So much I want to joyfully share in and clap for. (Pardon the excessive length.)
This past Friday and Saturday I got to spend a total of 11 hours with mythologist, storyteller, and healer Michael Meade. He was invited to be the keynote speaker of an exhibit called “The light in Dark Times” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
I paid slightly more for those 11 hours than I paid for a 30 minute zoom critique with another artist.
I don’t say this to diminish the artist or the 30 minute critique. It’s just, a deep part of what you wrote “what if we’re so well trained as consumers of culture that even the most powerful work going on in those rooms will struggle to break through, to get past our training, to go from an object of consumption to an experience that might tear us open, shake us, move us, leave us changed?”
I feel this so much, especially within my chosen medium of photography. Typically speaking a successful photographer creates artificial scarcity and makes a limited edition of their work that only a few will ever be able to own and only the rich can buy. Yet if what is embedded in the work is of value during this time of climate crisis and collapse this editioned way of operating within the Art system is woefully out of date.
The Art System as a whole has always had this latency period where something new happens and it builds momentum until it becomes known by successive generations. I think of Duchamp here, while he had plenty of success in his lifetime, his work really didn’t become influential / mainstream (within the Art System) for 30-40 years after he made many of the pieces.
I tend to look at The Beats, Jazz, and Hip Hop for cultural shifts that happened much quicker and in all of these, the work was accessible and affordable to popular culture. You could buy a book, record, or cd and as an individual you were able to purchase the exact same object that the wealthy bought.
Art is still largely stuck on this heirarchy that it needs wealthy benefactors. I do see benefits in that system as some times things need to be made in a large scale but more often than not it is very limited and excludes needed voices in favor of a handful of individuals who receive an excessive amount of attention and resources.
The art system and its benefactors mostly excluded artists of color much longer than popular music/culture did. Post Black Lives Matter it’s often as if the Art System has myopically gone the other direction and is desperately trying to diversify their collections to prove they’re inclusive.
This really hit home on my last trip to the Denver Art Museum. It’s a several hundred thousand square foot complex with multiple buildings. It has floors for nearly everything a First Nations/indigenous floor, a South American Art floor, and Eastern Art Floor, and African Art Floor, a Contemporary Art Floor, a Modern Art Floor, a Western Art floor. In total it has three large buildings a Castle/Fortress by Italian architect Gio Ponti which is the only structure he created in the US. A giant Frank Geary-esque “ship” building also known as The Ark. And a circular glass building by another Italian architect who was a student of Gio Ponti. Across the street is the Denver Library built by world famous Post-Modern Architect Michael Graves. Across from that a high end fancy “Art Hotel” with actual art in it.
But if you stand outside the entrance to the Denver Art Museum and you turn 360 degrees what you won’t see is a landscape. There is nothing that isn’t completely designed by humans, there are a few trees all of which are safely planted in containers, everything else is concrete, asphalt, steel, aluminum, and glass. It is an absolute ode to anthropocentrism and the accomplishments of “man” (and I should be specific and say white men) because even as the Art System tries to diversify when you look at the architecture (which by its very nature is slower to change) every building is by a white man.
So there’s this weird contradiction; inside the museum you are shown a veritable rainbow coalition of artists of different genders and racial/ethnic backgrounds. On the outside you see the old white patriarchal foundations naked and fully exposed and the naked man outside has taken up every square inch of space and left no earth, no nature, and nothing wild.
So here is where I slightly disagree about Art is not good at messages. I think of the Guerrilla Girls and how they often pointed out how women had to be nude to get into a museum. I think about the message of Public Enemy and N.W.A and how this radical confrontational form of music helped a generation learn about police abuse and the realities of being black in America. I guess I should say we need both well tuned message and living examples that speak more to the unconscious.
As you wrote to be a good artist “you have to be … the most truthful person in [the] room.” For years I was a landscape photographer but as I stood outside the museum and looked around and had to ask myself if I was the best landscape photographer on the planet and my images were put in that building “do I think people would leave and immediately be changed and want to go be in nature? Have their own connection with the living systems around them?” We already have a large portion of the state via the Rockies designated and protected as a National Park but I don’t believe that inside such a structure I can effectively make any significant change in the way the viewers engage with their natural environment. (I can make changes but the set and setting is screaming the old heroic artist/architect story.)
