AN ARTIST FOR OUR TIME

In response to my 29 July published essay called ART and OUR OWN OPPRESSION, Helen Garrett, an artist whom I hardly know, but who subscribes to my essays, wrote what is below.

ANGEL OF A FLAMING STAR by Helen Garrett This painting, as some of Helen’s others, offers an imagined emotional landscape filled with implications of other beings or other senses of existence. When not just looking at it but watching it, the floating imagery offers mysterious others, as though spirits or energies attempting to escape the pigments which hold them in. It is compelling and upsetting, demanding that we admit to the existence of some energies deep within the world we may share with our unknown selves.

From Helen: “Personally I am struggling with a kind of deep unease that seems to go beyond politics, environmental concerns etc. It perhaps is a feeling that the direction of our species feels misguided and doomed, and I'm an optimist! It is like a grief in the heart, yet, at the same time I am noticing loving and good acts more vividly, I am speaking my own truth in a loud, clear voice and feel a huge expanse of love and care for people as they go about their lives.

Daily, I look at my paintings and question, ‘is it enough? What am I doing? How will it change anything?’ ... yet my spirit burns with an inner reassurance that to try is everything, to try with your very own, beautiful and flawed voice.

You, Robert, are certainly trying and doing more than trying - and your essays are present to be found and your photographs ask stirring questions. Thank you for both your courage and your doubt.

Sincerely and with Respect,

Helen Garrett”

THE HOME COMING by Helen Garrett Hill country with a valley filling with light? Or is this a state of mind? I think of Leonard Cohen’s line, “there is a crack a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. This is what is so compelling and distressing in Helen’s work, that one sees the obvious, a landscape, an eye ball, a grass covered slope and yet, soon after I may be witnessing the moment of death, or an ascent into eternity. It thrills and demands emotional bravery on Helen’s part as well as for the viewer.

I believe that my journey of discovery towards what is important has not been dissimilar to Helen’s, although she is arriving there much earlier than have I, at probably twice her age.

For many years I have been documenting people’s lives in particular industries, in particular struggles, in particular places and found that they hold many things in common. I recently recognised that one of the major underlying things was that almost all those essays and films took place inside the framework of capitalism. Social and cultural institutions, predatory actions by transnational corporations on the economies of all countries have weakened the belief in and strength of democratic institutions, and that behind-the-scenes the power of science and technology in the hands of nation states, compromised by corporations, have contributed to fostering a poorer, less informed and deeply unhappy world of people now starring total destruction in the face because of the climate crisis.

I understand that addressing these things through my work has more or less failed not only because of being denied a platform to exhibit or project my work, but also because the problem is not alone in the state’s institutions, in politics and in the economics of the present neoliberal ruling class, but also in the self-destructive nature of our species.

How can it be that our species, unlike all others, is allowing a relatively small number of us to ever increasingly get away with destruction and murder? This is a kind of madness which may in part be a result of our ego-centric refusal to stand-up and be counted, to take action, to destroy the careers of politicians who answer to the corporations rather than to the voters?

Returning to Helen and her paintings, when she applies pigments to canvas it is not only that she is converting three dimensions into two dimensions with particular visual truths, but she is doing much more. Bending trees, furious winds, clouds bursting with rain and shafts of light are filled not just with her memories of the visual world, but as well with her re-imagined store of memories, and what she makes of those memories that struggle to reveal greater truths of hers and our existence, tinged by her inquiring mind, and perhaps her hopes and dreams to find a path to her own completion in a destabilized and darkening world.

This is why her at first seemingly obscure images slowly reveal a profound and hungry imagination which offers mysteries to be uncovered by the viewer. Perhaps she and I hold a desire in common to more fully understand the nature of our species and to share those perceptions in a form so beautiful that people are engaged and challenged to examine their own plight in this crazy world, and perhaps to ask, ‘how is it that I allow a small group of mendacious and uninspiring rich people to destroy my species?’

Helen is a true artist in that she knows, consciously or not, that it is the job of the artist to question, to disrupt, to challenge and to be committed to this role no matter how difficult and how isolated the establishment’s rejection of our value maybe.

The French philosopher/writer Albert Camus wrote,
“artists cannot be in the service of those who make history;
they must be in the service of those who suffer history…”

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(Next week I will fulfil my promise, writing about the Cultural Canon)

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My book TRANSIENT Light, Fleeting Time (50 thought about photography)
can now be purchased from my website

Comments about it:

“This book of love and passion is a joy to open and read; a memoir crammed with philosophy, politics, history of art, science and creativity. “

“This book is terrific. For me that particularly means the images. Robert Golden’s eye is a truth teller…there is so much wisdom and compassion in what he shows us.”

“Robert is a brilliant image maker and a deep thinker, this in my opinion makes him an insightful story teller of beauty, and I mean beauty in all its brutality. When Robert's eye turns to conflict the considered moments are profound and a compassion arises in me for both the victims and perpetrators in this painful dance. His images of his friends makes us feel honoured and beautiful!”