ART MAKES YOU SEE THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY ©2003 Deborah Henson-Conant
This essay was written in April '03 for WBGH radio, then recorded and edited for their series of artist's essays.

ART MAKES YOU SEE THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY

Art makes you see the world differently. About 15 years ago, they put in a bunch of new subway stops here in Cambridge and they put in a lot of subway art. At the Kendall Square stop they had a set of tubular bells in between the tracks. People going inbound could work one set of levers to ring the bells. People going outbound had a different set of levers. If people on both sides of the tracks worked the levers at the same time the bells would go crazy. They made all the rest of the subway noises sound different, too. The subways sounded more like music, even when nobody was playing the bells.

At the Davis Square stop they tiled the subway with these big ceramic tiles that schoolkids made, with pictures and poetry glazed onto them. Words and images jumped out of the walls, out of the floors and suddenly, even streetsigns, even graffiti started looking more like poetry.

At my stop, Porter Square, they collected piles and piles of old abandoned mittens and gloves and they bronzed them. Sometimes it was just a single threadbare mitten, bronzed and stuck between the escalators, sometimes a whole pile of gloves was lurking in the corner. They looked so familiar, so casual. But they were clearly sculptures, clearly art Ð and suddenly regular gloves and mittens started looking different, too. Even when they werenât bronzed.

Things people dropped on the ground started looking like art. New art was popping up every day. You never knew when you were going to look somewhere and see -- art.

One day I was heading down towards Porter Square when I saw something that completely floored me. Overnight, someone had built a new sculpture at the crossroads and I had never seen anything like it. äOh my gosh,ä I said. ãLook at that! Thatâs incredible.. It looks like Ð it looks like a big black plastic bag wrapped around a stopsign.ä Oh. Oh, it IS a plastic bag wrapped around a stop sign.

But in that one moment before I realized it was really just a stopsign and a plastic bag, I saw art. I felt art. Hey, if you get enough real art around, the whole world looks different.

(© Deborah Henson-Conant / 2003)