Art Gives a Speech at the old JP Morgan Bank as part of the No Comment Art show, 10.8.11

Thanks to Wolf Geyr for filming. Find more of his work at:  http://www.wolfgeyr.com

Art Enables The Banks (version 2)

Letter to the Bank Manager #85 (Art is learning to lighten up)

My dear, ever so bouncy bank manager,

How is it that life doesn’t simply drag you down? You always keep your spirits up. You are an inspiration. Free of scruples you can cakewalk through life without the anxieties faced by us mere mortals. The doubts we suffer concerning, say: the correctness of an action we partook in, or the quality of our part in a dialogue...these are things that do not even begin to bother you. If you step on a finger or two you might apologize and then move on. whereas I’d be up all night. You do not suffer from the pain you leave in your wake. It is of no concern to you. Such is life. Life is such. I meanwhile bang my head against the wall. Why, I ask myself, did I waste a dollar on that silly, silly bobble head doll from that crappy yard sale. You I imagine, spend thousands on cars you don’t need and question the expenditure not at all.

You remain perpetually sunny and bright. You lead a quality life: good food, good company, good everything. Your tolerance for not good is, I imagine, zero. Downers? Out! Mopers? Be gone with you! Complainers and whiners? Walk away! Politically correct? Don’t waste my time! Scruples?...Give me a break!

I don’t know how you do it. I’m so thin skinned, watery eyed, and sensitive. I ask too many questions. I’m paralyzed by the weight of every decision.

Really, in the end, it is no wonder I fail to make the kind of money you call: Making Money. I don’t have the skill sets needed. For goodness sake I got a degree in Fine Art!

If I were a banker I’d see a client who’d just been foreclosed on and be unable to function for the rest of the day. If an old lady walked into the bank and said her heat was off because she’d failed to pay her electricity bill I’d empathize! I wouldn’t be able to put on an act. I’d reach for the phone and call that heartless electricity company and start in with how cruel and inconsiderate this world could be. I’d get them to imagine their own grandmother shivering beside a cold heater, glassy eyed hoping, hoping it might come on. I’d force them to face the picture of blue skin showing through the holes in her stockings and ask them can they truly live with such guilt?

And of course I’d lose my job.

Guilt is a dirty word. You know this, but I cannot shake the feeling that guilt must be confronted and not simply shrugged off.

It is a terrible thing. I imagine my family going hungry and eating the drywall in their crumbling home and think: that must never be. I imagine it because it is a closer reality for me than it ever will be for you. Whereas for you a bankruptcy is a glitch, quickly fixed with an infusion of air from a pump, for me it would register as a permanent and insurmountable scar. You will always inevitably bounce back.

That said there has been a change in the air of late—a sea change. Where once upon a time a job lost or a business shut down would leave the victim feeling lost, ashamed, floundering in self doubt, these days people are learning to carry such travails with a certain levity, even with a certain rakish charm. We are learning from you. You have taught us to not take it all so seriously. Stigma? Nah! Debts? Forgettaboudit! Do the banks worry about their debts? No! Do they let moral turpitude hinder their every action? No they do not! Let us all follow by example. Those credit card offers? Utilize them! The banks offer them to you in hopes you do. They are our teachers, exemplars of how to behave in a world too oppressed by issues of right and wrong.

Thank you for being so supportive during my hand wringing. You may never respond to my letters but by acting as a sounding board you help more than you can ever know.

Sincerely,


Art O’Connor

Freedom From Want

Norman Rockwell

So is this one of those rare, populist moments that will benefit the democrats and not the republicans? The notion that income inequality as it stands is reprehensible is hard to dispute. For once it does appear as if the right is at a loss for words. Their outmoded charges of liberalism and socialism will now fail to penetrate the usually thin skins of the opposition as the true meanings of those words are taken to heart once more. I’ve never understood how it was that the right could hurl these words as insults and get away with it. The democrats have always showed a remarkable lack of backbone. Maybe now they are beginning to stand behind their supposed values. The issue of income inequality is one that the right has so vociferously painted as one of class warfare that their about face is remarkable. Cantor would now like to talk to the mob he slandered. Romney is now concerned about the plight of the 99%. Politicians of either stripe apparently now feel the frustration. Until they exhibit an interest in real change that empathy will appear hollow. The exciting part of all this is that the bland assumption that the have nots simply want what the haves have is clearly hollow. Their demands are reasonable. Freedom from want is not a new idea but amazingly there are those who have continued to mock it with impunity until now. Freedom from want is a human right albeit one that must be ever fought for, and people are now taking that fight to the streets once more.

Meanwhile on the health front more and more companies lay off workers to whom they owe too much (good benefits) replacing them with hungry workers to whom they can extend less satisfactory benefits and lower pay. So it is naturally time to address the healthcare gap once and for all. Do I need to point out that private health insurance is hard for most of the 99% to afford? The healthcare system as it stands tilts heavily in favor of the wealthy. Time for those without health insurance to wage a health war! A good and affordable healthcare system is something many, many folks could get behind once someone explains clearly and simply, once and for all, how they are being shafted by the system currently in place. Tying an individual’s health benefits to a job was never a great idea as it impeded the ability of people to grow their careers and move from one work situation to another concerned as they were by the possibility they might lose the benefits they have or be temporarily caught without. That amounts to a form of fear culture, something the right continues to extol as virtuous in every sphere. Fear, as far as they are concerned, drives the economy.

