After an unnecessarily stressful day in the office, my friend Adam suggested that we see the new Judd Apatow movie Funny People at the Loews on 34th Street. I hesitated at first because I haven’t found Adam Sandler, the movie’s lead actor, funny since my high school days. But after some coaxing about the amazing supporting cast, I relented. We made our way to the theater on the top floor, watched the previews, and sat through literally five minutes of the movie- tribal hunters, grandiose narration, primitive lands- before realizing that we were actually viewing the new Transformers movie and in the wrong theater. What does this have to do with art? Well, here’s my stretch- I actually started to smile watching the aboriginal hunting because it seemed a ridiculous way to start a romantic/semi-serious/comedy. The expectation of being entertained in that manner influenced my perception of what I was seeing. And perhaps I’m dense.
I couldn’t get enough information on today’s news story about former President Bill Clinton meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Unmarked planes, negotiating for the freedom of two American journalists, the unknown diplomatic concessions– it had the making of a blockbuster itself. It made me think about just how (for a lack of a better word) foreign it must be to be raised in a communist dictatorship where the most of the artwork you see in life is political propaganda. I literally can’t even imagine it when I try; we’re overwhelmed by images we see throughout our day, thousands of them, from so many different sources.
My quick Google search for “North Korean Art” found many reproductions of the artwork that North Koreans see everyday. Pictured above is a graphic apparently from a book picked up on the Chinese side of the North Korean-Chinese border, titled “Doing Her Job by Fighting the Enemy,” artist unknown.
By the way, the movie- the right movie- was pretty good.
I stared at this piece for awhile, thinking how even though communist countries are so limited in the art they see, and that the art is all of uniform messaging (i.e., communist propoganda) that their art comes across as unique and distinct because of this. You can look at the print above and take a pretty good guess at where it came from, whereas art in the melting pot democracies runs the gamut in terms of composition, style, technique, & political and social influence. You could intuit that the piece above is more representative of folk art — highly representational of a place/country/geography.