'What's the use of the arts?' by Robert Stevenson
I recently overheard a conversation between a group of twenty-year-old Tasmanian university students earnestly denigrating the institution of the arts degree. One of them dropped the name of a high-ranking employer in the government sector - the general manager of a large Tasmanian council. As a sort of coup de grace to their conversation, he knowingly informed the group that this figure had confided in him that people with arts degrees weren't much good for anything.
This got me thinking. We envisage an uncertain future of potential economic and climatic catastrophe in which (in a time of technical skills shortages) we will be called upon to face technical challenge upon technical challenge. Perhaps this Tasmanian council manager is right. Are artists and the arts community really much use to anyone?
Humour me if my answer begins in a strange way. The cliché tells us that only two things are certain: death and taxes. To this list we should add entropy. The universe is governed by entropy, which means that the laws of nature insist that energy should be dissipated and averaged throughout a space, resulting in the loss of information, and a crumbling toward randomness. There are two forces that act in opposition to entropy: one is nature (the living environment) and the other is the intentional action of sentient beings. The natural world is engaged in an organic revolt against entropy - creepers climb against the rule of gravity, spiders instinctively spin webs. Other than that, entropy is only opposed by the purposeful, directed and intentioned act. Any creative act - it might be as simple as making a bed or as complex as digging a mine or writing a poem - is a gathering of information and a focusing of energy.
We have lost sight, it appears to me, of the extraordinariness of existing as intentional beings. We are born into a universe of white noise and objects floating in a void and from that we create the entire world of human experience. And yet we take for granted, not only that we are free to gather together what otherwise would be random information and make sense of what we experience, but that in this process we continually create what we call the human condition. Each of us does this, one might say this is what it means to have a human consciousness.
So if we are all creative beings partaking in the individual and shared creation of human experience, is there anything particularly special about artistic creativity? Is there anything particular about the painting hung on one wall in my kitchen that makes it different from the saucepan hung on the other? Both are created objects, one of which (the saucepan) seems to be of some use to us.
I wrote an introduction recently to an exhibition in Hobart in which I avoided mentioning Duchamp while discussing found objects. Casting about for a metaphor to suit the purpose, I found myself thinking about the reason found objects can have such extraordinary presence – think of a Joseph Cornell box or many of Patrick Hall's works such as his exquisite Historical Record #1.
Found objects remind us of the oddness of human consciousness in a particularly poignant way, because when we consider such artworks we can't help but observe them as things fit for a particular purpose. We can always see the found object as just what it appears to be (a bone, a cog, a banknote, a urinal), but we must, also, interpret it in the context in which we find it; that is, as a part of an artwork. In this moment of interpretation, the object falls into a kind of flux and we can briefly observe it caught between what we know it to be and what we imagine it becoming as we make new sense of it. What we may not realise at this point is that from an objective viewpoint (if there were such a thing), these two states of being are fundamentally equivalent – the object in and of itself does not have a being in any sense we can appreciate.
The object appears to reveal another side to itself, and yet we can’t really describe it as having changed. The change does not occur in the object, but in the world as defined by the observer. The consequence of this is that we can never say with certainty what this or that thing is – it is either unknown to consciousness, or continually being refreshed by an observing consciousness. Found objects help to remind us that there is no completed picture, no finished story, no all-encompassing theory, no completely understood idea, no closure, no finalised state of consciousness. They should also remind us that there is nothing special about themselves as objects except that someone has carried them into a gallery. This or that thing has an existence and a meaning because we collectively and individually imbue it with an existence and a meaning. This is not to say that without an observer the object is no longer possible, only that we ourselves are part of the narrative that describes what a particular thing is, whether that thing is the statue in Franklin Square, a silent pond or our own being.
Unlike those of us who have become complacent in our appropriation of the world, artists deliberately seek to express and uncover that fleeting, unobservable moment and place where the world 'out there' becomes thought, and, conversely, where thought somehow becomes action 'out there'. Artists, it seems to me, have inherited the atavistic wonderment of the first time a sentient being did something deliberate; committed the first non-random, non-instinctive act. In a world of manufactured objects with predetermined uses, artists permit themselves to view every object for its eternal potential to become.
Artworks are objects which expressly communicate this potential. This differentiates the object deliberately created as an artwork from an object created accidentally (like a footprint), or created for some purpose. Artworks are objects deliberately created to be thrust into that moment of coming into being. Other creations (the tools, structures and technologies of our lives) do, occasionally, become the objects of our consciousness in an abstract and purely philosophical way (where we might call them found objects). Conversely, artworks we have grown used to may become bland objects of decoration that we no longer even see. However, only artworks are created expressly for the purpose of inhabiting the moment of consciousness, the now, or present moment, for their own sake.
