The Art Gallery in "Six Degrees of Separation"

Play "Six Degrees of Separation"

Art is a part of human history. 

Unlike speaking and writing like poems, paintings are more designed to give expressions to other people

In stone age, people draw to carry their history, and many famous artists after civilization period draw pictures to show their ideas and beliefs to the public. 

However, this loyal faith of artists in drawing has been deteriorated and degraded through materialistic and money centered human history. 

Six Degrees of Separation does mention many famous artists and their paintings, but the actors in the play degrade them.

John Guare uses this decay of arts to argue that the arts are degraded along the distortion of pure human relationships through the materialistic society.

Russian Artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

             One of most significant artist in the play is Kandinsky who is both an influential Russian painter and art theorist whose art reflects his opinion or belief to the society. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He was in Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was returned to Germany in 1921.After Nazis emerged in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939.

"Chaos"

"Control"

             In several scenes, a Kandinsky painting, which shows the balance between chaos and control, is used to illustrate the balance, or lack thereof in the different characters’ lives and relationships with one another.

When Paul enters Ouisa’s life, her main concern is maintaining her affluence and standing in the high class society to which she belongs. 

They both are very obviously upper class New Yorkers whose lives, though they depend on art, are ironically not enriched by it at all. 

Their out-of-balance lives have become obsessed with control, security, and money. 

Art has become for them a meal ticket, reduced to simple figures, and stripped of its imagination, significance, and function as art.

Moreover, the Kandinsky’s two sided painting symbolizes the double side that there are two aspects to every person. While Flan views Paul as an intruder to his control and security, Ouisa understands Paul’s desperate willingness to become the part of upper class, another side of Paul’s story; while on one side, Paul is just a con artist, whom people must stay away from, being a confidence man is tragically only path for Paul to enter the upper class community. Ouisa’s realization that her life has “color” but she is “not aware of any structure” suggests she finds the lack in her life, while Flan still believes his life is fully bright and there is not any problem (62). 

Paul whose story has two sides.

The flip of Kandinsky painting becomes a symbol of reflection that Ouisa becomes able to see the back side of her materialistic life by Paul. Along the decay of art in her career, Ouisa’s relationship with people before Paul is degraded as Flan calls two million more often than Geoffrey. At last retreating from the obsession of security, control, and materialism, Ouisa flips the Kandinsky painting into “wild and vivid” where human life actually should be. The Kandinsky painting revolving at the end has deeper significance by juxtaposing with geometry side. 

The "geometric side" of Kandinsky Painting

The geometry side, which the painting shows the audiences until the end of the play, carries Kandinsky’s artistic view on the immobile society in Six Degrees of Separation. Kandinsky in his autobiography mentions that a point is neither a geometric point nor a mathematical abstraction; it is extension, form and color. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, a star or something more complex. The point is the most concise form but, according to its placement on the basic plane, it will take a different tonality. 

The "wild side" of Kandinsky Painting

Point can be something while a geometric shape in the painting, is already established and cannot further create something. The geometric side of Kandinsky’s painting indicates the established order and pattern of the society where lower class people are immobile to move up. The painting, therefore, criticizes that the immobile society is not willing to disturb the order and structure by helping the lower class. Immobility of spirits ultimately claims the decay of the upper part of the society, that while Paul, who came from lower class, struggles but uses the dreams of the upper class life as energy to make or at least act to have social change, Flan and Ouisa’s life seemed to be stopped permanently where they not seek the imagination and dignity in arts but prefer unchanged materialistic status, security, and money.

          

The Bluest Eye and Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk introduces two concepts describing the blacks’ experience in America: the veil and double consciousness. Both The Souls of Black Folk and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye emphasize the racial self-loathing blacks have once they fully understand how different they are from whites. They begin to feel inferior to whites and do not view themselves as true Americans. Most would rather either become white, or disappear and become invisible. Blacks grow up learning how to objectify beauty; it something that is taught, and it is generally defined as having white skin, blue eyes, and nice hair. Once blacks learn these standards of beauty, they accept themselves as ugly without question. They proceed to live their lives, ashamed of their appearance and their ultimate lack of whiteness. This shame draws out the concept of the veil, which is used by blacks to hide their ugly appearance from white judgment and disapproval.

"How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.  And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine."

- W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (2)

Shown in both Dubois's The Souls of Black Folk and Morrison's The Bluest Eye, blacks have two very significant revelations early in life: the moment they realize they are black, and the moment they realize it is a problem. Dubois's experience exemplifies the self-hatred blacks feel once they understand how different they are from whites, and are therefore excluded by society as ugly, inferior, and essentially a "problem." In this time period, blacks grew up learning the standards of beauty, and what is accepted by society and what isn't. For instance, Claudia, in The Bluest Eye, acknowledges a point in her life when she had not yet been taught certain standards in society. Claudia did not understand what was so adorable about the Shirley Temple doll she got for Christmas, and she recalls, "Younger than both Frieda and Pecola, I had not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her" (Morrison 19). Furthermore, Dubois's experience explains that blacks are blocked from the rest of the world "by a vast veil." This veil is a physical and metaphorical barrier between blacks and whites, and Dubois recalls that he never attempted to break through that social barricade: "I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through." In The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove has a similar revelation. She only feels comfortable behind her veil: "Concealed, veiled, eclipsed - peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the the return of her mask" (Morrison 39). Pecola has no desire to tear down her veil; her only desire is to become white and have blue eyes, so she can be accepted by the rest of society.

            The concept of sight plays into Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk in that blacks are living in a world that enables them to only see themselves through whites’ eyes.

“A world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”

 – W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk

Any African American’s attempt to know themselves, and see themselves as who they really are, is blocked by white superiority and their standards for living. Morrison additionally demonstrates this lack of self-consciousness with Pecola’s character: “Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people” (Morrison 46-47). Pecola is unable to see herself for who she really is; she can only see herself through the eyes of other people. Society has made it impossible for blacks to know themselves and to be an individual.