INDESTRUCTIBLE YOUTH…
Debra Riley Parr
Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons
You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon…
Neil Young
Forever young is not attractive. Everyone needs to pack up and leave Sugar Mountain sooner or later. And yet, the yearning to live in that space lingers. Indeed, the appeal of youth and youth cultures holds strong in a young culture like that of the US where being young is cool, powerful, sexy and dangerous. The Italian Futurists of the early 20th century thought similarly about the attractions of being young, and they clearly articulated—and sometimes shouted—that art was properly the province of youth. In their first of many manifestos, F.T. Marinetti publishes a scathing attack on old ideas, on old ways of doing things, on a past that must, according to their logic, be rejected:
[W]e will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists! The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! (Marinetti)
Contemporary exhibitions like INDESTRUCTIBLE YOUTH focusing on street-inspired art, skate cultures, hip hop and other musics, continue this youthful orientation of art production. The energy of youth skating a beautifully shaped wooden skate bowl built by the collective SIMPARCH in the Hyde Park Art Center at the turn of the millennium compelled curators at other venues, including Documenta, to include it alongside more traditional work. Nicholas Bourriaud in his writings about DJ culture as a model of contemporary art practice, for example, signals the extent to which the young have enormous influence in technique, subject matter, and attitude. Beautiful Losers, curated by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike in 2004, featured the poetics of street culture in the work of artists like Mark Gonzales and Margaret Kilgallen among others. You just can’t kill that kind of energy. Not that you’d want to.
Revolutionaries of the early 20th century also realized the moment of youth had arrived, valorizing its energy as a force to be reckoned with, as a necessary fuel for the engine of cultural transformation. In the 1920s, after the revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky writes a series of essays entitled “Youth and the phase of petty jobs,” “Youth fills the breach,” and “Young people, study politics!,” all with an eye to directing the attention and energies of young people to the difficulties of forming a new culture. Trotsky writes urgently of the need to move beyond nagging young people to do the right thing:
It is not a matter of preaching, appealing and exhorting—there is already too much of that, and it is wearisome; young people growing up in an atmosphere of slogans, appeals, exclamations, placards, are in danger of ceasing to react to them. The youth must be given factual information in the right proportion and the right perspective. They must be given solid elements and methods of independently finding their bearings in the development of world revolution (Trotsky, 122).
For Trotsky the key is to provide youth with tools, education and independence of thought and then to allow them to find their own way.
Elliot Earls, a contemporary educator, performance artist, and designer (he is head of the design program at Cranbrook Academy) likewise urges the youth of the 21st century to find their bearings in a rapidly changing world culture—arguing that they ought to construct for themselves a life of merit. Tired of representations of the young as slackers who take on little responsibility for anything, Earls in a lecture he gave to a group of designers in June 2010, expressed a faith in youth to embody something different, to offer a critique of the status quo, to direct their indestructible qualities toward doing something good. As part of his lecture Earls played the famous recording of Walt Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! as an inspirational call to a life organized around passion and considered action:
Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers! …
All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers! (Whitman)
Anyone who saw the Levi’s “Go Forth” advertising campaign of late 2009, directed by Cary Fukunaga and M. Blash, will remember the moving cadence of Whitman’s poem as read by the actor and activist Will Geer. (Geer was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.) I’d like to think that Earls saw this series of ads, and wanted to situate the poem in another context. Like the youth Earls wants to call out to a better life, the poem demonstrates a kind of indestructibility, resisting appropriation and the potential to be destroyed even as it is made to work for corporate ends. With an unyielding Romanticism, the poem surges above its commercial usage, maintains a distance, creates a kind of momentary rupture with the expected “sound” of advertising—partly because of the analogue quality of the recording of Geer’s voice, partly perhaps because of the history of the Levi’s brand (it was around when Whitman was writing in the mid 19th century) and of the history of jeans as a quintessentially American working class garment worn for the last half century by youth cultures the world over. Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate.com, despite all his trenchant observations about the crassness of using Whitman in this way, sees the advertisement as a call to indestructible youth: he writes, “it acts as a galvanizing call to generational action: Times may be tough, but we've been here before, and America's youth will not be broken.”
But is it true that America’s youth will not be broken? The Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, R.I., notes that some of the kids in that city have given up all hopes of working at a summer job, and in the face of increasing violence are hoping just to stay alive until school starts again in September. In addition to violence, youth in the US are struggling with conditions of poverty as well, with 20% of children living at or below the poverty line. The US Congress seriously debates whether to extend health insurance to the nation’s children—perhaps believing that youth is literally indestructible and can survive without medical care. In the face of such heartlessness, arguments could be made that youth is fragile and in desperate need of protection and nurturing. And yet, as INDESTRUCTIBLE YOUTH shows, the energy, the cool, and the sexy, even the danger continues the romance of youth, the love we all have of that sweet space we never want to give up.
Seth Stevenson, “Whitman Thinks You Need New Jeans: A stirring new ad campaign from Levi's”, Slate.com, Monday, Oct. 26, 2009.
Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia, Pathfinder Press (NY), 1994.
Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” Leaves of Grass, University Of Iowa Press; 1st Edition, 2009.