This present moment is the place we ourselves inhabit, it is the only moment that really exists. (We accept that history exists, but it only really exists as an idea that we can conjure into the present moment, holding it before us in consciousness to examine it). Artistic objects may act as bearings, as handholds, as stumbling blocks, or as traps. They may easily be dismissed, misunderstood, ignored or forgotten. But the point is that they are created (or placed, in the case of found objects) purely for the sake of being brought into being, activated if you like, by an observing consciousness.
Which leads me back to the question I posed at the start of this piece - what does the arts community have to offer us in a time when the challenges of the age appear to be so technical and scientific in nature?
It is not outlandish to suggest that we have reached a cultural tipping point. Put most simply, our civilisations, economies and agriculture depend almost entirely (bizarrely enough) on burning fossilised carbon. The environment depends on our ability to do without it. Consider, then, a future entirely different from the recent past - a future where petrol prices have increased tenfold; where households are increasingly responsible for generating their own power and are accountable for the real costs of their own waste streams; where jet travel and cheap coal power are memories; where ten billion mouths must be fed and twenty billion considered. Evidently the technical challenges are enormous, but much more significant is the challenge to shift cultural momentum en-masse to an acceptance of the scale of the problem and the acceptance that each of us is personally responsible for the future of the planet. This shift has not yet occurred. It has hardly begun.
The narrow view of progress assumed by the council manager mentioned at the start of this piece is that progress is about determining this or that road widening, or this or that business opportunity. This view requires armies of clerks, economists and engineers. His view is not so unusual, in general, we watch this or that market indicator, read (aghast) this or that prediction. But while populations remark upon statistics, and react unpredictably to predictions of impending doom, they respond collectively and responsibly only to culturally relevant myths and narratives. Statistics and predictions are interesting, but forgettable from news cycle to news cycle. Analogies, metaphors and powerful imagery linger.
One of the most powerful images from Tasmania's recent past was a newspaper photograph of the artist and anti-logging protester Allana Beltran as the ‘Weld Angel’, an ethereal creature suspended in the treetops high above a road, adorned with white wings, stopping traffic and disarming the most powerful opponents.
No act of force or instrument of law raised against her served any purpose other than to make her message more powerful. Her opponents could only shake their fists at the air because they fought not against the artist, but against the collected cultural imagery of twenty centuries that she focused against a country road in a quiet backwater. She became an impossible image, a bizarre object pregnant with artistic, religious and historical meaning whose presence it was left to us to make sense of.
It is not for me to suggest whether she was right in her judgment or qualified to make the assumptions she made, but what is clear is that it is the preserve of artists alone to create such imagery, take such risks, be so audacious as to place themselves so passionately into the central moment of an entire culture's consciousness. Despots have long understood the power of artists and writers to influence culture – hence their love of censorship and sedition laws. (It is no coincidence that the country of North Korea proudly displays an exquisitely choreographed arts community while rendering an entire populous impotent by allowing, only, the state’s own narrative to be told.) The forest angel focused creative energy in a way that only artists have the power to do.
It is not only legitimate, but necessary for artists to take such steps. Art gives voice to the unutterable, and makes us able to imagine the not-yet culturally possible. Our future is not yet written, but it is whispered by the forest angel and the artists of her generation. Scientists, mathematicians and engineers - these are the people with the crucial skills to solve the problems of the age, but the culture has not yet been told the story of our future in a narrative powerful enough that we universally accept the scope of what we must do. Nor will that message be one delivered to us by science, even though it is scientists who will understand it best. It will be the role of our writers and artists to create the story of our future in order for us to live it. We will ignore and misunderstand the voices of the best of them, for it is the best of them that will create the vision we least wish to see - show us the arduousness of the steps we must take. But even when we ignore them and misunderstand them, it will be because we know they are right. Think of George Orwell. Any fool can understand the themes of 1984 in 2008, but back in 1945, he understood us.
Today's artists require courage. We live on the edge of certainty - in the 'interesting times' of the proverbial Chinese curse. Corporations sue activists; protestors are held financially accountable; satirists are warned off by law. The message is clear: toe the line - things are beyond your control. This is serious. Don't question the war effort. Don't query the green credentials of every multinational that suddenly sprouts a flower on its logo. Don't question the right of governments to read your email. Don't analyse the funding of alternative energy projects. Don't question the environmental costs of any pulp mill that brings investment dollars. Just watch your screen and be thankful you're in safe hands. The canned laughter will tell you which bits are funny.
We need our artistic community more than ever to rewrite our cultural future so we may understand how to live it. Where we have lost our way, we need stories and images to redefine the boundaries of our vision. We need cultural signposts, we need bearings. We need a crop of new narratives. And they need to be good.
Robert Stevenson graduated from the University of Sydney with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Teaching (Hons I) degrees. He currently lives in Tasmania where he studies and works independently as a writer and editor.