Art as Activism
Suzi Gablik | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #62 |Not yet ratedSome years ago, I was invited to share the lecture podium in Madison, Wisconsin, with Hilton Kramer, for many years the lead art critic of The New York Times. Kramer is well known for his often bellicose and conservative views. On this occasion I spoke first, blinking into the darkened auditorium.
"Are there viable alternatives to viewing the self in an individualistic manner?" I asked. "Can making art include more than just ourselves? Can art actually build community?"
Today, these ideas are no longer radical or shocking, but at the time I could sense that my questions were like gigantic, startling waves breaking on the beach of everyone's inherited experience. I went on to discuss the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who had made herself the self-appointed artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—definitely not a salaried position. The first thing Ukeles did in her newly chosen context was to accompany the sanitation workers on their daily rounds, talking with them and getting to know them. Then she made her first piece of art—a performance work called Touch Sanitation. The piece went on for eleven months, during which time she visited the five boroughs of New York, and personally shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers. She did a ritual in which she faced each worker, and shaking his or her hand, said, "Thank you for keeping New York City alive."
Ukeles considers the real artwork to be the handshake. "When I shake hands with sanitation workers," she says, "I present this idea and performance to them, and then, with their response, they finish the art."
This piece has been a longtime favorite of mine, partly because of the way it drops the unwieldy, autocratic personality of the modern artist-hero. I also like it because of her effort to make room for the workers and give them a voice.
Art and the Big Picture
Several years ago, the University of Chicago alumni magazine featured philosopher Richard Rorty on its cover, announcing "There is no Big Picture." I happen to believe, both as an art critic and as a woman, that this philosophical stance is precisely what has brought the world to the edge of systemic breakdown and planetary collapse. In the past, artists were valued because of their sensitivity and their ability to distance themselves from received ideas. Such an artist would have been a kouros, a visionary who could gain access to the world of the gods. But today, artists do not dabble much in metaphysics. The connection to perfecting "the temple of the soul" has been cut, and the spiritual dimension of art has been replaced with something else: a set of rules and external standards that artists are expected to follow.
Often artists and critics become imprisoned by what they come to accept as "institutional truths." Some time ago I was reading a conversation between the curator Robert Storr and the artist Gerhard Richter in Art in America. When asked by Storr what he thought of Joseph Beuys' ideas about art as "social mechanism," Richter responded that he thought they were "absolutely stupid." Often in my talks, I have cited a similar comment by the painter Georg Baselitz: When asked by an art critic from The New York Times at the time of his 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum what role he thought art plays in society, he replied: "The same role as a good shoe, nothing more."
I suppose you could say there is a kind of modesty to this attitude. But anyone who has read anything I have written will know that I am someone who believes that art is a process that needs to be engaged with the world. Often speakers talking about a controversial topic will offer facts and information but withhold their own views. I am someone who feels ethically called to stake out a position, to take a firm stand—even at the risk of making a fool of myself. My books are meant as a challenge to our reigning paradigms of economic control and domination. They expose the coercive propaganda of capitalism and the acquisitive society as a form of spiritual and ecological suicide. And they look at the Big Picture—how things fit together—inviting answers to these questions: How do individuals revision a worldview and break free of its limiting ideologies? What makes us change our beliefs about something?
Anyone who wants to change our cultural orientation needs first to look at the Big Picture—and then become conscious of how profoundly they themselves have internalized the values and dictates of the dominant paradigm. And then, as Annie Dillard suggests, you go home and soak your feet. Because the task at hand, the task of renewal, the task of choosing a different path in life, is very daunting—and will require a peculiar internal state that ordinary life does not induce. To construct one's life outside the numbing conventions of the status quo is a difficult path to undertake. But it is an essential journey for anyone concerned about the future of this planet. —SG
When I finished my talk, Kramer could hardly wait to turn the hose on me. "Shaking hands with sanitation workers has nothing to do with making art," he bellowed, as if a demon had broken loose in the room. "Solutions to social or environmental problems will never take place in an art gallery," he stormed, because "the only problems art can solve are aesthetic ones."