Like the Martin Shaw quote Michael Meade said something similar multiple times “nature is rattling and culture is unraveling” and we have entered the dark time of the apocalypse, from the Greek: apokalupsis which means “revelation, unveiling, both collapse and renewal.”
I believe I do know other ways to make art more effective, to encourage a cultural shift but it’s going to require a massive shift in on many levels.
Thank you for this essay, I truly appreciate it. There’s so much more I would love to respond to.
It's gratifying to generate such a rich response, Randall, truly. Just to pick up that one thread about art and messages, there's something important here that's missing from the way I've often articulated this point, and your examples of the Guerrilla Girls and Public Enemy get at it. It's not that art can't deliver messages, sometimes very direct messages, it's that it can't be a messenger on behalf of others, the message has to arise directly out of the truthfulness of the one or ones making the art. Its messages are going to bring trouble, often unsettling even those who think of themselves as on the same "side". What I mistrust is any attempt to make art useful, to make it a trustworthy tool. I see the artist's duty as to whatever is missing from the "social truth" in the existing situation - and that can apply to drawing a tree in a way that gets past what we think a tree looks like and shocks or moves us with the encounter of seeing what that idea of a tree hid from view, or it can be bringing the hidden infrastructure on which our lives depend into awareness, or a thousand other moves that shift attention. As "audience"/"public"/etc, we can receive messages, but I always think of Rilke's encounter with the sculpture, leaving him with the inescapable message that "You must change your life." That message wasn't written on a placard, held by the sculpted figure, it was embodied and encountered. A placard can be a legitimate expression of artistic truth, I'm sure of that, but the risk is that when art is enlisted as messenger, it defaults to some kind of placard-making for reasons extrinsic to (and short-circuiting) the artistic truth-work.
Love all of this, thank you again. As for the Rilke quote, it resonates so much with the Koine Greek word “Metanoia” that was mistranslated to “Repent”.
I had a similar conversation with my partner yesterday about re-seeing trees. She is rapidly becoming a poet and is questioning how to use language to speak of the pre-linguistic. And to circle back to the critique I had and make it clear of my respect for the person offering it they were the first photographer who made me consider that photography itself “can” be pre-linguistic if you get outside of yourself. 🙏
I first encountered Rilke’s poem in my early 20s and that line was like a dagger in my heart. It’s one of the most truthful poems I’ve ever seen. At one point, I memorized it. Every word is magic.
This is helpful as I adjust the opening pages of the book I'm writing and imagine how to close it out so that people have a chance of proceeding differently than they did before they picked it up. Very helpful. Thank you.
First off, I loved the idea of kidnapping people by train. Are you sure that isn’t a thing? I mean, let us not get too sure about what is Not Not-yet-imagined.
Anyway…Barfield leans heavy on imagination as a truth bearing faculty. A sense organ as well as well-bucket I think. The loss of one sense organ usually leads to the increased sensitivity of some other portal. I imagine the over-feeding of a sense might work in the opposite way and dull the less used doorways. One thinks, almost a cliche, of Homer’s blindness. And our eyes in the unending feasting upon moving pictures, frame after frame, 24 images per second and now the blood diamond silica world can fill 6 more in between each of those. Does the debris accumulate in the other senses exponentially as well?
Vanessa says it costs to become Other, to imagine deep enough, to get down far enough into the well that our own interests fade enough to hear new music, to stay long enough in the inland sea to scrub our own scent into a more reasonable proportion. Is the currency some surrender of the overindulged sense? At least is that a start. Again, I dunno.
Weddings as we know them around here lately are that exhausting thing. Wise to keep them scarce. But am always drawn to these ancestral stories of Yids like the Arizal taking the people out into the field at dusk on Sabbath to meet the Shekinah, the Bride. This is over and over again wedding unto the Resting of some One, some Many. There was at least one Rabbi that saw no contradiction with the repetition unto rest/feast of underlings also being a place to break open and find healing in the rising to meet our broken-by-consequence coming Night.
I still wanna kidnap people on a train. Can we please?
If I were picking a crew to kidnap an audience with, I'd want you on it, Andrew!
