Expression Beyond the Grave

Amidst the hustle and bustle of busy New York streets, I search for evidence of real life. There are throngs of people littering the streets, yes. But the life I hunt for is alive. It pulses through you like the drummer in the subway. It lifts you up like the bubble-makers in Central Park. It makes your heart flip like the street acrobats in Times Square. The city is a museum of art, always changing and always in conversation with itself. Like the Constitution, it is amendable and relevant to today. When I stumbled upon this ersatz gravestone on the sidewalk around 67^th and Amsterdam, I was struck as if by a beam of light. I was drawn to it.

Reading, “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof of God he needed was music,” this Kurt Vonnegut quote has become essential to my understanding of the manifestation of art in the city. Vonnegut’s equation of art as proof of God is simple, yet effective in that theology generally views God as a force of creation. In mimicking God’s creation, man is essentially paying homage to the divinity of that act.

Moreover, this quote serves the double purpose as a piece of art in itself. In displaying itself in the middle of a public street, it becomes an essential function of that street, inextricably related to the people that use it. Therefore, the conversation is threefold: a dialogue between Vonnegut and the artist, between the artist and the viewer, and between Vonnegut and the viewer. The foremost message of the installation comes in the interplay between Vonnegut and the artist. The decision to place the art as a New York public work is a response to Vonnegut’s claim that creation is divine, transferring that quality automatically to the chalk-art. Then, the artist attempts to engage the viewer. How the viewer reacts to the piece – walking past, over, or around it, stopping to look at it, sharing it with a friend – is a response to the artist’s message. The creation, in the length of its lifespan, effects daily life. Finally, the viewer leaves the piece in conversation with Vonnegut. After engaging with the artist, they are left with the weight of the quote, or sometimes with a picture of the piece to accompany them. It may inspire feelings of faith, mortality, permanence, art, and beauty.

That art is dispensed by man through the celestial providence of God is enough to rest peacefully. 

          So it goes.