Art that doesn't originate in a vision-centered paradigm is often ridiculed by the standard bearers of the status quo. In the episode with Kramer, both of us were visibly choking on our own high-mindedness, determined to incriminate the other. Since then, I have become much more sensitive to the way that challenging someone's worldview can threaten his or her whole life and identity at its core. We are, all of us, heavily invested in what we believe, and sometimes we resist strongly—and even violently—any interpretation of our beliefs that would bring them into question. Cultural myths like individualism do not die easily, and the hegemony of the eye is very strong in our culture. Make no mistake: To change the paradigm from which art operates is to change something about its fundamental nature. And to die to the world of your beliefs is both challenging and frightening.
Do we really have a choice in the matter? Or are we forever locked into the inevitability of a worldview based on materialism or consumerism? Can we recover, if we choose, from the estrangements of Western civilization? Instead of art-as-commodity, deprived of any social role, can art help us revision ourselves and our way of living?
"No one in his right mind goes to an art museum to worship anything but art, or to learn about anything else," the painter Ad Reinhardt declared in 1962. So if you are going to challenge the old dualisms—like the one that separates art and life, for instance—with more participatory forms of consciousness, then you will also need a whole new language: one that expresses interdependence and reciprocity, so that the creative imagination can meet its new task. An artist's worth will not be measured by showing or not showing, selling or not selling. The bare white walls of the gallery and the aluminum frame will be redundant in this regard.
This may not be the most popular view, but I agree with what Friedrich Nietzsche once said: "The product of a philosopher is his life. That is his work of art." I believe the same dictum applies to artists as well. Creativity is a process that goes on all the time, not just when one is in the studio or at the desk. Creativity is connected to the whole of life and to the totality of our experience. When it is made to fit the rules and standards of a specific institutional filter, the soul's personal reality easily gets lost in the culture's shadow.
What I am talking about here is a "quantum shift" in the motivational attitudes of the artist—not just away from isolated individualism and the self-serving, self-seeking world of commodity capitalism, but toward new forms of compassionate interaction and being-in-relation. What I am talking about involves a radical refusal to collaborate any longer with a system that leads us away from spirituality, soul, and mutually supportive communities. By this I mean being an artist in ways that do not cater to socially agreeable institutions or hinge on the approval of society. Allan Kaprow used to say (way back in the 1960s) that "The artist of the future must learn how to evade his profession." I think he knew what he was talking about.
Seeing a Better Path
In my own writing, I have been drawn mostly to the work of artists who have peeled away their attachment to conventional success and made the shift into what the Dalai Lama calls "altruistic mind." These artists are able to enter the territory of the other empathically and become a conduit for their experience. They have discovered that by giving each person a voice, a bond of love and connection that builds community can be created. I happen to believe, along with the Dalai Lama, that compassion, love, and altruism are not just desirable spiritual attributes; they are human qualities that are fundamental to our survival, and to the understanding of what it means to live in an interconnected universe. In general, artists do not aspire to become models, exemplars, or harbingers of a new way of being—but some of them, acting from their own power and truth, know there is a better path than the one currently being exhibited. And they let their whole life communicate a different message.
Sometimes when I talk this way, people assume I have a grudge against objects. But it isn't true. I'm not attacking objects. I'm just making a strong case for something else. Or people think, given the problems of the world, I am suggesting art has to do something about them. In truth, neither art nor artists will save the world. Only a new way of being can do that—one that knits people together and inspires a different vision, an ethos of generosity and caring. Only when we dissolve our historical ties to the modern paradigm of materialism, and overcome our habits of passivity and consumerism, is there any hope of moving toward a more spiritually informed way of looking at the world. Art of this order goes against the prevailing current. It requires the artist to step out of line, to break with the past. Other people will feel the ripples, and sometimes they won't like it.
But life is way too short to beat around the bush—so here is the real message. Rather, it's an invitation. If taken, it can pull you to another place: Ally yourself with your vision and speak up on behalf of it. Do not be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Be bold! And don't hold back. Above all, do not let the power-driven, goal-oriented, materialistic focus of our modern belief system rob your soul of its creative daring and eccentricity.
Suzi Gablik has written a provocative trilogy of books on art: Has Modernism Failed?, The Reenchantment of Art, and Conversations Before the End of Time. Her new memoir, Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure, will be published in late 2002.
