Still from Scar Tissue Dance Video - section 'Scar Writing', The Olimpias, 2005

“AIDS is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Those words from an exhibit a decade ago at the California College of Arts, struck me speechless. I stood, riveted to the wall-sized set of panels. The honesty and courage of the words and images impressed me profoundly. I felt I was in the presence of something significant and wholly unexpected, something I would have thought impossible.

How could the artist make this claim? The notes revealed the reason: the calamity had transformed his art and his personal relationships, his very identity.

I would never suggest that everyone should have this attitude toward suffering. But that it was possible at all made me ponder.

Unemployment, too, can hit us like a heavy diagnosis; where in this disaster can we find meaning and healing while we send out applications and wait for change? How can we walk through the gaping door into the unknown?

The artist mentioned above supplies one answer: we can create art. The world’s most powerful art arises, not from leisure and comfort, but from the struggle to find meaning in suffering. Many prisoners have found spiritual release through poetry. The sculptor Barbara Bloom said, “When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.”

Worst Case

Even on the street, a person could write on the back of a flyer with a pen found on the ground. I met an artist from the Milwaukee ghetto once, Prophet Blackmun, who painted his visions on plywood using house paint and eventually entered them in the city’s art shows. We can learn so much about innovation and survival from immigrants, the rural poor, Native American and African American communities, from any group that has suffered without an end in sight, relinquished a beloved past, and faced the present. The blues didn’t spring from music lessons, concert halls, and expensive instruments though eventually it did connect with them.

Under the Radar

I once knew a couple who both worked part-time jobs making videos and selling paint in a paint store, but surprisingly, they lived well. Instead of renting an apartment like everyone else, they found and leased a small private club no longer in use. Besides offering ample toilets, it gave them an institutional cookstove and refrigerator, vast spaces for building sets, and twenty-foot-high windows.

Our need to live like everyone else can blind us to possibility. Unemployment might offer an opportunity to leave the herd and its “needs” and individuate, as Jung suggested, becoming more and more our unique selves.

Beyond the Solitary Creator: Collective Art

In 2009, another art experience profoundly moved me. Berkeley’s Subterranean Arthouse in conjunction with San Francisco State’s Poetry Center hosted a night of “cripple poetics” which promised to be very interesting. It was much more that that.

One of the featured speakers, Petra Kuppers, teaches both fine art and disability studies at the University of Michigan. She appeared to be one of those people of courage who has been somewhere herself, come through, and returned to share and guide. In a wheelchair, which she de-emphasized, she leads creative community projects involving dance, art, video, storytelling – all kinds of collaborations – from New Zealand to Wales.

Beautiful choreography is possible using posture, arms and hands in living sculptures created by people we might assume to be barred from the art of dance. In one project, Kuppers worked with Cancer Society volunteers and cancer patients; in another, with prisoners and hospice people; in another, with elders and dance students; in another, with mentally ill people and mall-goers. She involves the community in creating a positive Disability Culture to counter disability oppression through a collective called Olympias named for a Greek queen who practiced Dionysian mysteries.

Bill Roorbach

I came away from the evening recognizing that at some point in our lives almost everyone experiences disability (whether visible or not). I thought “What is Disability Culture? What is any living culture?” Kuppers made some profound remarks in a wholly “unpitiful” way about how disability oppression involves being isolated, being touched only by people who are paid to touch you, being asked to focus on the traumatic event over and over, having it projected as one’s only identity, and living with secrets, one’s own and others’.

Could the condition of unemployment be considered a kind of disability? A social, financial, psychological disability? How might we create a collective work of art from it? One of my friends, a poet, has included the experience of unemployment in her poetry.

The Spiritual Payoff?

When we step into the unknown, we discover a new land, and what we discover inside ourselves and in relation to others may be as important as what we discover outside. Our power to contribute and create may be challenged by difficulty, but not diminished. As Bill Roorbach, a writing teacher, noted in his wonderful book, Writing Life Stories, “To have a voice is to have a self and to have a self is powerful.”