THE NECESSITY OF ART-Post Covid: 5

THE FUNCTIONS OF ART

A CENTRAL FUNCTION

Ernst Fischer, cultural critic, quoted the Dutch abstract painter Mondrian who said 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 equilibrium composed of justice, equality and freedoms.

LOOKING, West London photo: Robert Golden

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. 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.

THE MAP OF HISTORY

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 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 beings, creating a new understanding of the world centred on human consciousness, while 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 has continued to change.

OFFERING WHOLENESS

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 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.”

There are other reasons why people crave storytelling. Some search for mentors and some for discovering rules to live by. Having noticed how, when people flood out of the great London bureaucracies at the end of a day’s work on computers and into the trains, they immediately grab a paperback pulp fiction novel to read, a mobile phone to watch the next episode on Netflex, or sometimes they furiously play sudoku or a crossword puzzle. “Why?” I asked a psychoanalyst I know. She said that people working on computers all day, shifting a file from another office, through their computer adding a yes/no, black/white, 1/0 lead day-by-day fragmented lives. They crave to dig into something they can complete, or something that guarantees completion.

OVERCOMING CONFUSION

People are perhaps unconsciously confused and angered by the neoliberal’s excessively exploitative system which they have been led to believe care for them even 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. 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 sexualised, infantilised, 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.

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I believe that in what will become known as the POST-COVID 19 PERIOD artists are going to have to ask what exactly will they want their relationship to be with the monsters of the new normal? Knowing those established but shaken powers will struggle like a dying monster, to re-grasp its redundant powers, hurting many of us in the process? Austerity and the tragedy of Ukraine are both consequences of this.

Before those decisions are made there must be an inquiry about the essence of art and whether that essence is in fact beauty and if so, what is beauty?

next time THE GIFT OF BEAUTY

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