I am asked all the time “why art is so important to me”. I do not have a formally correct answer. I have not formulated a rational theory evaluating the risks and the ROI of art. All I have is an intuition and the faith to follow that intuition on a path between the spiritual and the material.
In the work I do I am often confronted with subtle (not that subtle) requests of having to provide a formal justification of why art is important (so people can “buy” it) followed by a request of not explicitly mention the soul in certain “boardrooms”. Yet, when I ask if it is ok to assume then that those people are soulless everyone feels insulted. I have had to learn to navigate the paradoxical terrain of denial of the soul while denying to have become soulless. (I know, confusing in writing as in living it).
Charlene Spretnak writes: “The spiritual dimension was simply removed from serious discussion of the art. By the 1950 the entire history of modern art was framed with the premises of formalism. From the 1940s to the mid 1960s, in particular, the entire culture experienced a muscular burst of modernity and expediency, which was informed by a displacement of all things sentimental or nostalgic by new ways of doing things that were seen to be tough-minded, powerfully efficient, and supremely rational.”
Does it ring familiar? Does it apply only to art history or to life, and work, in general? Have spiritual and soulful become dirty words we are afraid to use, especially in certain environment, for the fear of losing our (professional) cleverness?
“Maybe the value of art...is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.” Eula Biss. But what if art and the artists have been squeezed by the world made by work?
What may be possible if we could liberate the arts from the critiquing and evaluations established by the norms and standards dictated by work? Would we heal the relationship we have with the spiritual terrain? Are we willing to value the spirit as we value the matter? Are we willing to reclaim the artist within to make peace with our denied spirituality? Is it by this reclaiming that we learn the value of art (as spiritual practice)?
Rumi “Sell your cleverness. Buy bewilderment”?
I do not have the answers or a ready to use step by step process to follow, “because if I do, I’m only creating more dogma” (A. Moorjani). All I have is a need to call myself an artist outside the dogma of what art is or is not. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to unlearn the frame-work I have been thought trying to make peace with my own spiritual path.
“Once someone is educated in a particular frame of reference during their formative years, subsequent events and information that do not fit within that framework often do not register” C. Spretnak
What if we could come together to collectively make peace with the artist within? What if there was a space for us to call each other artists and discover what that means not only formally but spiritually? What if it was an invitation for practicing heARTfully instead of teaching tools? What if our work (and WORK) became the enabling of this heARTful learning?
So why calling myself an artist is so important? Because I need a connection with my own heART, a connection to (self)-expression, a connection with the world that isn’t “tough-minded, powerfully efficient, and supremely rational". Because I know and I believe that if we (all) do so, we can transform the relationship with ourselves and the world. And that is a space of creation and re-creation of harmony and wellbeing. How do I know that? I don’t know it formally but I know it poetically.
Poiesis (from Ancient Greek) is "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” Poiesis, from which poetry derives, means "to make” something new. By making that new “poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” (Novalis) We have mastered rational supremacy, data oriented problem solving and efficient performance. These do not teach us how to relate and create. Learning and healing require relating and creating as artists do.
Joseph Beuys said: “ Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. This most modern art discipline – Social Sculpture/Social Architecture – will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.”
Will we tend and mend the art within as a way to reconnect with a spiritual world that has been denied, demonised and relegated outside our work? Is it in so doing that we reclaim our right to WORK?
This is my desire and will to be an artist:
I have to say my own name as artist
becoming transparent to the heART
painting the colours of my being
hands on heart
practicing art
the heartist reclaiming artistry
to the minister of industry
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