There are several little areas on campus, rooms less traveled, that have been decorated with posters in an effort to neutralize the ugly nakedness of cinderblock and the desolate lack of furnishings.
When I pass through one of these small holdouts, I find myself in the crosshairs of a mute conversation between a soulfully glossy Elvis Presley and a shaggily somber John Lennon. John Coltrane, eyes closed, leaning back with his lips to the mouthpiece of his gleaming saxophone, ignores my intrusion. The Beatles stride across Abbey Road in their bellbottomed suits towards the abstract landscape of a guitar chord guide, which must be traversed before they can arrive at the juicy psychadelic explosion of color that is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Louis Armstrong's eyes roll up from the floor. He is still focused on pumping air into that trumpet as my shadow flits over his felled portrait.
I'll tell you why this quiet little room makes my skin tingle.
In the medium of the presence created by all those faces is rendered an intangible portrait of the person who purchased them and puttied them to the wall. By appropriating these posters, this person announced her personality. She gave it a certain life of its own, detached from her physical being. You might say that she created a spirit and housed it.
The faces of Elvis and the Beatles have become the faces of Rock and Roll, just as the faces of Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane have become the faces of Jazz. Altogether, these faces paint a portrait of the face of Music, an image that is dated like a Rembrandt self-portrait: Music at a certain age, in a certain lighting, with a certain backdrop.
That is why my skin tingles. I step through that door. There is the face of the anonymous person who decorated the walls. The face of Music. My own astonished face.
Whose personality are we announcing?
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