NECESSITY OF ART Post Covid-1
THOUGHTS ABOUT CREATIVITY, CULTURE, ART AND POLITICS
QUESTIONS
This set of short essays which are to follow, are extracted from much longer essays I have written about culture, art, beauty and society. When I teach young people about these things, the first thing I ask is “why do you think what you believe to be true is true? I ask that because I do not believe one can make meaningful art (not craft, not entertainment and not inchoate work or propaganda, but art) if you neither have a basic understanding of the reality of power and wealth that surrounds you, nor if you are not committed to changing the world into a better, fairer, kinder place to share with others.
To understand the role of art after the pandemic, there are three questions we must ask ourselves as human beings, as members of a society and as artists. The first is, ‘do you want to return to society as it was before the plague?
The second, ‘do you understand the world of power and wealth that surrounds you?
The third is ‘how do you understand the role of art in a hoped-for renewed society?’
I am going to open out each of these questions as briefly but as carefully as I can. First, I want to be clear about where my instincts arise from.
WITNESSING
As an innocent young person, then as an activist and finally as a committed photojournalist and documentary film maker, I’ve seen my city’s bowels removed by arrogant businessmen and by a cruel and vengeful ideology (Neoliberalism). I’ve seen my region turned into a rust belt. In the UK and in the US I’ve seen once proud workers sitting on curb-sides, harbouring paper bagged bottles of liver rotting hooch or drugged out of their brains on prescription drugs but still in pain.
I’ve seen peaceful street demonstrations turned into battlegrounds by right-wing thugs,by self-justifying anarchist nihilists, and by club swinging cops.
I spent a night in a wooden church surrounded by torch bearing KKK riders and Alabama State Troopers, trapped with 36 other young people and with Martin Luther King, a man whose voice sits inside my soul.
I’ve been in pub brawls with neo-Nazis; I have been nose to nose with anti-Semites, I’ve been in in post-war countries where old people had forgotten how to smile, where the middle aged suffered from heart disease and cancers, and where, years later, many infants are born with congenital diseases and blindness from the poisons we dropped on their parents and on their lands.
I’ve shared bread and river fish with poor people and been resentfully offered poor food at high prices by restaurateurs with a foot on the first rung of the global economy and newly embraced avarice.
I’ve seen our countries freedoms dying. I’ve listened to endless reasons for another war and heard very few leaders speak of reasons for peace. I’ve seen there is little money for education but endless money for invasions and aerial bombardments. I’ve seen how wars destroy three generations of lives, cultures and our shared humanity, and how it enriches the wealthy.
I’ve seen how greed has gutted our communities and our decency, I’ve seen how austerity has gutted people’s lives. I’ve seen how this curse of teaching children to become submissive-test answering-drones has suppressed their imaginations, and I’ve seen how the thoughtlessness and corruption of our political classes and the new wealthy rulers have caused us all to become lost children.
TO UNDERSTAND, TO SHARE
And now we listen to our leaders lie about their wondrous decision making as our friends and relatives die in droves, as people’s jobs are sold down the rivers and as our economies tank, and yet they howl their accomplishments and brag about their brilliance.
And so, I do what I can, I try to understand, I try to make and to show. The following is dedicated to those artists and others who want to know, to plan and to change our shared world for the better: for kindness, equality of opportunity, decent jobs and decent wages, and for ways to live a complete life while treating our precious planet with tolerance. I am not serving up an ideology, nor a command, nor even a request. It is simply a set of facts, yes, documented facts, conjectures and an expression of hope especially for my grandchildren and all the children.
NEXT TIME:
HOW ARTIST’S CREATIVITY IS FED.
BELOW:
A LETTER TO MY MP (in the UK) ABOUT UKRAINE
hello@chrisloder.co.uk
Mr Loder, I wish to address you about this current Ukrainian tragedy.
PATHS TO UNDERSTANDING
There are many paths to understand the Ukraine tragedy: political, historical, psychological, financial and cultural as well as a clear view of several layers of moral and financial corruption.
WHY PREVARICATION?
When we hear about Western governments prevaricating over not omitting Russia from SWIFT, the international banking systems rapid payment platform, we must put that into perspective. It seems the main reason is that it will compromise their ability to pay the Russian state energy corporation, Gaszprom, for deliveries of gas and oil to Western Europe.
UNNECESSARY DEPENDENCE
That indicates two things: the collective failure of European governments to not rapidly create a green based economy and renewable energy grid. This means that regardless of their and UK’s promises after the illegal kidnapping of Crimea and the on-going war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed over 14,000 people, European governments have ignored their dependence on Russia for their energy needs. 60% of Russian’s income is based in oil and gas sales. And second: this asks, ‘are politicians in the pockets of their own and/or the Russian energy corporations?’. Since the last election, North Sea oil and an electric cable company, run by a Russian tycoon who is close to Boris Johnson, have donated over one million pounds to the Tory party. We are told that every dog knows not to bite the hand that feed it.
CAPITALISM EATS DEMOCRACY
What we are now witnessing is a struggle between the unfettered desires of Capitalism and our ‘Democracies’. Or put more bluntly, between profits and deaths with justice and freedom. Or between the .05% of the wealthy and their trusted accomplices – the Establishment – with the rest of us. Or between the alt-right, the neo cons and the neoliberals, with the social democrats and the remnants of the left. Or between those who believe in the laissez faire, positive freedom which ignores restraints on bankers, CEOs and other business manipulations along with their thuggish gangs onto the streets, with those who believe in negative freedoms (laws democratically agreed, that control business and personal life to the degree that the weaker or less fortunate are protected) and who believe in a world where capitalism serves society.
BLIND TO HISTORY
I do not doubt for a moment that contemporary neoliberal capitalism is as happy or indeed happier partnered with fascism as it is with other totalitarians around the world. But I do think the political classes are blind to history. As we are seeing, they are hesitant to confront Bolsonaro, who is ripping out the lungs of the earth, or Modi who is destroying indigenous tribal groups in India, along with arresting journalists and lawyers, or China in its slow annihilation of the Tibetan and Uyghur peoples and its destruction of Democracy in Hong Kong, or Trump and his business-friendly fascist ideas, or as now, their willingness to appease the Russian psychopath with only partial sanctions. From digging in Parliament and in some of the press, we know that the Prime Minister and the Tory party, as well as some huge corporations, as BP and Rolls Royce are deeply linked to Russian money.
We can suspect that if Putin crushes Ukraine, jails many and kills more, and if he survives his own people’s responses to this unnecessary war, he will then place troops on the borders of the Baltic states and/or Finland, all of which he sees as being a part of Russia. This then is Europe, facing Hitler and the Sudetenland in 1938.
I detest war, I have seen its unhappy results on generations of people. But we accept that the war against Ukraine is a war against all, and we must ask, are we facing what we must accept, that this maybe an unavoidable but just war against a ruling establishment in an otherwise culture country?
ACTIONS
You, as a member of the Troy party, but more importantly, as our representative, should distance yourself from the dirty money, insist that it is made public, insist that we transform our energy supply to a renewable one in the fastest possible way, and for you to demand that Putin and his cronies are totally isolated and that criminal proceedings against them for crimes against humanity should be begun now.