Looking as Discourse: Four Screams

Image by Angelo Maneage

The theme of the 2022 Cleveland Humanities Festival is “Discourse.” Zach Savich, a Cleveland Review of Books board member and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, asked a group of artists, writers, and scholars from Cleveland and beyond to address the topic, “How is looking a form of discourse? Or: how does looking become discourse?” Their responses explore some of the ways in which private and shared experiences of vision contribute to culture, conversation, identity, and collective exchange.

REFRESHING HOPE AND PLEASURE

Wanting to write about looking at screaming, the woman clicked again on a video by Kim Beom in which a slate-clad actor playing an artist stands at an easel to teach her (and whomever else is watching) how to make a painting titled Yellow Scream—will it help? The instructor lists the materials required, sets up his palette, and grabs a thick hog-bristle brush with which to make a series of vigorous horizontal gestures along a primed white cotton canvas. 

Beginning with lemon and “anguished screaming,” he paints a straight line from right to left while telling the audience to yell “as if someone yanked your arm behind you or pulled you by the hair.” The instructor’s guidance in Korean is captioned in English (though a scream is lucid in any language), and he continues with rapid brushstrokes of chrome yellow, permanent green, and burnt amber, each swipe paired with a particular shriek for the pupil to imitate: “anger-filled screams,” “short scream expressing flashing pain,” screams “from the heart,” and “refreshing hope and pleasure.” 

“Simple, huh?” the instructor asks, matching his moan to pigment: “A brown tone filled with regret, isn’t it great?” The painting’s nonsense. An ugly, childish mess. Vomity glob of sunset—hot knot of dissent.  

“A brushstroke done with screaming is very different from a normal one,” explains the teacher, after wailing in pain, “[b]ecause screaming greatly affects the lines that are drawn… the effect of the screams is recorded with the brush strokes.” The woman had watched Beom’s video when it went viral two springs ago, though it had been bought by the Walker years earlier. She saw it just before everything that would happen happened. It’s not so hard to look at art, she thought, pressing pause. It’s not that difficult. If one was in the mood, they could even click through a couple of links and end up at Beom’s Horse Riding Horse, way stranger.  

WOVEN

What I’m seeing now is a cylindrical shape made of single-use water bottles spiraling down and around: a glass hornet’s nest, clear chrysalis? “Unsustainable medium of plastics,” writes Ron Shelton, addressing the trash he used to make a cadmium yellow mosaic of irregularly cut squares and scraps of kitty litter buckets, multi-colored tapestries of grocery bags, and floppy plastic hats, pointed repurposing of original packaging. I’m surprised by the face of the woman working at the gallery (the only other person here) and wander to the side, pass by a piece called “plastic fire.” Even under a mask there’s something familiar about her.

Shelton says working with recycled substances radicalized his art, changed his life. Reusing is a practice invoking other habits even if a single (re)creation doesn’t directly shift anything. The consolation of repetition. I look again. To not know what will cool your pupils after a year of screens. Stilled debris. I catch a bright deadening yelp of yellow. Chemical, it’s banana flavor instead of fruit. The opposite of waterfall.  

I drive home. Rain clouds darken the living room. I switch on a lamp, plop down on the couch. Oh! The woman hosted a talk about art. I watched it long, long after the event occurred. Wire, thread, wood. Here, wear this jester’s hat. The shared nightmare of a million floating toddler cars. Suddenly, I hear a shriek—piercing, piercing—and jump up. But no! No, no. No, no. My kid, this time of day, he’s safe at someone else’s house.

TONGUES OF FIRE 

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature, said Edvard Munch, of his most famous painting.

BLOW BLOW THOU WINTER WIND

The dog’s cry is aimed at an invisible day moon. The mother’s spine curves over her child like a cabin roof. A man pushes his head into weather, following a piss-tinged path in the old snow. Misery is evident in their postures. In John Everett Millais’s painting the wind is devoted to the trees, the dog to its owners, the child to their mother, the man to his future. The dog’s so distraught that he’s stuck—caught between two prospects—unable to choose between comfort or accompanying.  

Consider the mother’s shawl, the plump orange parcel that holds her belongings. It’s clear that the hope of the fir tree, the stone wall, the forest, the sea—it will all be inadequate. A howl signifies desire. It says: come back. A howl serves as a sign of fidelity. Mallais’s painting’s dog was based on a neighborhood collie. 

The sky is overcast. It’s a made thing: ice gray interrupting soft ivory. The title is borrowed from As You Like It, the phrase “Blow blow thou winter wind” appearing at the beginning of a song performed by Lord Amiens, directed at the character Duke Senior, whom he’s accompanied into exile. Amiens’s song declares the winter wind a less cruel force than “man’s ingratitude.” Winter is never as painful as the indifference of a friend, sings Amiens. Nature’s bite is impersonal, whereas disinterest’s a behavior.