Peripheral Visions

shanty builder. In complex societies we emphasize the uniqueness of the work of the individual artist, but in traditional societies the shaping of pottery or tools and the ornamenting of the body provide bridges that outsiders can see more clearly if they look at them as art, while the members of the community see someone doing in a seemly way what has always been done, perhaps in a manner just a little more comely in the hands of this potter or wood-carver. Some enact even very traditional and homogeneous cultures with more grace than others.
    These two issues converge in modern society because of the difficulty in doing things as they have always been done in a changing setting, so that individuals are obliged to invent new ways of composing the elements of their lives. Today survival depends on a willingness to move away from familiar patterns, but we do not emphasize often enough that new patterns must satisfy ancient needs for harmony and that familiar graces also contribute to an evolving aesthetic of adaptation. The attention that looks for unfamiliar kinds of order even in behaviors that appear outrageous or bizarre may be a precondition for the capacity to generate new patterns from unfamiliar materials. Every time there is a brouhaha about censorship in the arts, like the outrage of the Iranian mullahs at the work of Salman Rushdie or of the American right at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, I think about the double rhythm of pattern violation and pattern creation in the arts that must also characterize any society undergoing change. We live like the people of Tondo, torn out of traditional patterns and attempting to make sense of our lives by composing and creating new ones that will seem good to us with whatever materials come to hand.
    Works of art that offer new ways of seeing the human body propose new ways to be human. American society has been forced within the space of a generation to accept the presence of a large gay community and to grant its members rights of privacy and self-determination, but this acceptance is grudging and graceless until we learn new ways of seeing. The work of an extraordinary generation of homosexual novelists and poets and photographers allows outsiders—straight people—briefly to see that what society was grudgingly forced to tolerate is in fact both seemly and comely, to acknowledge different kinds of grace and tenderness. The urgency of this acknowledgment is sharpened by the AIDS epidemic, which had its first rapid spread in America in the gay community, for curbing the spread of AIDS has required ever stronger patterns of mutual caring and respect both within that community and between the gay community and the straight majority. It is in this sense that experimentation with new kinds of beauty has survival value.
    The move toward racial justice in the United States had to include an understanding by both blacks and whites of the beauties of black men and women, the richness of dark skin, the grace of bone and muscle, the coherence of nappy hair. Here, too, the experience of newness may be essential to developing a new aesthetic. I have seen racial differences and racism in a new way since I lived in the Philippines, because I discovered there the variability of my own visceral responses. After living for months in a village with dark, graceful, small-framed people, I returned abruptly to a gathering of white Americans who suddenly seemed to me bloated and unhealthy, like beached white whales decaying in the heat…later, I was confined at home by illness for two weeks and felt the shock and oppression of alien difference the first time I went out. If nothing else, these moments of self-recognition taught me that the reactions that underlie racism (like ethnocentrism and homophobia) are a human heritage not limited to the bad guys, and that such reactions can be learned and unlearned and mined for insight. Even those artists who concentrate on shocking offer an opportunity to learn, but if that is all they are doing their work will seem trivial soon enough.
    Those who try to limit artists to confirming existing ways of seeing may also limit their own capacity to learn. The rejection of the unfamiliar in the arts is often a blend of imposed tests of reality and propriety. If observers say, from their limited point of view, It isn’t really like that, the work is false, slums are terrible places where life is nasty, brutish, and short…they are introducing