Ready for the World

 

 

Last Thursday night I was lucky enough to attend a screening of A Whole Lott More, a documentary about a sheltered workshop being shut down in Toledo, Ohio.  I also was a small part of a panel discussion right after with the movie's three stars:  TJ Hawker, Wanda Huber (pictured above), and Kevin Tyree.  A Whole Lott More was directed by Victor Buhler, and Buhler's focus and dedication to showing every aspect of the shutdown has a procedural quality to it.  He concentrates intensely on a moment in time when a lot of people are struggling with past, present and future.  The past, in this case, is symbolized by a large sheltered-workshop facility in which many people with developmental disabilities have worked for most of their lives.  Back in the day, the facility was going gangbusters with contracts from Detroit car manufacturers, but as the economy has shrunk so has the contracts.  The present is dramatized through the lives of TJ and Wanda, who both work in different capacities at the workshop, and Kevin, who is transitioning from high school to work and has chosen to look for a job in the community.  Their struggles with work comprise one aspect of the film; the other aspects revolve around non-profit and governmental agencies and boards battling for control of the future, trying to figure out how to support people with disabilities in capacities that transcend programs and buildings and the past.

 

In many ways this documentary is a ghost story, and the Lott Industries work facility is a haunted house that has outlived both its cultural and economic purpose, and yet the people who worked there and were supported to be there did not experience it as anything other than the place they worked and socialized and went to every day.  The symbolism gets lost when you're living your life, as do the politics and the controversy.  That's one of the more profound themes coming from A Whole Lott More:  we live our lives in whatever systems, codes, rules and values surround us, and making fundamental change happen often isn't about the will to do it as much as having the patience and dedication to reinvent and reimagine the environment in which the change is taking place.  That building full of folding tables and windowless walls and concrete floors is more than the sum of its parts:  it was a refuge, a place for people to know what they were and where they fit.

 

I work everyday trying to help figure out how to support people with disabilities to get jobs in the real world, but it's incredibly hard in a universe where sheltered workshops, and the concepts and mindsets that helped to build them and staff them, still exist. These buildings and symbols often become the only answer and the only vision, places and programs and cultures where waiting for a job becomes the job.  And everything else follows:  businesses, employers,  supported employment service providers, families and the people being helped all get bogged down in a status quo that supports preconceived notions, the main notion being:  you're just not ready to be in the real world.

 

And I know "real world" is a prejudicial term, but still the concept of isolating people and then training them to return to the world rehabilitated more often than not eliminates the possibility of a chance at individuality.  It assumes you deserve a uniform group status, a place where you can only hope to ascend once you figure out you can't.  That hopelessness often becomes a way of life, and that's okay because you don't have any alternatives.  In the movie, Wanda lets us know about her employment history from the get-go, saying when she was younger she went to Sears and K-Mart and applied but they turned her down, she said, because they saw she was disabled.  "I don't want to be a part of a community that does not want me."

 

I totally understand that feeling.  Of course she doesn't.

 

But is that the only dichotomy we're dealing with?  I hope not.  Maybe the discussion isn't about a sheltered workshop being shut down, but maybe the conversation is about the rest of the world?  What if the concern wasn't about the closing of an institution, but the promise of what's "out there" waiting for people to come and get it with a little help from their friends and the people paid to help them?  What if systems and bureaucracies, instead of turf wars, got into a discussion about how to figure out how to make more and more and more connections, more and more actual job opportunities, more and more business opportunities, knowing that there's no alternative?

 

Kevin is the representation of this line of thought in A Whole Lott More.  He never became a part of the workshop culture, and from graduation he pursued getting a job.  That's fraught with all kinds of dangers of rejection, dead-ends, and all the other obstacles in the way of anyone pursuing employment, but he kept trying, just like anybody else, and he finally got a job at Best Buy, even though he truly wants a job in a library.  He settled, but still has a vision forward. 

 

I think all the folks involved in this film are heroic in all kinds of ways, because they are all in pursuit of  a decent wage, a decent life, and a little dignity.  I completely understand how the Lott Industries facility that shut down was a space that held a lot of great memories involved in that group struggle, but at the end of the day I know that everyone who worked so hard within those walls should have a chance to give a try on the other side...

About Last Night

Last night we had an opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc. for a show Bill curated called, "Glory Be!  (a Historical Romance):  Works by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck."  It felt like old times somehow.  Like 12 years ago in fact.  Bill and I first curated a show of "outsider" art back in 2001, at a place called Base Gallery.  That show featured Antonio Adams, Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland and Richard Brown, all artists we had met doing our regular jobs helping people with developmental disabilities.  That gig was titled "Art Thing," and it truly was a groundbreaking moment for me because I realized how art can allow you intense moments of grace and happiness that can sometimes push you forward to do bigger things.  Without "Art Thing," we would not have started Visionaries and Voices, and without Visionaries and Voices we would not have opened Thunder-Sky, Inc. 

