The Function of Art at the Present Time

Berry 47 R. M. Berry The Function of Art at the Present Time Coming down the street on the left-hand sidewalk is a mime or juggler—that is, a youth in whiteface with eyes uplifted and hands poised to catch an object you can't quite see—and trotting beside him two black children in cutoffs cat-calling. A biker pedals in and out of the cars against the flow of traffic, apparently headed toward a clutch of young women, arms crossed, cackling, all dressed in hot colors—yellow, crimson, magenta, garish green. In a scene extravagant with color the green leaps out. There's a fight in progress around a car that's got one wheel up on the curb and the front doors open—an overweight, flush-faced guy in an absurd tam'o shanter being punched in the nose by a skinhead and his girlfriend. Nobody looks, but that could just be fear. An abandoned baby stroller stands in the sun. (Empty?) A skater zips around it with a boom-box under one arm. And high above everything, a huge Schweppes billboard looms, its lettering funnelshaped , uppercase S swooping toward the lowercase one, so the logo functions like a pointer. The word means nothing, of course, but it highlights what does. Specifically, a head and torso peering over a roof that, except for their silhouette against the final yellow e of the billboard, would pass unnoticed. We don't know this shadow, couldn't describe her (him?), nameless, does she live here? No race, class or soul, but she's curious. She leans waaaay out—points her chin, cranes her neck—and fixes a man at a sidewalk table five stories down. It seems important to say that this man—bald with a red fringe and pallid scalp—is exactly the same size as everyone else and does nothing odd. He holds a pencil in one hand; loose pages strew the tablecloth . No detail in the scene reveals just how to take him. If we're observing a romance—the watcher and watched—it's either deep or uncanny. Possibly the man and the silhouette are enemies. Is her posture distrustful? But what makes the two so interesting is that he has twisted in his chair—as if amazed—to stare right back up at her five stories away. What has drawn him to her darkness? Their shared look organizes everything. Behind the man a waiter with one hand on a chair back rolls his sleeve and chats to a woman in a business suit. Beside them the sidewalk is bare for a distance, except for a striped cat on a stoop. At the street's far end there's a brick wall with a huge mural. 48 the minnesota review The mural is the neighborhood—cafe tables, Schweppes sign (but changed from yellow to hot green), traffic, stroller, even the biker and cat (calico now). The surface is turned at an oblique angle so the end with the mime—we can see now that it's a mime, not a juggler—is larger than life, and the end with the cat converges to a grayish miasma, virtual nothing. In the near corner the artist has scribbled her name, tantalizingly legible, and leaning forward we're about to make it out when a guard harrumphs, embarrassing, so we hurry away. ...