ART AND HOPE
I am continually hearing that we must be positive about change and our futures. It is as if being positive is a social duty especially to and for the young, that it is a moral responsibility, a pledge to their future. But if one suspects that there is little to be hopeful of, then what should one be pledged to do? I would dearly appreciate a positive and hopeful state of mind, a state I could hold onto in the middle of the night, a state which would allow me to think joyously of my grandchildren’s future.
But as I watch a middle eastern multi-millionaire oil magnate being made the head of COP 28, as I hear that the greatest cause of death for males under the age of 40 is suicide, as I understand day-by-day that my food is brought to a shop near me on the backs of slave labour, improvised labour, oppressed labour, and as I witness the European (and to irk the Brexiteers, I am including the British in ‘the Europeans’) and American middle classes who tut-tut and place their plastic in the correct bins but don’t demand of their politicians to serve them, their electors and their children’s best interests rather than serving the rich oil and other corporations who back the politicians and their party’s election campaigns, or provide them gold wallpaper, or offer them holidays on exotic islands and sexual favours.
What is this human condition? What is the state of our species, who have witnessed holocausts, genocides, awful wars, rapes, pillage as if we are still living in the dark ages and as if we have no history which engraves upon stones overlooking the dead, ‘never again’.
Fleeting, painful moments, rare moments of pure joy, struggle, engorged by wealth, diminished and bedraggled by poverty, stillness, movement, violence and heartfelt embraces, kindnesses, wickedness, evil, hatred, love, knowledge, profound stupidity, visions, nightmares, shame and glory. An inability to learn from history.
One of my artistic heroes, Akira Kurosawa wrote, “a human life is truly as frail and fleeting as the morning dew.” Time leaves us struggling to make sense of it all…where can we place our trust?
We are enslaved by our own souls….
We cannot be happy together because we are not happy on our own…
we can’t accept our own limitations as we lose our connections to ourselves.
Because an enormous part of the enslavement
is that we have fallen victim to soulless materialism, to ‘greed is good’,
to forgiving psychology rather than to unforgiving history.
Must we do something meaningful?
Are we here to serve some greater cause?
If so then one must ask how to serve
even as we are imprisoned by our comforts.
Our world is not as it seems but as we have created it.
We who have crushed the sand, laid the rails, suspended the bridges,
healed the sick, embraced the poor,
we are therefore not inevitably lost or detached.
Our consciousness is more powerful at keeping us connected,
then our egos are at keeping us detached.
Are higher codes of justice more important
than our personal codes of conduct?
I ask, ‘what do I truly treasure?
I answer, others whom I love.
But how difficult it is to trust others,
and yet how beautiful when we do…it saves us from despair.
We are closing in on a time for singing, of joining hands and singing.
As the world burns, as the seas rise,
as the deserts spread and the ice caps melt,
if we can’t admit and account for these things,
as it seems we cannot,
then we cannot rise above the unrolling tragedy.
Perhaps even those amongst us who have no god and no faith (as I)
will learn to sing Bach’s Passions,
or perhaps will just go on watching rom-coms.
In this dire time, what of the arts?
Empty colour, empty form, empty dreams.
The gatekeepers of the status quo
– the critics, academics, columnists, gallery owners and museum keepers
defend the individualism of the artist,
their right to express a personal preoccupation with aesthetic questions,
but never defend artists
engaged with the moral and real political struggles of their day,
whom they condemn as propagandists, usurpers, talentless mouthpieces.
Art must serve something beyond the artist’s personal needs
for money, ego and reputation.
Whatever the defenders of the status quo call it:
‘the artist’s raison d’etre’, their ‘refined sensibilities’, their ‘personal vision’;
none of these can help to raise their works to the level of social energy
and to become an expression of the real problems of life at this moment in history.
Said another way,
they cannot be seen to become an expression of the essential conflicting social forces of their time,
and therefore relevant to people of our time.
The true artists are rejected, displaced by someone’s dirty bed,
someone’s diamond encrusted skull.
It is intellectually pathetic.
So, I ask myself,
are we in our stem brains,
actually monsters,
or are we, in our values, angels,
or indeed,
as seems more likely, are we both?
You can see a film of mine about Ricky Romain’s work here.
You can find a PDF illustrated appreciation of his work here.
You can see his website here.