witzmountain
05-29-2008, 07:49 PM
Have you heard about what’s going on in the Mexico City, at the Mexican School of Down Art? Students have paintings and lithographs touring the major galleries of Europe and the United States, and getting great reviews. All the artists have Down Syndrome. Most were considered hopelessly retarded until they picked up a brush. Once thought to have no complex ‘inner life,’ the Down Syndrome artists paint in the style of expressionism, an art form defined by the artist’s inner life, and the placing of subjective feeling and emotions aroused by a subject into the painting.
Down Syndrome was first described by John Langdon Down in 1866, but depictions of people with Down Syndrome features in art date back at least to the sixteenth century. In the west, these people were once referred to as ‘Mongoloid,’ also a slang term synonymous with ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’. We now know that the physical and behavioral differences in Down Syndrome are the result of a person having an extra set of chromosomes, 47 compared to the normal 46.
So what’s going on? Artist Daniel Perez says of his Down Syndrome students: “their limitations enable them to see the world in a way you and I don’t.” He’s right, of course, only it’s not that you and I don’t see it. It’s that we can’t see it. Expressionism is often contrasted to impressionism. Impressionist art depicts the fleeting nature of things, the visual impact of an object and light at a moment in time. Expressionist art depicts the inner nature of reality, and the feelings that give an object its meaning. Within the dualism of civilization vs. primal nature, expressionism tends toward the latter.
Things like this are happening around the world. Autistic men and women, so severely autistic they can’t speak, having grown up rocking or hitting their heads against the wall, are now writing poetry, and autobiographies. There are Down Syndrome artists illustrating children’s books and autistic authors writing them. The same computers that have brought us together on the internet, literally reading each other’s minds, has brought the keen intellect of autistic men and women into dialogue with us after generations of being locked away.
It seems only right that the Mexican School of Down Art should be located in the same country where First Mother ground corn and formed her first humans on the creation volcano Witz Mountain, and in the same country where the Pleiades-sun-zenith conjugation and the galactic-center-sun conjugation will occur in 2012 at the end of the age of her people. Now, with that year approaching, the definitions of who has limitations and who doesn’t are beginning to blur. Minds thought empty of thoughts and emotion are opening like flowers, and sometimes surpassing us.
It might just turn out that the most normal people might be the most boring; we are so good at trying to act like everybody else that we just share the same delusion, sitting around on chairs telling each other exactly what we expect to hear. Every person has a blind spot, a big hole in the retina where nerves and arteries crowd out the vision cells, but we never see the hole. The world we see there comes less from the eye than from the imagination. Even knowing this, we can’t turn off the illusion. Similarly, it’s nearly impossible to break out of the delusion, the movie we’ve scripted to show ourselves exactly what we want our world to be.
If the planet is to ever share a common consciousness and vision, all her children must be at the table. As the year 2012 approaches, it is a blessing that those with Down Syndrome are finding voices. The blessing is on all of us, because Down Syndrome artists seem to see a world most of us can’t even imagine.
Down Syndrome was first described by John Langdon Down in 1866, but depictions of people with Down Syndrome features in art date back at least to the sixteenth century. In the west, these people were once referred to as ‘Mongoloid,’ also a slang term synonymous with ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’. We now know that the physical and behavioral differences in Down Syndrome are the result of a person having an extra set of chromosomes, 47 compared to the normal 46.
So what’s going on? Artist Daniel Perez says of his Down Syndrome students: “their limitations enable them to see the world in a way you and I don’t.” He’s right, of course, only it’s not that you and I don’t see it. It’s that we can’t see it. Expressionism is often contrasted to impressionism. Impressionist art depicts the fleeting nature of things, the visual impact of an object and light at a moment in time. Expressionist art depicts the inner nature of reality, and the feelings that give an object its meaning. Within the dualism of civilization vs. primal nature, expressionism tends toward the latter.
Things like this are happening around the world. Autistic men and women, so severely autistic they can’t speak, having grown up rocking or hitting their heads against the wall, are now writing poetry, and autobiographies. There are Down Syndrome artists illustrating children’s books and autistic authors writing them. The same computers that have brought us together on the internet, literally reading each other’s minds, has brought the keen intellect of autistic men and women into dialogue with us after generations of being locked away.
It seems only right that the Mexican School of Down Art should be located in the same country where First Mother ground corn and formed her first humans on the creation volcano Witz Mountain, and in the same country where the Pleiades-sun-zenith conjugation and the galactic-center-sun conjugation will occur in 2012 at the end of the age of her people. Now, with that year approaching, the definitions of who has limitations and who doesn’t are beginning to blur. Minds thought empty of thoughts and emotion are opening like flowers, and sometimes surpassing us.
It might just turn out that the most normal people might be the most boring; we are so good at trying to act like everybody else that we just share the same delusion, sitting around on chairs telling each other exactly what we expect to hear. Every person has a blind spot, a big hole in the retina where nerves and arteries crowd out the vision cells, but we never see the hole. The world we see there comes less from the eye than from the imagination. Even knowing this, we can’t turn off the illusion. Similarly, it’s nearly impossible to break out of the delusion, the movie we’ve scripted to show ourselves exactly what we want our world to be.
If the planet is to ever share a common consciousness and vision, all her children must be at the table. As the year 2012 approaches, it is a blessing that those with Down Syndrome are finding voices. The blessing is on all of us, because Down Syndrome artists seem to see a world most of us can’t even imagine.