THE NECESSITY OF ART
POST COVID 4
This is the last of the 3 catch-up repeats from last year. From next Saturday there will be new essays.
For artists to understand how to use their voice
and indeed what their voice may be,
they need to think more about their role in society
and the role of art in encouraging personal and social transformations.
THE FUNCTIONS OF ART
Ernst Fischer, a Bohemian-born Austrian journalist, writer and politician, quoted the Dutch abstract painter Mondrian who said (I paraphrase) ‘art will disappear when it becomes displaced by an equilibrium that reality presently lacks’.
Given the nature of people exploiting people within every political/social/economic system, few can believe that Mondrian’s necessity will soon disappear. None the less, Mondrian’s thought reveals one of art’s central functions, and one which must be considered for the post Covid 19 period: to help impoverished, exploited humans to find ways to imagine an equilibrium composed of justice, equality and freedoms.
A SUBSTITUTE FOR LIFE?
In that way, art becomes a substitute: a text (novel, poem), an object (film, photograph, painting, sculpture), or an activity (performing music or dance, reading poetry, making theatre) projecting hope and promise in the face of under-achieved lives limited by unfair distribution of wealth and arbitrary power.
The Swiss psychoanalyst, Karl Jung, spoke of how dreams represent desires for fulfilment, an attempt to make a tolerable dreamscape out of unfulfilled daily lives. This is why dreams and art are closely related; a link that reveals an ever-present relationship between our inner needs and the social, psychological necessity of art for both artists and audiences.
DYNAMIC CHANGE
As the nature of societies change, so do the needs of art. Ways of understanding and viewing a pastoral food-producing world of subsistence farmers are substantially different than ways of understanding the world of factory employees in an industrial city, or a banker enjoying life in an exclusive part of that same city.
Throughout history, as science and technology evolve, they affected every level of society. Evolving systems fundamentally change people’s essential roles as workers/producers and therefore, their understanding of the world around them. This inevitably changes the art produced in different periods, which may act as lightning strikes upon other’s unrecognised needs.
In the pre-Renaissance world, various gods were deemed to rule human destiny. During the Renaissance (around 1100 – 1520), poets and artists grasped the central intellectual space of our morality and consciousness, creating a new understanding of the world centred on human consciousness, forcing the old God’s to flee Europe.
After the Age of Enlightenment (1715 – 1789), the legal status and sanctity of individuals began to dominate expectations about how they were ruled. This pressure increased the demand for democracy over monarchy. Still today we sway between wishing to rule our own lives and wishing to exploit others. With all of these historical successions, both the necessity and the nature of art had continued to change.
DIVERSION OR NECESSITY?
Everyday millions of people read books and on-line material, watch TV and before the decent of the plague, went to the cinema. Whatever the actual cultural value of these encounters, they reveal people’s hunger for news, ideas and perhaps desires to find stories offering better ways to live lives stalked by poverty, struggle, seeming meaninglessness, oppression and demeaning encounters with bureaucrats and managers/bosses. Or perhaps art is a substitute, helping individuals to find messages allowing them to better comprehend relationships: other ways of living and loving.
These encounters imply that people are willing to lose themselves for brief moments in the comfort of other real or fictional character’s lives. Why? Because they wish for those brief encounters to offer them an escape from the misery and confusion of their own lives. As Ernst Fischer also wrote, “we want to escape from an unsatisfactory existence into a richer one, into an existence without risk...because our own existence is not enough to fulfil us.”
People are confused and angered by this neoliberal excessively exploitative system which they have been led to believe cared for them as its cheating insurance companies, continually more expensive services, aggressive bureaucrats and deaf politicians darken their existence. This leaves well-meaning people turning to the alt-right jingoists, nationalists and racists for guidance or to become so discouraged, they fall into silence.
NEED FOR ONE’S OWN TRUTH
The struggle for consciousness and objectivity, the ability to look clearly at one’s own oppression and to see one’s un-freedom* is extremely difficult in the face of the power and persuasion so well promoted at us by religious institutions, politicians, advertising, and corporate constructed popular culture and media.
The French novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus wrote, “Art for art’s sake, is indeed the artificial art of a factious and self-absorbed society. The logical result of such a theory is the art of little cliques or the purely formal art fed on affectations and abstractions and ending in the destruction of all reality.”
The dominant culture is fashioned around the ruling elites’ need to bamboozle the rest of us into accepting their morality, assumptions and system, as we become clones in their sexualized, infantilized, single dimensional, reductive pop culture created and guarded by their minions in the media and arts who consciously or not administer all of this as their cultural canon.
Robert, I wonder about inner space of the art producer. How does one who produces art, produce in such as way that voices are heard or even if that is at all of importance and if not, why not? Here in Lewiston NY Sonia Clark, the artistic producer of Artpark, is a dictator. She hires her friends from NYC. She hires groups that have nothing do to with this community and those who come who would like to do something about this community or humanity at large are not in the game plan. We are talking about upwards to $300,000 dollars to bring in groups from Spain, from France for a week. We need translators-their work is not in English. All the while there are conversations to be had that only artists can capture about our May 14 shooting, our storms where the rich have electricity and the poor are the last to have their homes restored, we have so much to talk about and Ms Clark uses taxpayers money to fund groups that are extreme in cost and alien to the culture that is here. There is not an intention to raise the bar, no reach out to local culture, local talent, local needs. The board are lawyers, they have no idea other than if things cost money it must be good. It is desperate. And the story of these past years whether its Trump, or Putin or Clark-one person destroys things. Somehow even in the Reagan era, it wast just one person destroying it was a group. It is still that same group but now there is a Trump, like a monster out or the box. There is Putin who should be assasinated-just ended. And Clark, who should also be done and thrown in jail for abuse of taxes, abuse of funds and of people, young people at that. How is it that one person can do so much damage, and what can the community do? The necessity of art revolves spherically with space to take in and respond. Space to allocate and hear what is coming forward. Why is it that this very organic process of creating and producing art...why has it gone so terribly? I never thought ego could do so much harm. What is the way out? Why is there such huge amounts of money needed to create work? I find no answer in this community. The idea of pushing away is counter to the idea of integrating and yet, it is so, today, here in this country. Dire. Depressing. Investments thwarted. $300,000 of non investment into community here. I wish there were some better news...and yet my curious voice is engaged as to why? How? What for? What is the next move? And through it all , the necessity of art calls. Like a patient waiting friend. How kind with all this muck!