Let it be known that I'm a total neophyte to the art world and may have no idea what I'm talking about! But if you know what you're talking about, please enlighten us in the comment section below, I'd love to learn more about powerful art and its potential to change culture.
I just got back from a fantastic Surrealist exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the same one that Br. Trevor mentioned in a recent post. In learning about the Surrealist movement I was struck not only by its obvious connection to postmodernity, but also by the power of art to change culture. In my mind the question naturally arose: where are artists challenging the culture of today?
Great art has probably always challenged the status quo. One of the most enjoyable things about visiting an art gallery is finding yourself opening-up to new feelings, ideas, and possibilities. If anything, art at least challenges the status quo of our own mind and limited perspectives. But art can also challenge the status quo of culture at large – something the Surrealists did during the early 20th century.
Surrealism has some very fundamental connections to postmoderism and, in my opinion, is an early artistic expression of its values. For example, Surrealism, just like postmodernism, rejects of the madness of modernity (WWII, colonialism, oppressive factory work, etc.); emphasises on the individual and his psychological experience; and aims to free people from the "false rationality" of restrictive social structures. Surrealism was even called a "social revolution", an ongoing theme that underpins postmodernism.
One expression of this revolution was the exploration of innerspace - trying to depict free-form thoughts, access the unconscious, and stress the ‘reality’ of dreams. All this stuff was an artistic exploration of meaning making, something the postmodernists became experts at.
The Surrealists even battled for the acceptance of shamanistic spirituality as a legitimate form of knowing (a hallmark of postmodernism, if there ever was one).
Walking through the Vancouver Art Gallery I could really feel how much of a leap forward Surrealism was. Looking at the art you can tell it was exploring a totally new territory of the individual psyche. And there's a stark contrast between the dreamy, non-logical, free-flowing imagery of Surrealism and the mechanical, rationalistic, material bias of the Modernity it opposed. Clearly the Surrealists were rebelling through art.
It made me wonder: if a similar movement were to arise today, what would it look like and what would it be rebelling against?
Well, there's still plenty of reason to rebel against Modernity. That paradigm continues to run roughshod all over the planet.
But what about a rebellion against postmodernism itself. Now you’re talkin’.
Like modernity, postmodernity has its own madness. The madness of our postmodern time is rampant narcissism, dogmatic individualism, searing materialism, and value-less relativism. I know it sounds depressing but come on, you know it's true. (1)
So if it's true, how do we make art that not only shows us the truth of our world (in the way that Picasso showed us the truth) - but expresses an alternative to it. Because just tearing down the establishment isn’t enough anymore. Nor is shouting at “the man”. We need art that wakes us up to new possibilities – the same way that Surrealism woke us up to the huge interior world within us that we now take for granted. But here lies the challenge: how to explore and depict new possibilities that aren't even visible yet.
It’s a tall order. But in the spirit of building new avenues, and not just tearing up the old, here’s a few ideas that come to mind for me. Art could express:
Collective fields - - Apparently we aren't as separate from each other as we usually think and feel we are. Rupert Sheldrake has done lots of research on morphic fields (How did you just know your friend was going to call??) and there's been increasing talk lately about the phenomenon of scenius - the type of genius that is created within a scene of creative people (think silicon valley, the Renaissance, the Beats). Art that explored this territory could help wake us up to our connection to one another, shake-up our individualism, and move these ideas out of lofty science journals into something we regular people can understand.
Process/Universe Story - - A process perspective uncovers the truth of our human condition: that we are part of an evolving cosmos, the latest development in a 14-billion year process. It's one thing to get this cognitively and say, yah, yah, I know - we evolved from monkeys. But it's another thing entirely to feel it in your bones and know that you are an evolving being who lives within the evolutionary process itself. This shatters the personal sense of uniqueness (you're not unique, everything about you is shared by 7-billion other humans). Art that explored this territory would find a way to depict the deep time process all around us and let us feel that we're not separate from it. The video below is a primitive attempt at this.**
**I think that time-lapse video of geologic events can help us to remember that we've actually emerged within a geologic process. My dream would be to have a video that covers like 10 years of a growing forest, or a moving glacier, or an eroding shoreline. That would really give us a sense of how much is changing all around us, all the time, and that we exist in the middle of it, unseparated from the environment.
Interior vs Exterior phenomenon - - How can you express that the observer is never separate from the observed? In meditation we see that we seldom relate to reality as it really is. There's usually a layer of cognition between the external world and our experience of it. When this layer falls away - a layer of names, categories, opinions, and pre-conceived notions - the exterior world instantly appears different. Our view of reality is all wound-up in our interpretations, yet we focus on the material and look for answers there. Art that explored this territory might help shake-up our overemphasis on the material. If we could only see how much our inner, immaterial world is influencing the way we understand material reality - we might start being more interested in the inner part.
Paradox - - at the ITC conference last year, Robert Kegan, spoke about what he understood to be an emergent stage in human cognition. He used a series of images to try to depict how this cognition sees a world beyond the confines of linear rationality. Developing this type of thinking could help give us the tools to depict and make art of the Process and Collective fields I mentioned above.
Art communicates in a way that no mere writing can. Through art the Surrealists opened up a new inner world of the individual and pushed back against the constraints of Modernity. But any art that seeks "social revolution" must address the social context it exists within. Artists in the West today find themselves embedded in postmodern culture, so those seeking change must confront this context at its core. The ideas above are just a starting point, but they're a challenge nonetheless. I hope artists out there read this and may be intrigued enough to take up the task. As for me, I’m going to have to learn to paint.
(1) It was suggested to me by the editors of this article that I left out some important madness. They reminded me that crippling cynicism & irony, which go hand in hand with apathy, is afflicting a significant segment of youth culture today. I have no idea what kind of art can help our hipster friends, but agree that they seem to be a pretty good representation of postmodern culture.
