Don’T Make Us Put On Our Thinking Caps

Thinking too much can cause problems.

Being happy is more important than anything.

Dying should be as easy as falling off a log.

Men are not monogamous by nature.

Violence is permissible, even desirable occasionally.

Murder has its sexual side.

Unless it comes in the shape of a giant red wagon or a line of rusty Bloomsday runners, art in easily shocked Spokane is often as welcome as yellowjackets at a fish fry.

Case in point is the electronic readerboard above the security desk in the STA bus plaza. It has become the latest anthill the Chicken Littles want to transform into Mount Everest.

This newspaper has already aired several ridiculous letters to the editor over the display, which is part of a pop art exhibit sponsored by Cheney Cowles Museum.

Nervous Nellies claim this narrow, 121-inch-long device is an instrument of the devil that promotes suicide, spouts Communist propaganda and could influence serial killers.

Yet the board continues to blink. Any bus station patrons who bother looking up are bombarded with a continuous, 20-minute loop of mixed messages in red moving lights.

As if poor bus-bound souls don’t have enough problems trying to figure out whether the No. 8 Altamont is on time, now they must confront sentences such as:

Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

No one who lived through Nixon or Clinton would debate that truth. But before brain cells can digest the thought, along comes Stupid people shouldn’t breed, followed by another non sequitur: War is a purification rite.

The steady steam of sentiments is lost on most observers, who scratch their heads and meander onward through the STA’s palatial $20.6 million loitering grounds.

Others, however, see forces at work that are far more sinister.

“That’s not art,” declares Leone Johnson of the Good News Store, a new Christian outreach center on the second floor of the STA building. “That is straight from the pit of hell.”

Actually, Leone, it’s straight from the pit of Canada. On loan from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, to be exact.

Titled “Selections from Truisms,” the readerboard is a 1985 work by Jenny Holzer, an internationally known pop artist.

Pop art is most associated with Andy Warhol’s screen prints of Campbell’s soup cans. The style, however, changed the art world by making culture as important as nature.

For a pop artist, a mundane object is as legitimate a subject for inspiration as a sunset or a seascape.

Holzer, for example, turns a humdrum electronic readerboard into a provocative instrument by programming an assortment of unqualified imperatives.

The decision by Cheney Cowles’ curators to put the board in the bus station was a bold one. It exposes art to people who may never set foot inside the museum’s doors.

But to suggest its messages, like In some instances it is better to die than to continue, will persuade someone to kill himself is insane. Will The land belongs to no one, another Holzerism, persuade some clod to give away his houses and go live under a bridge?

The point of Holzer’s piece is not to blindly accept these so-called truisms, but to question them. It is designed to challenge you, to make you think.

The easily offended never get it.

Ask Ildiko Kalapacs, a fine artist. Last February, she says her art exhibit in the lobby of a downtown office building was canceled barely after it began.

Why? A couple of nitwits raised a ruckus over her nude paintings.

There was no sexual content in the paintings. Kalapacs’ nudes - elongated and abstract - are not remotely realistic.

Even so, the paintings were pulled. Show over.

So take some advice, you struggling artists. Stick to the giant red wagons and happy runners. Spokane will will love you for it.