Friday, September 23, 2005
The Artist’s Clock
Last Thursday at the third annual South Bend Art Beat, I bought a large decorative mantel clock at a crafts booth in the square across from the Morris Performing Arts Center. During the long evening of wandering from scene to scene and chatting with friends and strangers, I’d been tempted by quite a few lovely objects: pots, vases, sculptures. I was looking for something to take home, but I didn’t know exactly what I was after, or why, until I spied the clock.
The craftswoman displayed a selection of her hand-painted furniture. All of it appealed to me. But the clock seemed special. In aesthetic terms, it didn’t outshine the other pieces. But it spoke to me because what I was looking for, as it turned out, was just the sort of amusing, witty object that this clock was, by virtue of being a clock.
Some clocks are stately and ponderous; others are fussy or sleek or merely functional. Mechanically, our new clock is simple. Its brushed steel dial, fancy black minute and hour hands, and simple battery-powered mechanism are nothing special. But the architectural wooden case is whimsically hand-painted in bright colors—blue and orange and green and yellow and black and red. In irregular ways, one color frames another, and within the frames are spirals and twists and bright polka-dots scattered like stars. What the artist has done is to cover the clock’s structural austerity with a picture of mental frivolity. Yet it isn’t a child’s clock, this dream object, this elegant household clown. It tells time for us, but it also tells us not to take time or ourselves too seriously.
It changes our rather serious little house, and it changes me to look at it. What am I saying? I still try to arrive at meetings on time. But when I check the time on this clock’s face, which is immediately framed by the starry night, I sense how the foundations are tilting and shifting beneath me, how in the clock’s laughter, joyful as it is, an abyss opens, levies break and cities tremble.
There must be a million ways to communicate love, many of them rare and difficult. The artist of this clock reveals her care in the patterns and in the brushstrokes. There is something hard-won about the vulnerability of all these gestures, part design and part chance. Like all art, it is a struggle against time, no matter how desperate, and an effort in favor of love, no matter how perverse. She isn’t laughing at us—or with us, at the world. Through her, somehow, the world is laughing, and in the light of a certain time outside of all the times we know, we appear ridiculous to ourselves. Aren’t we ridiculous—all of us such consummate politicians, careful in all the wrong ways, technicians of our own undoing, always checking the time as if to ensure that we’ll never understand?
The beauty of art is that it destroys us all at once. How is that an expression of love? Don’t we want to live and grow and avoid being destroyed? Yes. But because art may be as close as we can come to experiencing our own deaths, because it permits us to glance at the clock that no longer changes, it may free us to live beyond our deaths and to know something of immortality in this life. Really, I have no interest in making you believe that my unconsequential clock can save us, when what I believe is that our salvation is all around us. We can hardly escape it.
Ah, but we do.