As we enter a new year and perhaps new era of great unknowns ahead, I become more and more convinced of the importance or art in not just my life but the world in general. We can't know what the new administration will do after Jan 20th, but we have a pretty good idea and it could mean drastic change in our civil lives, our health, and our sense of well being. All throughout the Christmas season I have heard others at parties and online speak about the need to become involved and less complacent. I've taken up the call and joined an activist group. I will be marching to fight for my civil liberties, but I've also heard artists speak of their duty to produce works that respond to the racism, hatred, bullying and threat to basic civility that this election has promoted. This was particularly from the acting community, while one young art dealer I spoke with said he felt despondent that "no good art can come out of this. It will all reactionary."
I could not disagree more. My visceral response (beyond becoming more politically active) has been to dive back into the studio. To work in any medium of art be it poetry, painting or drama is to essentially to encounter the unknown and wrestle meaning to light. When I face chaos, tragedy and fear in my life I will use the studio as a place to organize and create a path forward. This is why I believe in the power of art as therapy. I know that it works.
The current show at the MOMA on the Russian Avant Garde art movement speaks to the power of change - revolution reflected and exacted through art. It is both exhilarating and chilling to see as the likes of Rodchenko, Lissistky and Eisenstein rejecting imperialist styles of art in favor of a new abstraction without formal constraints that could represent the will of the common man. There is so much freedom to these images speaking to a new spiritualism after the oppression of centuries of Czarist regimes. The cautionary tale is how they then became enlisted as brutalist motif for a most brutal form of totalitarianism under Stalin.
For good or evil, art is more than just a mirror of the times. Artists must imagine new forms of seeing. With politicians and journalists using language like "we must draw out the possibilities" whether about health care or relations in the Middle East, this is no less a time for artists to be active and imagining the way forward; the way to wrestle meaning from the complex unknown of our world.
I could not disagree more. My visceral response (beyond becoming more politically active) has been to dive back into the studio. To work in any medium of art be it poetry, painting or drama is to essentially to encounter the unknown and wrestle meaning to light. When I face chaos, tragedy and fear in my life I will use the studio as a place to organize and create a path forward. This is why I believe in the power of art as therapy. I know that it works.
The current show at the MOMA on the Russian Avant Garde art movement speaks to the power of change - revolution reflected and exacted through art. It is both exhilarating and chilling to see as the likes of Rodchenko, Lissistky and Eisenstein rejecting imperialist styles of art in favor of a new abstraction without formal constraints that could represent the will of the common man. There is so much freedom to these images speaking to a new spiritualism after the oppression of centuries of Czarist regimes. The cautionary tale is how they then became enlisted as brutalist motif for a most brutal form of totalitarianism under Stalin.
For good or evil, art is more than just a mirror of the times. Artists must imagine new forms of seeing. With politicians and journalists using language like "we must draw out the possibilities" whether about health care or relations in the Middle East, this is no less a time for artists to be active and imagining the way forward; the way to wrestle meaning from the complex unknown of our world.
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