Tonight I fitfully flipped between my two British indulgences (British Baking and Downton Abbey) and the Grammy's. I've been a lover of British dramas and Music Award Shows since I was a child. So the scales were in a dead heat and my thumb was thumping between PBS and CBS.
Watching the moral growing pains of post WWI in England and listening to short slices of music with various morals attached to them, I thought about the intersection of what I love most; a universal communication: Art-Technology-Writing-Music-Theatrical Performances. Most of us agree that music is a universal language. After I turned off the TV, and began to think about tonight's missive, I found my mind traveling back to a school field trip to the MFA that we took on 29 January. None of my students had been to the museum in Boston before, and they live just over an hour away in Leominster.
The day after the field trip, I asked each of the World Studies students to share their favorite piece of art, or exhibit, or section of the museum. Some said the bust of Dante and Virgil (I think to curry favor with me), others the modern landscapes hall, and some others the Chihuly green glass tree. But then one group of kids was murmuring quietly and I asked them to share. They looked embarrassed and then said, "the electric guitar made from guns".
At one point, my group of 12 had divided. The docent (on his second tour ever) had taken them to one area in the last 15 minutes of our tour, while I had taken some band boys to the Instrument Room. It was during that separation that they'd seen the electric guitar gun. One of the boys had written down the artist's name as he noticed a youtube url on the placard beside the guitar. All the kids were curious, as was I, by that point. So I found it, loaded it and we watched it (it's the vimeo url above).
Pedro Reyes is the Mexican sculptor who made this piece. It morphed out of a project he'd first done in 2007. The government had confiscated a large cache of weapons, dismantled them and given them to the arts council to do as they pleased. It became Reyes' "Shovels to Guns" exhibit. They'd melted down the metal to make shovels (and plant trees with them) and then exhibited the shovels.
He was trying to take something created for destruction and turn it into something created for construction.
Next there was a confiscation of 1500 weapons that had been broken down to be unusable as weapons. Reyes claimed the pieces and decided to make instruments out them, including the guitar above, which you can hear being played by a famous Mexican musician in the video. At first he asked musicians to play music that he would then set digitally to the instruments. Later he realized the instruments would have to play the music the musicians wrote in order for it to be authentic and giving the objects a true new usefulness.
If/when you listen to the video and hear his creative process and the consequential collaborative process, I hope you find it as inspiring as my students found it to be. We even clicked on the bonus video at the bottom of the link to learn about a project they did that went on to London. (video above is roughly 8 minus, bonus video another 6 or so).
You see, most of my students don't speak fluent Spanish (the language of the video). Most of them have never listened to the process of what it means to produce a sculpture. Although they do come from the city, Leominster, that is the birthplace of Plastics (one of Reyes' fundamental mediums). They do love technology and music, but they'd never realized that a person could combine those to great a music machine made from old weapons.
The students don't want war, although many of their family members have served or are serving in one of the armed forces. The students do want to recycle and repurpose materials to not be wasteful and slow down the destruction of the planet. The students don't want random acts of violence to invade their lives; although we had lock down this fall, with the city and state police storming our corridors with automatic weapons.
We all want to be peaceful. We all want to be of use. We all want to find that sweet spot of passion, technology, and universal connectivity. Their eyes and ears were opened to a broader world; with a instant memory and new understanding of how the world can work. One that I think will be indelibly etched in their heads far longer than a schmaltzy duet or singular speech at the Grammys.
Good night, aspiring universal artists and activists, G'night!
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