I'm on my favourite soapbox again: if one is blessed with artistic talent, should our art (by that I mean writing, movies, paintings, anything creative) offer a vision of something greater than ourselves, or - under the name of creative freedom - does "anything go"?
Today I came across a beautiful article from Odyssey Magazine which provides an interesting take on the subject. The author is Andrew Dilks, who writes on culture and politics at
orwellwasright.co.uk and is the author of "Goliath" and "Flow." Here is Art and the Transformative Vision by Andrew Dilks:
It’s hard not to look at
the contemporary art market and see it as superficial and transitory – much of
it comes across as the self-indulgent product of egotism; self-conscious
attempts at irony that degenerate into meaningless banalities; a smug postmodern
sensibility obsessed with its own cleverness without saying anything
insightful. “Art” – however debased and misapplied the word has become in
today’s materialistic world – is no longer interested in offering a
transcendent vision of something innate and timeless. Instead, at best it
serves as a loud, demanding punctuation mark, as immediate as the latest Google
trends – a reflection of the short-term memory of the digital age more
concerned with what is “in” than what is “within”.
Art, in this sense, can be seen as the culmination
of mankind’s regression away from a unified psychological attitude in which
reason and emotion – left and right hemisphere thinking – are fully integrated,
towards the complete domination of the cold rationality of the scientific age,
with no room for unfettered creativity, only the sanctioned “art” of the
marketplace where the artist themselves have become commodities, personalities
every bit as disposable as TV celebrities and pop stars.
José Argüelles refers to this duality in the
history of human artistic expression as “techne” and “psyche” in what is
perhaps one of the most radical and significant books on the subject: TheTransformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of HumanExpression. It is an ambitious work, to say the least, spanning the course of
history and examining the changing role of art in the context of history,
culture, psychobiology, Jungian psychology and the sciences. For Argüelles, the
forces which have defined the development of the Western world are responsible
for nothing less than the near-total detachment from our ability to make
contact with the “transformative vision”; a world where mankind has become
trapped by the ideologies of reason and science which limit consciousness and
thereby the ability to express that which stirs beneath the rational mind.
An illustrative example of this process is the introduction of the single-point
perspective in painting and its proliferation during the Renaissance,
coinciding with the rise of the “Great Artist”. As perspective-based art stands
for the growing perception of mastery and domination of the world by mankind,
so too does the rise of the artist as commodity – those with the wealthy and
influential patrons in the church or, more tellingly, bankers and merchants
such as the Medici family – mark the beginnings of what was to become an almost
complete rejection of the archaic, psychic forms which came before. As the
artist began to master nature through painting and sculpture (albeit it in a
subjective sense in which the position of the viewer was paramount) so too did
Western society seek to dominate and exploit the environment under the guise of
progressive humanism as it moved towards the industrial age.
At the same time, the subject became mired in the
human experience – the “great men” of the ages – be it the grand portraits of
men of influence or the neoclassicism which characterized the Age of
Enlightenment. This drive towards historicism – dictated by the linearity of
time and the causal nature of human history – further embedded the Western
mindset in a tradition at odds with ancient modes of thinking and was
consolidated by the establishment of academic artistic institutions, rendering
“art” the preserve of elite intellectuals and depriving the masses of
legitimate access to their own creativity. These academies, as Argüelles puts
it, were “the basic conditioning factor of visual perception in the Western
world” – not until the Impressionists was art reluctantly and somewhat
tentatively dragged in new and bold directions.
There were notable exceptions throughout this
period – men who achieved something of the transcendental in their art and
could be called visionary: William Blake’s mystical prophecies and cosmological
visions in response to the deadening effects of the Leviathan that is the
technocratic state; Goethe’s alchemical works inspiring a reunification of the
feminine and the masculine (just as Blake created his Illuminated Works, so too
did Goethe end his life with the words, “more light!”). But these visionaries
were the exception, destined to live on the margins of a world dominated by
materialism. Some, such as Vincent Van Gogh, would be perceived as so radical
by the forces of artistic reaction as to be “suicided by society”, which
subsequently, without a trace of irony, decides to worship them posthumously,
almost apologetically for failing to appreciate their vision while they were
alive.
Ultimately, The Transformative Vision is about a
final return to the archaic in which the transcendent, spiritual goal of art
and its function in the process of individuation comes full circle; where
techne and psyche are reintegrated in a process of complete unification. As
Argüelles puts it,
“[the] modern techno-historical society abolished
the right to vision as well as the ritual for gaining it with a fearful and
self-righteous vengeance, thus ensuring its own fantastic rise to power but
also sealing its own doom. In denying the validity of the vision and the
vision-quest, modern society denied itself any rebirth short of the apocalypse
– an event its own shamans and visionary prophets, exiled to the sidelines,
have continually foretold and prepared for.”
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