A FOCUS FOR ARTISTS

Ways of understanding our own beliefs

INTRO NOTE
The brief essay may seem a bit abstract, but I believe to find ways of living that are truly fulfilling, that may open us to our greatest potential, thinking about thinking is vital to artists as it is for all of us. This is because the Anglo-American popular culture does all it can to distract us from asking questions and examining an understanding of ourselves as part of the world around us. When it does allow some insights, they only admit to the relevance of the individual’s experience, turning us away from the group, class or historical importance of community. Please give this essay a go and let me know what you think. Robert

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BELIEF
Most people admit to believing in a set of values or in an energy, often described as a life force or a god. This admits, consciously or not, to the acceptance of a set of beliefs. A set of beliefs is reasonably called an ideology (a creed, a dogma). It is a part of one’s understanding of existence. Perhaps the word ‘ideology’ seems a bit serious, but it is fair to apply it to any set of beliefs, however simple or complicated. Maybe it is a problem for many that they do not have a coherent set of beliefs and are happy enough to live in a kind of fog of opinions, half understood realities, wishes and hopes, and always being victim to whims and emotions.

Every coherent and incoherent set of beliefs, that is, every ideology should not be thought of as a mirror of truth, but rather a refracted view of truth. Each ideology will probably include vague hopes expressing a dream or nightmarish model of reality, or it may be a cynical or optimistic view. Whatever it is, it is not reality itself. This distinction is key to people being able to understand that there are competitive and contradictory belief systems or ideologies held by others that will also refract a subjective view of truth, just as theirs does.

Easter Religious Celebration, Ibiza Spain, 1970. Photograph: Robert Golden

A WAY TO COPE
Culture (the total of all we think and make) and in particular art, is a refraction of our beliefs – it is reality filtered by our imaginations and our specific ideology. The necessity of ideology is that it allows people to place themselves in a world that they imagine exists. It helps people negotiate what they believe reality to be, helping them to fit in, to be able to cope. It provides a worldview and indicates ethical boundaries they choose to live within. Ideologies are mostly based on un-measurable subjective constructions – a set of beliefs connected in various rational and irrational ways to each other, which we inherit from the educational institutions, family, popular culture and common knowledge.

All cultural production and therefore all art is the result of an inherited worldview; therefore each cultural production is the result of a particular ideology. All films, photographs, songs, poems, novels, music we make within our ideological refraction are an allusion (a hint, an insinuation, an oblique reference) to truth, rather than truth itself.

Another way to say this is that there is a chasm between our constructed ideology with which we think we comprehend reality, and our misapprehension of that reality because those views are wrapped in a muddle of religious cant, superficial popular cultural assumptions, miseducation and government and corporate propaganda.

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DIFFERING
The chasm between these two states exists within and between individuals as well as between dominant and subjugated groups and classes. People with wealth have a profoundly different view of their right to wealth, power, equality, justice, freedom and democracy than those without wealth. Their every murmur and all cultural works they commission or purchase are an expression of their ideological beliefs and tastes, just as are the rest of ours. They do not allow news to be published or broadcast that is contradictory to their belief system; they will not purchase a painting or finance a film or commission an article that will admit to another reality. The ruling elites want to maintain the status quo through imposing one view - theirs on the rest of us. This is a prime reason why culture controlled in these narrow ways becomes rotten from the inside, moribund, bereft of meaning for the rest of us.

The photojournalist, W. Eugene Smith, fought against his editors because he saw “a whole world view (his) being substituted by another (the editor’s) world view”.

The votes for Trump and Brexit were both manifestations of the neoliberal status quo’s flawed thinking. (The neoliberals, without a mandate, now control the dominant economic/political ideology of government, culture and society.)  Even after the desperate failures of their banking/financial system of 2008, the impoverishment of society in general and the attacks upon the wellbeing of the rest of us under their austerity policies, the horrific failure to care for the rest of the world suffering covid, and the blunders leading to the Russo-Ukraine war, they believe they can endlessly impose their out-of-step morality and ideas on the rest of us.

Since they have little desire to let go of their mechanisms of extracting as much wealth as possible from us, since our politicians have no will to take democratic control of the neoliberal’s rampant form of capitalism, and since the popular culture is in the hands of a small number of media corporations, it leaves artists with no choice but to step forward and make work relevant to the world we share. This is our imagined world, one beyond the control of their state, beyond the neoliberal’s interventions and controls, and outside of the reach of their guardians who stand at the gates of all cultural institutions and grant-giving bodies.

A truthful and therefore radical culture is one of the few viable ways we can collectively move forward. This is why artists need to examine the question, ‘for whom do they speak?’ Is it for a class or group or for themselves? And if the latter, they must be damned sure they are interesting and relevant. But more of this another time.