Walking Through Campus

In this week's visit to the Thomas Hart Benton Murals, at the IU Auditorium, I found a lot of what David Finn spoke about in his article: Walking in the City. In my personal experience, if I wrote an article about my relationship with the murals and the IU campus, I would title it: Walking Through Campus. I have been to the IU auditorium multiple times for various reasons. I have gone to shows, bought tickets for friends, and I have even gone specifically to look at the murals. In all these visits I have never really "seen" the mural and all it has to offer as a story of Indiana's history.Finn talks about walking the streets of the city and noticing new things about places he sees everyday. In this case, I had a similar experience. After we had our group discussion about the different parts of the murals, my view about everything around me changed. I can no longer walk campus without noticing something different or discovering a new tree, or a cool building, etc.

In the article, Finn talks explicitly about making new discoveries and how it can become a game that you never lose. He explains that there is always something new to see, in his case, walking in the city of New York. As I walked into the auditorium I realized how much I had missed. There was so much to the mural to discover, and I had been there so many times before not even taking a second glance. Finn gives one example of this when he discusses his photograph that he had taken out of a car toward the street. There was a man walking and reading. Not until he developed the film, did he realize that there was another man in the shot. The other man was sitting on a stoop. Each person showed a contrast between "living in their own little worlds." When looking at the mural in sections, we were able to see this is a similar way. When you stand there and glance upward at the mural and scan across it's length all around the auditorium, you are just taking a picture from a moving car, but as soon as you look for a while at a small section of the mural, you have then developed the film and are able to see individual stories.

Like Finn, we were looking at the daily lives of people in small snapshots of time, and then speculating about each person's individual story. The artist provided characters in specific motions, clothes, form, and locations on the mural to allow the viewer to make assumptions and tell stories about what they saw. I do not think the artist was trying to make each and every person perfectly recognizable, or even each scene portrayed, I think the main idea was to find what you believed to be important in the mural. In my case, when I looked at the mural I associated with the farming scene. I have grown up in a rural farming community all my life and as a Hoosier, I relate to that section of the mural.