Thinking back about how I used art as a child, or how I experienced it, here is one example that comes to mind. Now this isn’t the earliest memory at all, (it actually came around year 10 of my life), nor would I call it the number one memory, but it is definitely in the top 10, maybe even the top 5 experiences I think of in my childhood and art.
It is the tv serial “Blue Summer” – or “Verano Azul” – made in Spain in the early 80s (1981 to be exact, according to Wikipedia). I probably saw it in the mid-80s. It is about a group of 7-8 kids – teens and pre-teens, who meet in a resort town on the sea coast of Andalusia and spend the summer together. Several summers in a row the Bulgarian national television (the only one at the time) would show the serial over the summer, and all kids I knew watched the episodes faithfully. We didn’t know what a cult film was, but now I see it labeled as such. All I knew was that I loved the film – I wanted to watch it over and over again, and then when it was over, I would reenact the episodes and imagine new and different situation, I would adapt the situations to my environment or join the characters in theirs. It was as if they, the show’s characters, were my own friends and companions. I remember the excitement of experiencing their adventures, and I remember looking up to them (they were older than me the first time I saw it) for a glimpse of a future that could be mine. Looking back now, I wouldn’t call them my role models, but there was definitely the element of awe in seeing these guys and their relationships. I still decided which behavior I considered good, i.e. desirable, and which bad, or something I wouldn’t want to do, but I looked at their relationships like a model for what happens in reality and what I would like to have in my life – something like they had.
So I find my own experiences similar to what the people in the NY Times articles wrote (see previous post). I definitely think that art does those things in a person’s life. The question is: after we are grown up, after we take classes on what art is, after we make art our profession, after we don’t make art a profession and rarely find time for it, do these experiences still happen? For those of us who do work in the arts, are we really taught how to create art that way? I wasn’t.
But I leave this discussion for later and invite you to watch. Here is the link to the opening sequence. Enjoy!
Art and the Invisible 