At the risk of sounding like I only read two publications, the New York Times and Adbusters, I will expound up on something that I read from Tuesday’s Times.
Herbert Muschamp wrote an article about one of the plans proposed for the rebuilding of Ground Zero (the area where the twin towers were located). He speaks about a group called “Think” and their plans for making the space a cultural area, home to “a vertically organized complex of cultural and educational buildings, including a conference center, concert hall, library and an interpretive museum about the events of 9/11.”
Muschamp continually reiterates the idea that this new plan is, in itself, art. It brings culture to the city at large. It welcomes all citizens to bask in its statement and in its symbolic mingling of a monument to the past and a center for future intellectual progress.
Muschamp equates this center to poetry. Its part in the landscape of New York is integral-the silhouette of the Twin Towers is as much a part of New York’s “big picture” as Broadway, Chinatown or the Guggenheim Museum.
I like the idea that Muschamp presents-that the layout of a city or town is just as cultural and meaningful as a painting or a poem. I know several people in the architectural field (either practicing or studying architecture), and the way that they view space and the space that buildings create is revolutionary.
Buildings and area make an impression on viewers and citizens. Starkville is just as memorable, to me, for its spatial rendering (the campus that segues into Main Street that bleeds into back roads and railroad tracks) as it is for the people that I know here.
I think it’s vitally important to be able to find poetry, beauty or culture in more than what we typically view as “art.”
Once we, as regular citizens, allow our living spaces to make impressions upon us, we connect ourselves to more than just a single group of certain people or a specific region of the country. It is then that we connect ourselves to more than just specific buildings, and specific houses and plots of land. We learn to see ourselves as part of a great whole, as part of a collage of a country-a statement in itself.
This, in turn, may facilitate a greater enjoyment of the area in which we eat, drink, talk and run because it reminds us that we exist in an individual and vital part of a greater entity.
I am intensely interested in the promotion of artistic ideas and movements to the population at large. I feel that it is important for people to learn to appreciate aesthetics and intense statements and analysis connected to our existence.
This explains the excitement I find in the artistic use of space and buildings. It connects worlds. It bridges art and business, student and laborer-this list of connections is endless.
I want to urge people to allow this connection to take place, and to appreciate the other people with whom they share this area. Many of us have nothing in common, except for this town, which is fine.
But if we move past the town and allow ourselves to start finding interest in the many people groups that inhabit this town, then, if nothing more, we’ll have learned something and possibly made some new associations to worthwhile people and organizations.
Joy Murphy is a senior English major.