 

What has changed in the last 12 years for me, though, is an evolution of trying to figure out how to do shows and projects and events featuring great art by artists often consigned to the background without having to frame their work with their diagnostic biographies:  without having to say what they've accomplished is a product of what a doctor says they have, or has happened "in spite of" this or that diagnosis.  So in "Glory Be" and in every show we do now, the idea of "disability" and "outsider" gets critiqued through stone-cold silence.  That stuff just does not get mentioned because you don't need to know how "outsider" the artist is in order to enjoy the beauty and peculiarity of the art.  Major case in point is "Glory Be," a show featuring three artists whose works have a lot of things in common, but whose demographics aren't really in sync.  Matthew's intimate, playful drawings of famous presidents, Paul's text-infused drawings of the names of presidents and other historical figures, and Britni's sly, sleek, blithe sculptural inventions cracking the code of historical gloss and pomp -- all these works belong together, and we can relish the way they fit and knock into each other, creating both mystery and meaning.  And we don't need to know who went to art school and who didn't, and we don't need to know IQ numbers or socioeconomic indicators.  We just need the work to be here, pulled together succinctly, given room to expand.

 

Last night, too, I felt a weird, beautiful reconnection with the idea of congregating around art.  I have a major fear of groups of people, but at the opening reception last night the groups of people felt organically okay somehow, as if they had come together to feel better about being people, not so they could feel charitable or sympathetic.  Matthew's family brought enough food for a huge family reunion.  Britni had a sweet soulful crowd of her own.  It all just came together.   And I got it:  this is what we're supposed to do, what Thunder-Sky, Inc. is.  Gatherings of people with lots of food and art and that's enough. 

 

Like "Art Thing" back in the day.  We did a full-color catalog for that show, back in 2001, and below is the back-cover, our mission statement at that time.  I wish I would have known then what I know now:  I would have taken out "disability" and "outsider" from the get-go.   As in:  "The Art Thing Project Is...  ART and helping artists gain access and credibility and success on their own terms."  Why do you need "outsider" or "disability" slapped onto any of these concepts and ideas?  Is it the idea that first you need to assess/label/diagnose people prior to helping them?  Like a doctor?  Bill and I are not doctors.  I don't really know what we are.  But I truly understand, I think, what we're supposed to do here on out, and it has nothing to do with systems or charity, and it has everything to do with what happened last night, and what happened 12 years ago:  finding ways to allow everyone to leave all the bull-shit behind, and proceed accordingly...

 

 

 

 

Below are photos of last night's opening of "Glory Be! (a Historical Romance):  Work by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck," and from March, 2001's opening night of "Art Thing:  Drawings, Objects, Paintings and Words by Antonio Adams, Paul Rowland, Raymond Thunder-Sky and Richard Brown." 

 

 

"Glory Be!"



 

 

 

 

 

 "Art Thing"

 

 

Bondage

Skyfall, the new James Bond film, is exhilarating to watch to the point you forget it's a total retread.  The whole purpose of Bond movies now, of course, is aggrandizing deja vu, finding pleasure in reinventing what has been reinvented to the point it's no longer cliche, just a kind of movie-movie shorthand.  Skyfall is one of the best examples of taking formula and reformulating it to create a little shock to spice up nostalgia.  And its first five or six minutes are probably one of the best action-picture sequences in the history of movies:  car crashes, motorcycles zooming over roofs, a speeding train with two men fighting atop it.  It's an old-school triumph of style over logic.  The ending, as well, has an early-90s independent-movie vibe to go along with its crashing helicopters and armed groups of bald mustached men.  It takes place in a small Scottish church, and delivers a dramatic punch in the gut that evens has tears rolling down 007's cheeks.

Daniel Craig plays Bond as if he is in a trance, all blue-eyed soullessness, his anger engineered to create simple solutions to very complicated problems.  And Judi Dench, as M, is so beautifully understated in her portrayal of power-hunger and regret, she practically steals the show. 

One part of the retread pleasure that doesn't work for me is Javier Bardem's supervillain, Silva.  Bardem is an incredible ham, and it is always a joy to watch him ham it up, but in Skyfall the character does not deserve such deliberation and vigor.  Silva is a one-note psycho, and is particularly sad because of the way the screenwriters define him:  he is disfigured from a botched suicide attempt, and that disfigurement becomes the reason he is what he is, that disability defining him.  He also has dyed blond hair and eyebrows, and a sort of proto-effeminacy that borders on camp:  a guttural, grotesque prissiness that makes it seem like Silva's insatiable villainy is unspooling from Silva's "monstrous" (at least in the moral code of the Bond movies) sexuality.  In one of the first scenes between Bond and Silva, Bardem plays Silva like a catty homo happy to be indulging in a little kink.  With Mr. Bond helpless, strapped to a chair, Silva opens Bond's shirt and licks his lips and it's awkward not because of the gay vibe as much as what the gay vibe is being used for:  to define good and evil.  It's a quick way to divide the universe.

Even when you indulge in retreading a retread after 50 years of service, you still need to rethink the villainy just as much as the heroism.  Isn't there a way to create "evil" without making it feel like gay-bashing?  Can a villain not have a facial disfigurement and still be evil?