Occupy Art?

Serat's Redux  "Picknic on the island"

What is Art?  This the eternal question that begs debate.
For me it is that medium that evokes thought.
Nothing has caused more of a stir in my mind this week than the works of an unknown artist that were located on some unknown facebook page found by Mark Yarm & then posted on the Dangerous Minds blogsite.

It's a bold artistic take on the occupy movement that we are calling Occupy Art!.

Here in Maine everyone is familiar with the works of Andrew Wyeth.  We adopted him as our own, though he comes from Chadds Ford,  Pennsylvania and only summa'd on the coast. A sickly child Andrew was home schooled and instructed in painting by his well know dad and artist/illustrator of Treasure island & Robinhood fame, Newell Convers Wyeth. In a 1977 exhibition catalog for the NY Museum of Art Andrew is quoted :  “I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner,”

A turning point in Wyeth’s artistic life came in October 1945 when his father was killed after his car was hit by a train at a rail crossing in Chadds Ford.I'll paraphrase a 1965 Life magazine interview:  Before he died  I was just a clever watercolorist -- lots of swish and swash after he died I decided to do something serious, I had always had this great motion toward the landscape, and so with his death, the landscape took on a meaning -- the quality of him, a quality of the unknown.

 Andrew Wyeth's most famous work, “Christina’s World” (1948), depicts his Maine neighbor, who was unable to walk, in a pink dress stretched out in a blueberry field, looking longingly up a hill toward a house and barn. Her face is hidden from view but the yearning conveyed by the subject is undeniable.  Now fast forward to Fall 2011 and using photo shop drop into the serene Wyeth landscape a police officer spraying the pronated young Christina in the eyes with a can of mace.  It smacks of Dadaism, the defiling of an icon.  It also highlights and draws a parallel to the current coerced extrication of the "occupy movement".  The extraction of the "Occupiers" like the police officer in this new Christina's world crushes the very liberty we and the US constitution all behold.    Going even deeper is has forced me to focus on the occupy movement, if you think the movement was about people standing out in the cold trying to get attention then you totally missed it.  Now we are given a second chance in the viewing of Christina's World Redux by Mark Yarm .

 Why see Christina's World Redux , Why view Occupy Art?

Do it because it's a constitutional right, 
SHIFT HAPPENS !

and your good mind needs good art

The Gallery Talk is made possible by the generosity of the WMPG Radio listening community.  The blog is the text version of the art rant heard every Thursday at 7am, 5 & 9:30pm on WMPG college and community radio Broadcasting from the University of Southern Maine
90.9 , 104.1 and streaming on the web at http://www.wmpg.org/  

Note: WMPG 90.9 fm has increased it's FM signal strength from 1100 kilowatts to  4500 kilowatts! Thank you for making that possible. This means that you are now able to hear MPG on your car radio from Augusta to Dover , New Hampshire .  The station management, the University of Southern Maine & DJ's are totally pumped and excited about the ability to bring you fresh diverse live radio with a clean crisp sound!
And last but not least a special thank you to WMPG DJ John Dennison for turning me on to the Occupy Art movement and setting my mind a fire!

For more on Activism and the Occupy movement click Dangerous Minds  it's only dangerous if we ignore it.

Here are a few more OCCUPY ART IMAGES.

Edwourd Manet Pic-Nic Redux

Occupy Art hanging in the Wall st gallery 

 Shift is coming get ready for the 2012 Republican & Democratic conventions

Recently seen in the real Gotham City