And yes to the part about weddings. Got me thinking too about Berger's To The Wedding, which might be my favourite novel. And when I fell in love with that book in my twenties, I was still thinking a lot about having studied Shakespeare with Tony Nuttall, and about intergenerationality as the work of culture, and how the mark of tragedy is children dying before their parents, while the mark of comedy is that it ends with a wedding, implying the successful transfer of roles from one generation to the next and the coming of a new generation to keep the dance going and make new mistakes. Maybe I should revisit that with Arendt and natality along for the ride.
Wow. As so often happens with your posts I found that, after reading this to myself, I felt compelled to read it aloud to my wife. And now feel the need to let it settle, then re-read, then share more widely, with friends and community. This connects up several thoughts I've been incubating lately. Thank you Dougald for your deep thought 🙏
I spoke to what i correctly assumed was a lightweight audience several weeks ago in London, having played with the Rubik 's cube for several months till I found the heavy i could own.
They were starving for it and are still thanking me
Beautiful, Dougald. This makes me think of the ragtag traveling troupe in “Station Eleven,” keeping culture alive after the worst has happened. We recently joined a community choir and there’s something soothing about getting together weekly to sing together. The future is indeed unimaginable and community is right there for the joining.
Also, I so appreciate what you say about art and messages and being truthful. The great Eudora Welty wrote an essay to this effect - the role of the novelist is not to editorialize, but to raise potent questions.
So much I want to joyfully share in and clap for. (Pardon the excessive length.)
This past Friday and Saturday I got to spend a total of 11 hours with mythologist, storyteller, and healer Michael Meade. He was invited to be the keynote speaker of an exhibit called “The light in Dark Times” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
I paid slightly more for those 11 hours than I paid for a 30 minute zoom critique with another artist.
I don’t say this to diminish the artist or the 30 minute critique. It’s just, a deep part of what you wrote “what if we’re so well trained as consumers of culture that even the most powerful work going on in those rooms will struggle to break through, to get past our training, to go from an object of consumption to an experience that might tear us open, shake us, move us, leave us changed?”
I feel this so much, especially within my chosen medium of photography. Typically speaking a successful photographer creates artificial scarcity and makes a limited edition of their work that only a few will ever be able to own and only the rich can buy. Yet if what is embedded in the work is of value during this time of climate crisis and collapse this editioned way of operating within the Art system is woefully out of date.
The Art System as a whole has always had this latency period where something new happens and it builds momentum until it becomes known by successive generations. I think of Duchamp here, while he had plenty of success in his lifetime, his work really didn’t become influential / mainstream (within the Art System) for 30-40 years after he made many of the pieces.
I tend to look at The Beats, Jazz, and Hip Hop for cultural shifts that happened much quicker and in all of these, the work was accessible and affordable to popular culture. You could buy a book, record, or cd and as an individual you were able to purchase the exact same object that the wealthy bought.
Art is still largely stuck on this heirarchy that it needs wealthy benefactors. I do see benefits in that system as some times things need to be made in a large scale but more often than not it is very limited and excludes needed voices in favor of a handful of individuals who receive an excessive amount of attention and resources.
The art system and its benefactors mostly excluded artists of color much longer than popular music/culture did. Post Black Lives Matter it’s often as if the Art System has myopically gone the other direction and is desperately trying to diversify their collections to prove they’re inclusive.
This really hit home on my last trip to the Denver Art Museum. It’s a several hundred thousand square foot complex with multiple buildings. It has floors for nearly everything a First Nations/indigenous floor, a South American Art floor, and Eastern Art Floor, and African Art Floor, a Contemporary Art Floor, a Modern Art Floor, a Western Art floor. In total it has three large buildings a Castle/Fortress by Italian architect Gio Ponti which is the only structure he created in the US. A giant Frank Geary-esque “ship” building also known as The Ark. And a circular glass building by another Italian architect who was a student of Gio Ponti. Across the street is the Denver Library built by world famous Post-Modern Architect Michael Graves. Across from that a high end fancy “Art Hotel” with actual art in it.
