Hope and Change
I asked Lawrence about the place that hope and change held in the poetry of the homeless; he proposed the following: write or draw what’s right in front of you, which is what people don’t see: it’ the elephant in the living room. “An elephant is grey, but not all grey things are elephants.” The art of the homeless discriminates, and then confers value. It turns conventions and stereotypes, the grey quotidian, what the conventional representations of the homeless demand, a cinema verité, into the “minute particulars” (Blake) of living colours. “Not all homeless people abuse substances; not all homeless people are wasteful and lack ambition.” Riff Raff ironizes the homeless as waste. To write or draw the immediate reality expands, perhaps contradicts, expectations. “The doors of perception are cleansed” (Blake). “The percept has swallowed the concept” (David Batchelor). Lawrence equates the art of the homeless with Old Testament prophets who declaim not about the future but about the present: they present rather than imitate or conceptualize, getting closer to the truth. In A Book of Ours hope and change, declares Lawrence, may result from that honest focus on now.
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the final project by arthur+martha CIC.
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