Social Contracts
“If we go out to the lake, do you think we’ll get shot?” It was the week of the election and my wife, the painter Eve Mansdorf, was joking. Or not. The weather was beautiful, clear and unseasonably warm. We had been painting a series of landscapes on Lake Monroe a few miles outside of Bloomington where we live. The color display provided by the turning leaves was spectacular. But our attention was evenly divided between absorption in our paintings and the anxious mood surrounding the Presidential election. We continually listened to NPR as we worked, our emotions swinging between poles of elation and despair with each bit of news.
America seems to slouch ever closer to a Hobbesian world. A few years ago, the mayor of Bloomington wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times where he documented local incidents of a man openly carrying a handgun at a public swimming pool and of men armed with assault weapons riding atop a float as part of a Fourth of July Parade. He noted that Indiana law prevented him from doing anything to thwart such events. Our Republican dominated state legislature routinely attempts to curtail the ability of local communities to impose regulations requiring people to wear masks in enclosed public spaces as a public health measure and is doing its best to keep businesses from enforcing vaccination mandates. My immediate neighbors’ yard signs in town sport messages of tolerance and support for Black Lives Matter but as one moves toward the edges of town “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Back the Blue” flags predominate.
Immediately after the 2020 Election I naively assumed that tension would dissipate and people would come to their senses. Instead, it has only gotten worse. Absurd lies promoting theories of election fraud have found credulous audiences, particularly among Republican voters. A brief pause prompted by the twin shocks of the January 6th Insurrection and a second Impeachment barely made a dent in attitudes and have only seemed to harden opinion. The continued existence of democracy in our country is in doubt as the midterm election looms.
And yet from time-to-time glimmers of good feeling could reveal themselves. During the fall of 2020 as we worked in the park you could sense peoples’ exhaustion. We painted campers and campsites. Of necessity these had to be quickly painted. Campers and tents might appear or be struck at any moment completely altering the composition. After a difficult spring and summer of the pandemic people had found a safe activity that they could do together outside. It was a more diverse group of people in relation to ethnicity and class than one might imagine encountering in rural Indiana. Onlookers were curious and respectful about the paintings and our equipment and would engage us in conversation. If people came very close, we all put on masks. We had found a neutral ground where people could engage and relate. The subject of politics was carefully avoided.
Morandi is one of my favorite painters. A calm stoicism pervades all of his work. The dramas afforded by his compositions are intricate and particular. Objects in his still life paintings recur over the years like a troupe of actors. Among them are a scalded pot, a coffeepot missing its spout and a clock seen from the back, each holding a personality filled with pathos and tragedy. The evenness of the artist’s sensibility resists the surrounding world. Yet, I imagine that I can see a difference in his work from the War years – a certain instability in the arrangements and the presence of shadows which hardly ever happens in his paintings before and after that period.
I am drawn to classicism as a mode of being. Life seen from the outside imposes order. Surfaces reflect and conspire to conceal a secret interior. Inner life may be implied and hinted at but never explicitly revealed. The fisherman is forever in anticipation of the fish, the book is never finished, time stands still.
Tim Kennedy
Bloomington / December 2021