So, given that people have little choice re their health care insurance it seems now might be the time for everyone to drop their coverage, occupy the hospitals if they’re unwell, the headquarters of insurance companies if they currently are well and demand coverage for all or none.

I’m no expert. All I see is a wrong headed system with lobbyists so powerful any alternative to things as they stand have little chance of moving forward. Until someone stands up to the insurance companies nothing will change. This is just one of the many fronts where anger around income inequality is palpable. This insistence on change must be encouraged and cannot stop. The mantra must be healthcare for all.

It is positively boring to have to repeat the obvious again and again but in this culture as it stands we have no choice.

Letter to the Bank Manager #84 (Only Connect!)

Dear Bullrider,

You should understand by now that you are the recipient of letters. I would hope you appreciate the full implication of this—I have made the effort to connect with you via a  literary form that—though considered quaint in the days of TWITTER—is one that carries some weight, burdened as it is by the brilliant example of those great men and women of letters who have gone before. You are my Boswell, and I am your Johnson (not literally you understand). You are the recipient of the musings of a high minded, if oppressed artist. Do I resort to insults or name calling? No sir! I do not! I merely undermine your assumptions with powerful wit and humor. I insult with dignity. I may spill ink on your shirt collar but never blood! What a privilege! I invite you to step up to the plate! Don’t be one of those who sit upon a balcony, champagne flute in hand, staring down at the masses in their clumsy protestations in Zuccotti Park, with a sneer on your visage. Do not be one of the angry bankers spouting vitriol on YouTube! Instead I urge you to engage. Pick up your pen and respond. Dig deep and surprise us by not being predictable. Think outside the box. Imagine yourself in the shoes of others. Teach us to also pull ourselves up by our boot straps and quit our whining. Show us how it is done—if you can.

E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End tells a story of class struggle in turn-of-the-century England. I’m from England but have lived here in the States for half my life. I’m a duel citizen. When I first arrived on these troubled shores for reasons still not clear to me I was told by the official from whom I picked up my social security card that as far as America was concerned I was American, and as far as England was concerned I was both. “Make of that what you will,” he said, and so I have. I have brought that class struggle to these shores, shores that remain oblivious to the reality of such social divisions. As a country founded on the notion that anybody may come here and achieve anything and that each individual is only limited by the breadth of their imagination it remains a country that offers hope. Many immigrants recognize that and find it to be true given where they came from. They also see the fragility of it, the lie of it and may well grow to become the most ardent defenders of Democracy in a rapidly failing system. I digress. I studied E. M. Forster’s masterpiece in school and never forgot what I saw as it’s central theme: Only connect!

I will persist in trying to connect with you. I understand that you are not personally to be blamed for the financial mess this country finds itself in, a mess that spreads like a virus across this planet. Fires broke out everywhere laying waste to whole classes. Townships and communities the world over have been devastated by the ruinous tricks of a few bad apples. I only implore you, keen as you surely are to not have your name tarnished by association, to root them out. Regulate them into penury! That would be delightful and you’d please a massive segment of your constituency.

Yours most sincerely,


Art O’Connor
 
PS—I promise to hold your feet to the fire. Take this as the highest compliment.

How Art Propels Occupy Wall StreetMichele

Article by Michele Elam, Special to CNN

Letter to the Bank Manager #83 (Occupy Your Home!)

Crappy photo collage thrown together in haste! But you get the idea.

My dear Bank Manager,

I write to you on a fine sunny morning after days enduring nature’s rage. We have tree limbs in our back yard that narrowly missed scarring our home. Halloween was a blast this year as we negotiated downed power lines and piles of tree waste to get to those baskets of candy sitting on the stoops of homes that were without electricity. You must be relieved to hear we still have our power! This home on which I still owe a massive mortgage to, well, you, still stands. If the massive tree but yards away had chosen to give up the ghost the house could’ve been crushed. You almost lost your leverage over us.

This all set me to thinking about how it is that despite years of living in this fine shell, filling it with the warm sounds of children playing, laughing and singing—in essence breathing life into it—you, with a swipe of your pen could, if we were to skip a payment, lose one more paycheck, suffer one more medical bill, could end it all. I resent that. Truly it does come down to many missteps that, over the years, built up to a loss of equity, a tragic yet common situation. Indeed the situation is so common that people are discovering, of necessity, an inner creativity that shows the way to an alternative perspective, another way of looking at this mess. Instead of quivering with a constant gnawing anxiety over the fragility of our situation we shall instead take the bull by the horns (yes! That bull!). We have decided to go out into that yard, MY yard, no longer YOUR yard—mine I say! Mine!—I shall put my sweat and effort into sawing up those tree limbs to make fire wood (don’t see you out here with your chainsaw!) to heat my, MY family’s home. We, my family and I, not you, shall occupy our home! Inspired by the visionaries at Occupy Wall Street we shall Occupy Our Home!

Well? What do you think? Surely you are happy to see your client excited, and inspired, with fire in the belly? We are circling the wagons and hunkering down to a long, tough winter—in the comfort of OUR not YOUR home.

As these fresh creative juices flow I wanted you to be the first to know, you my bank manager, the one to whom I naturally turn in difficult times, for advice, for therapy and for friendship, a deep abiding friendship that can endure such difficult bumps in our relationship.

Yours sincerely,


Art O’Connor