THE NECESSITY OF ART- Post Covid 3
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 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 to 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
ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT THE WAR
The tragedy of Ukraine is nothing less than a condemnation of a part of who we are as a species. We struggle, as so many are struggling now, to be kind and just but there are those parts of us which still struggle for maturity, those parts that allow us to claim full humanity over the callousness of our devils.
The Trump-Putin-Johnsons of our world are not accidents but rather a natural expression of a soulless age, made so by greed, lust and various social pathologies.
It is also a product of neoliberal capitalism continually making war on democracy; this i believe is the root, not a result. It and they pitch to the worst within us; they entice the deadly sins The thoughtless, terrified and twisted amongst us, follow along, bathing in the power of their flawed gods and using it to beat those less powerful than themselves.
They remake Kiev in their self-image. But while we condemn them, take a moment to consider that while Putin and his cronies and thugs make claims about the Nazis and broken promises of the Ukraine establishment, look at the articles from level-headed journalists in the US, exposing US agencies and politicians in complicity in Ukraine with Nazi groups since before 2014. It’s truly ugly.
These things make me ask, who can we believe? One of my history professors said, ‘if you really want to understand history, follow the money.’ Who gains in this? Oil prices rocket, arms and munitions are used in truckloads, paranoia helps to increase Pentagon spending; banks do very well and of course, the huge infrastructure builders make fortunes.