THE NECESSITY OF ART- Post Covid 2
STREAMS OF INSPIRATION
This is the second part of the first three essays I put up a year ago February before many people were aware of the existence of these publications. Next week will be part 3 and then I will return to more contemporary essays.
STREAMS OF INSPIRATION
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 psychiatrist and 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 indulge 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 excessively exploitative neoliberal 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 forced upon 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.
NEXT TIME: A GIFT OF CULTURE
We have just received notice that our crowd funder for my book TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME has reached its goal, with thanks to over 60 people who have generously contributed to its printing. I think it will be printed and distributed by the end of May. For buying the iPub version for your phone or tablet go here.
Soon we will have information about who will be selling the hardback, which will not be available until the end of May.