‘Ask Ryan’ if chalking is art

Ryan Brown is a junior majoring in English.

As I began walking to class Monday, I was immediately intrigued by section after section of the sidewalk reading “Ask Ryan” in chalk.

The closer I got to class, the higher the frequency of these messages (which resulted in endless text messages of rather mundane questions from my friends) until I approached Ballantine Hall.

Once I was there, however, it became apparent to me that not only were the creators of the “Ask Ryan” campaign in rigorous determination to chalk their message loud and clear, but so too were dozens of other student organizations, including the Secular Alliance, Students for Change and Students for McCain.

If a stranger were to come to IU’s campus, they might simply think a truck delivering chalk to the classrooms of Ballantine had exploded in front of the building.

Now that Tuesday’s rains came and washed it all away, one doesn’t need to worry about the judgment of strangers, but the memory of all that chalk is a strong testament to activity at IU and students’ determination to promote a cause, whatever it might be.

Harking back to last fall’s well-known chalk enigma, “Who is John Galt?” I’m reminded of the standard Ayn Rand-type character, hard-working and almost unforgivably dedicated to whatever his or her over-ambition might be.

The chalk all over campus, the student-lead marches, the flyers, the events, the solicitation – all of this is representative of our student body’s glowing fervor, and in the midst of this, I have felt a deep artistic undercurrent boiling beneath IU’s surface.

Look at some of the basic, common notions of art, such as sensory representation (in this case, visual), the need for an audience and the presence of an idea attracted by that idea’s actual depiction, and compare them to the activism present in student organizations who chalk and flyer as a means of promotion.

If one can say the purpose of chalking is to promote a cause, one can say it belongs to the class of loosely definable, intangibly beautiful standards of art.

How can one be so sure of this, though, when we know full well that promotion can also be applied, as it commonly is in today’s society, toward a selfish, material goal?

Well, like all other forms of art, promotion is just one more that is vulnerable to corruption. But as far as IU’s campus goes, it is another bright thing that motivates me and others into thinking about what is around us and how we can remain active in our surroundings.

In other words, it is activist art.