#219 / This Really Grabbed Me

I saw this photo about a month or so ago, conveyed to me by one of the email bulletins that flow through my inbox. Glen Taylor is the artist who created this. You can learn something about Glen Taylor's broken-porcelain art work by clicking on this link. 

Here is a link to Taylor's personal website. 

Somehow, the photograph above really grabbed me. I stopped scrolling my emails, and stared at that photo. I tried to think why. Why should this particular artistic creation, which I find horrible to look at, have so completely captured my attention that I literally could not turn away from it? 

I don't know whether you, my reader, will have the same reaction to Taylor's art work that I did, but that is the reaction I had. What is depicted is horrible, and I could not turn away from it. 

As I thought about it, I found the answer. Taylor's art work reminded me of something else, another photograph, another recent photograph, a picture that I just can't put out of my mind: 

It seems to me that Taylor's art work is telling us that under that creamy white polish of our high culture, that lovely china from which we eat, each day, and from which we sip our tea, there is a horrible, horrible reality. Taylor's art reveals a lacerating truth about the massive pain that is hidden under that creamy covering, with all its flowers and flourishes. A similar truth is revealed by the photograph above.

oooOOOooo

What do we do when we realize that there is a horrible, hidden truth beneath what we have come to accept as our lovely life?

First, we do not turn away. We never turn away again.

Then... we throw out all those dinner plates, fine china all. We throw it all out. 

We have yet to do that, of course, with respect to the realities revealed by the photograph above, the photo that shows us the police killing of George Floyd, with that horrible knee on his neck, the photo that makes clear that there is, in fact, barbed wire beneath the ceramic coating of our social, political, and economic life, and that it is not just the killing of George Floyd that has been revealed, but the killing of so many others, past, present, and continuing.

That is the picture that has grabbed us, that has captured all of our attention, and from which we cannot turn away. 

Once we have seen the barbed wire beneath the surface of what so many have thought was beautiful, we know that we must throw out those flawed and fatal plates. 

We have yet to do that, of course.

But we must.

Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/07/glen-taylor-broken-porcelain/

(2) - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11761477/george-floyd-minneapolis-police-neck-restraints-unconscious/