NECESSITY OF ART Post Covid: 7
RESISTANCE, CREATIVITY TOUCHING OTHER’S SOULS
Each of these words/phrases has many ideas associated with them.
OPPOSITION
RESISTANCE means being against the status quo; it means being in opposition to what most people believe to be normal; it means that you, the individual artist, politico, journalist, lawyer, worker or intellectual are always on the outside looking in. It means to survive emotionally you need to believe that your being perpetually in opposition is not only good and right, singular and brave but also that you need to accept loneliness and financial difficulty.*
RESISTANCE means that you have sought the ‘complete freedom of truth’** and in doing that you’ve attempted to remove yourself and your assumptions born from inside the system of beliefs which have led to FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS - defined as ‘individuals have been convinced to believe that what is bad for them is supposedly good for them’. This is the singular role and message of the media, its 24/7 news and popular culture, to manufacture and plant within all of us, a system of beliefs accompanied by a very low level of morality that eventually seems real and right for us, or at least our only choice. This is what the American public intellectual and linguist, Noam Chomsky called ‘manufacturing consent’.
BEARING TRUTH
CREATIVITY, when connected to RESISTANCE, means to communicate your discovered truths to others through innovative forms of storytelling, metaphor, and documentation, always with poetic ways to touch people’s hearts, and to turn their spirits towards the complete freedom of truth – which recognises that without complete truth there is no freedom, and without complete freedom there is no truth.
“Innovation is always a singular, quiet discovery, revolutions are always collective, noisy conclusions”***. The first task then for artists is to liberate themselves from the oppression of false consciousness. Following this they need to discover the means of using their art to encourage others to also discover truth. Finally this naturally leads to developing and refining their artistic language into ever greater clarity and beauty, which may take a lifetime of commitment.
CAPITULATION
To do the contrary, to humble themselves inside the dominant culture, is to accept that in becoming pets of the Establishment**** and the ultrarich, they become their decorators or entertainers. Although the Establishment’s editors, publishers, lawyers and producers allow for an amount of formal and technical experimentation, they will never allow an artist the freedom to expose the interwoven network of oppression.
EMBRACING YOUR AUDIENCE
TOUCHING OTHERS in relation to being in RESISTANCE and practicing CREATIVITY means to continually ask what audience do I wish to connect with, from whom do I speak, what do I expect from the connection, how do I embrace my natural audience and how, through my own liberation and art, may I offer myself, as a service, to progressive change?
What we know is that ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to show’ does not work. This is why one-sided authoritarian arguments and pronouncements wash over people or become embedded as an unquestioned ‘truth’, which is not art but propaganda. This is why the opposite, metaphor touches people’s hearts and may gently move them toward feeling the need for discovery and self-liberation. (This asks questions about the meaning of ‘pluralism’ and how it links to the nature of truth(s) and how both lead to define democracy, but that is for another essay.)
A PRACTICAL LEVEL
Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher and author of THE ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, wrote that even contemporary philosophy has rejected happiness. He went on to write that aesthetics***** (the concern and appreciation of art) are the only activity we have that can re-create a complex multidimensional world. Complexity is always the enemy of populism and any form of totalitarian government. That is why the agitators and mouthpieces of those regimes hate questions (and questioners), but who better to pose questions than artists?
The novelist, Milan Kundera was traumatised by the post 68 Soviet Terror in his beloved Prague, but more than that, by the lyricization of the terror. He wrote, “The only thing I deeply, avidly wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one literary genre rather than another, it was an outlook, a wisdom, that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine any group:a considered, stubborn furious, nonidentification, considered not as evasion, passivity a position; but a resistance, defiance, rebellion. A position.”
He wrote about how the Soviet Terror used culture to plaster the walls outside of the gulags and the prisons with poems. People would recite, dance and sing before them, drowning out the screams from within.
Today in the West, it is somewhat different. We are all imprisoned within the visual and aural walls of the popular media and to a degree inside the digital world of the internet.
In both cases, culture is used as an almost impenetrable wall of fragmented morality, nationalism, shards of religious claptrap, and a hallmark card tidal wave of lachrymose emotional sentimentality to defuse, and confuse our psyches with inessential cultural detritus.
Much of this adds up to: ‘you’re lucky because you’re free’. This advertising-slick message really means, ‘whilst you are overseen by the national security state, you are free to consume what you can afford and given your credit rating, you are free to be enslaved by educational debts, mortgages and consumption.’ Those who object are not dragged into Soviet style prisons or worse, but are left outside the digital walls of their culture, alone, with a voice but without much of a megaphone.
VITAL STUFF
There are actions artists can participate in to help form true democracy and to save our species and planet, but they will be done as outsiders. They must be done keeping in mind that we need to challenge and change popular cultural assumptions. For me that means two things. The first is that we do not go inside the pits of popular culture, but make exciting, challenging work outside of it to bring people to us. Second, we need to not be shouting, but to be embracing others through our sensibilities. The work needs to be attractive, meaning beautiful for its delivery to others. This means it has to attempt to fill the dark hole of racism, fascism, resentments, bitterness and sense of loneliness, with a humane enlightened balm of truth. To me, this is the most compelling task for artists today.
Steven Pinker, Harvard scholar, wrote a book called the BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURES. Hard as it is to digest his conclusions, his research declares that, even in the face of last century's horrors and the continuing brutality many live within and suffer from, that since the Enlightenment, the world continues to become less violent.
FORM AND TRUTH AS BEAUTY
There is no sweetness in this for those who suffer, and there is no comfort for the rest of us who, like the poet Rilke, reminds us that other's pain is also our pain. But an enemy of this horror is culture, and more precisely art, and even more precisely, beauty. And even more precisely than that is beauty as a conjunction of sublime form embracing relevant and profound truths.
Those who are dedicated to creating those things that transform our souls, that re-engage us with the better angels of our natures, help to turn themselves and others away from violence.
I have no faith in politics and politicians, in religion or in gods but only in the human soul soothed by beautythrough either love or art.
* from WHY? An Anatomy Of Oppression; Robert Golden
** THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS; Vaclav Havel
*** a talk by Mehdi Krueger
**** the Establishment I the upper 10% of society in terms of wealth and position. They are those who operate the system for the ultrarich, who control the financial, military, industrial and bureaucratic structures of the state, including many of those from private schooling and in the political class.
***** note that anaesthetics – that given to people to stop pain, to dull one, is just the opposite of aesthetics.
NEXT TIME: HOW TO BRING CHANGE