered.  ‘Social agencies, social workers, schools and welfare offices, in fact, usually double, today, as sites of scrutiny and surveillance. In such contexts, those most desperately in need are those least likely to receive assistance.’* Such traps exist within our own boundaries regardless of class, as inequity reaps violence to the point that parents harbor their children indoors, tethered to television, to avoid the dangers of the street.

SPRING laments the impossibility of innocence on many levels, in our hearts and minds; yet, it also seeks to restore the purity of heart we associate with childhood.  The temporality of chalk games is made permanent, inscribed in concrete.   These particular traps are welded open, rendered harmless, in a gentle gesture toward disarmament.  Their pretty colors may not be merely candy coating after all.  Perhaps we can still play the game.

 

*Fine and Weiss, The Unknown City, 1999