Scary art and how to make it

The title of this post is misleading. But then, "A stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden" would also have been misleading. Their Botanical Garden, or any botanical garden, is a place for both tourists and locals to escape the reality of a place. In this case, the reality of Atlanta as a city belonging to its African American citizens, who look as though they have not taken possession of it yet but are waiting - tired, angry or bored - for the great come-and-get-it day when they will. My favorite site was the King Memorial and birthplace, located in golden lit, still scruffy Sweet Auburn. If you go, be sure to walk from the MARTA train. Be sure to pass through dilapidated neighborhoods where poor African Americans watch you, the privileged white tourist, on your way to pay homage to the Great Man. Their Great Man. But more on down-at-the heels Atlanta later.

For now, we are in the spiffy, lush, quiet, clean and orderly Botanic Garden, looking not at orchids (they have the biggest collection in the world, but at the messy, ragtag Halloween sculptures of Atlanta children, nestled in the bushes. Some, pictured here, are quite gripping and scary, more so than anything made by the professional artists also engaged for this seasonal show. The adults, the pros are studied and deliberate in their effects, the children random in ways that are much more celebratory and much more unnerving. How? You can not study to be unstudied. One scarecrow figure, created by a Cub Scout troop, wears a ball of feathers and other unidentifiable amulets on its chest, a proud, defiant display of masculinity that I find enthralling, together with the scarecrow's tattered head, built on a gallon plastic milk jug. The scarecrow's fatigue pants have assertive airplane silhouettes on them. Did the young artists know what they were doing? They certainly did not know the effect they were having on me. Still less did the preschoolers whose bluntly, randomly detailed brown bunny I also find disturbing. What rules did they follow? What rules do they know, even at that age?

Maybe Halloween is the best - maybe only - holiday for kid art. Because they are allowed to make it pure id. Bad behavior. You can't do that to Santa, but you are supposed to do that to skeletons and scare crows. That is why they exist. On the one holiday that is the child's portal to making real, true, scary art.