Chapter 20 — 

The Role of the Arts

‘The new artist does not imitate, they create. They do not describe, they design. What do they design? New values for life. And life is not only materialistic, as romanticists of utility try to present it, but is spiritual as well’.
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Adapted from Theo van Doesburg – 1931

Illustration – All things start somewhere – Connected

Through any transitional period bursting with new technology, the methods by which artists continue to contribute to culture, involves them continuing to also verse themselves with all the new tools at their disposal. As we speed into the midst of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, it means either keeping up with the pace of change, or at the very least collaborating with those who do.

The 20th Century showed us you could change the world through the lens of a camera, by much safer and sometimes more powerful means, than down the barrel of a gun. Making and spreading culture became a means of progression in its own right. Meanwhile this century has already shown us the trajectory of the world can be changed equally effectively through the potent combination of data profiling, and algorithms written to exploit the people behind their profiles.

Keeping up with technological progress is then crucial to securing some kind of influence over the overall narrative as it unfolds. This was no different 100 years ago, when during the founding of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius wrote: ‘Today the arts exist isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the cooperative effort of all craftsman’.1 In 2010 John Maeda reframed the same challenge a slightly different way, this time with a tweet: ‘The future of design relies on grafting artists’ eyes and senses directly onto technologists’ hands and minds’.2

One strength of the arts lies in its ability to create magic. For the philosopher Alan Moore, ‘Art is Magic’, and he means this quite literally. For others, the magic which lies within art has more to do with an artist’s ability to produce something out of nothing – where something is conjured into the world that seemingly was not there before.3 So magic manifests in the ideas, objects and connections, or whatever the artist successfully manages to create. These ideas compliment the philosophy of Gropius who believed art was the spiritual product of craft. An activity where talent, dedication and magic criss-cross in an embrace of the resourcefulness of the human character, united by the process of making.

The writer John Higgs once described the role of the artist as ‘like that of the fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present his catch to an audience’.4 This is the same place where new values, meaning, and even cultural movements begin to emerge. Artists go fishing in the collective subconscious, and then they vocalise or visualise essentially what people are already thinking.

With similar sentiment, Adolf Loos once summed up the artists’ responsibility this way: ‘Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect, or designer’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise’. If this is the case, then for all artists working to a Sustainable Movement’s narrative, there is huge untapped value to be found in how they manage to distill the story into something powerful. Putting aside wistful theories in favour of tangible ideas and actions which people can reach out, grab and use themselves.

By using the plinth upon which art is displayed – for example the frame hung within the gallery, the shiny edges of the smartphone or tablet display. Art has the ability to capture in time, refine and define what is already happening. By offering something elevated back to its audience, art further inspires the collective imagination of the viewer once again. This relationship unfolds over time, in perpetuity.

Morse Peckham once said ‘Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world in order that we may endure the tensions and problems of the real world’.5 Sadly we cannot avoid being exposed to the tensions of the real world, so we would clearly benefit instead from greater exposure to more meaningful and relevant art. Here artists have shown before they can rise to the occasion and produce work of great significance. As Don Pendleton explains ‘At their best artists create movements which change the world, or at the very least make people think twice about it’. Keith Haring practically managed this on his own with his work fighting the AIDS epidemic during the 1980’s.

But how exactly do artists contribute to the overall narrative? Bob Hunter, founder of Greenpeace, gravitated towards the idea of creating ‘a mindbomb’ – An idea so big it quickly spreads around the world infecting everyone it touches with hope, laughter or even disgrace. A similar technique is embraced by advertisers, who eternally search for the next idea which they hope might one day go ‘viral’. Whilst Eno sees the process of evolving art and culture as more iterative – part of an ongoing process which allows us to keep in synch with each other and remain coherent – much like dancing is a physical representation of this same phenomenon in action.

For the art historian Robert Hughes, he once argued that ‘Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others’.6 Yet this argument was formed at the end of an increasingly flawed post-modern capitalist era, largely celebrating eclecticism, which is fast losing its own tenterhooks of relevance.

Through a time where both humanity and bio-diversity come under threat from the potentially fatal collision of emerging technology and climate change. Then art and culture might be two of the few remaining ways by which we can continue to define ourselves, and which stand a chance of continuing to hold everything together.

Peter Kapos shines light here on a very relevant paradox when he suggests ‘Designers occupy a contradictory position between the demands of capital and human needs’.7 The pendulum swings through history, and contrary to Hughes (and largely due to the present failure of capitalism), it would appear we may be swinging back towards the needs of the human.

Illustration – Do make me think!

Amongst this backdrop, Eno sees culture as a sort of collective ritual which we’re all engaged in together: ‘that doesn’t mean just the artists… it means everyone, it means all the people actually in the community, everybody – has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture. Which somehow keeps us coherent, and keeps us together’.8

So perhaps it’s here we stumble across one more truism. We are all makers and producers now. Posting to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Blogging, vlogging, podcasting, adding to the larger conversation and ever extending narrative which we call life, and sometimes call art. Here, new headroom is emerging, and it’s beginning to look and feel at times a lot like a first articulation of a collective human consciousness, or mindspace.

In 2012 the Barbican Gallery hosted the largest Bauhaus exhibition the UK had seen for over 40 years. Titled ‘Art as Life’, the show mimicked both Aristotle’s view that ‘Art imitates life’ and Oscar Wilde’s counter-argument that ‘Life‘ actually ‘imitates art’. One detail here begins to really stand out – if we’re all participating in the art of life, then we all become contributory artists. As society changes around the artist, the artist changes around society too. Or in this particular instance, all of society becomes artists.

Culture is of course part of the ongoing conversation. So it is movements within the arts, science and technology which have the potential to capture the conversation, and steer culture in new directions. A movement with its compass set towards making more sustainable methods of living, shows all the potential for greatness, but only if it can find a way of uniting the conversation between disparate cultures and specialist fields. In fact capturing the overall conversation is a prerequisite to steering culture on a more sustainable trajectory. The artist therefore, will need to reach out to the scientist and technologist, and so on, and vice versa.

Today the role of the arts within the development of a Sustainable Movement is critical from the point of view of fostering the cutting relevance which is so desperately needed. Casting an animated narrative full of vitality and buzzing with energy, which captures both our imagination and our hearts, and adds genuinely meaningful value, which we can fully engage with. The movement will only be as strong as the connections which are made, so more than just reaching out to everyone living life, the magic will only arrive through actively bridging the gaps which exist within ‘the whole community’.

Re – Quote #7 — A NEW UNITY

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Chapter 21 —
The Value in Meaning

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Credits & Note

6
Robert Hughes
Paradise Now
The Guardian
(Mon 20 Mar 2006)

7
Peter Kapos – The Ulm Model
(Raven Row 2016)