But if you stand outside the entrance to the Denver Art Museum and you turn 360 degrees what you won’t see is a landscape. There is nothing that isn’t completely designed by humans, there are a few trees all of which are safely planted in containers, everything else is concrete, asphalt, steel, aluminum, and glass. It is an absolute ode to anthropocentrism and the accomplishments of “man” (and I should be specific and say white men) because even as the Art System tries to diversify when you look at the architecture (which by its very nature is slower to change) every building is by a white man.
So there’s this weird contradiction; inside the museum you are shown a veritable rainbow coalition of artists of different genders and racial/ethnic backgrounds. On the outside you see the old white patriarchal foundations naked and fully exposed and the naked man outside has taken up every square inch of space and left no earth, no nature, and nothing wild.
So here is where I slightly disagree about Art is not good at messages. I think of the Guerrilla Girls and how they often pointed out how women had to be nude to get into a museum. I think about the message of Public Enemy and N.W.A and how this radical confrontational form of music helped a generation learn about police abuse and the realities of being black in America. I guess I should say we need both well tuned message and living examples that speak more to the unconscious.
As you wrote to be a good artist “you have to be … the most truthful person in [the] room.” For years I was a landscape photographer but as I stood outside the museum and looked around and had to ask myself if I was the best landscape photographer on the planet and my images were put in that building “do I think people would leave and immediately be changed and want to go be in nature? Have their own connection with the living systems around them?” We already have a large portion of the state via the Rockies designated and protected as a National Park but I don’t believe that inside such a structure I can effectively make any significant change in the way the viewers engage with their natural environment. (I can make changes but the set and setting is screaming the old heroic artist/architect story.)
Like the Martin Shaw quote Michael Meade said something similar multiple times “nature is rattling and culture is unraveling” and we have entered the dark time of the apocalypse, from the Greek: apokalupsis which means “revelation, unveiling, both collapse and renewal.”
I believe I do know other ways to make art more effective, to encourage a cultural shift but it’s going to require a massive shift in on many levels.
Thank you for this essay, I truly appreciate it. There’s so much more I would love to respond to.
It's gratifying to generate such a rich response, Randall, truly. Just to pick up that one thread about art and messages, there's something important here that's missing from the way I've often articulated this point, and your examples of the Guerrilla Girls and Public Enemy get at it. It's not that art can't deliver messages, sometimes very direct messages, it's that it can't be a messenger on behalf of others, the message has to arise directly out of the truthfulness of the one or ones making the art. Its messages are going to bring trouble, often unsettling even those who think of themselves as on the same "side". What I mistrust is any attempt to make art useful, to make it a trustworthy tool. I see the artist's duty as to whatever is missing from the "social truth" in the existing situation - and that can apply to drawing a tree in a way that gets past what we think a tree looks like and shocks or moves us with the encounter of seeing what that idea of a tree hid from view, or it can be bringing the hidden infrastructure on which our lives depend into awareness, or a thousand other moves that shift attention. As "audience"/"public"/etc, we can receive messages, but I always think of Rilke's encounter with the sculpture, leaving him with the inescapable message that "You must change your life." That message wasn't written on a placard, held by the sculpted figure, it was embodied and encountered. A placard can be a legitimate expression of artistic truth, I'm sure of that, but the risk is that when art is enlisted as messenger, it defaults to some kind of placard-making for reasons extrinsic to (and short-circuiting) the artistic truth-work.
Love all of this, thank you again. As for the Rilke quote, it resonates so much with the Koine Greek word “Metanoia” that was mistranslated to “Repent”.
I had a similar conversation with my partner yesterday about re-seeing trees. She is rapidly becoming a poet and is questioning how to use language to speak of the pre-linguistic. And to circle back to the critique I had and make it clear of my respect for the person offering it they were the first photographer who made me consider that photography itself “can” be pre-linguistic if you get outside of yourself. 🙏
I first encountered Rilke’s poem in my early 20s and that line was like a dagger in my heart. It’s one of the most truthful poems I’ve ever seen. At one point, I memorized it. Every word is magic.
This is helpful as I adjust the opening pages of the book I'm writing and imagine how to close it out so that people have a chance of proceeding differently than they did before they picked it up. Very helpful. Thank you.
This is good to hear, Adam!
This is such good agitation, Dougald - thank you ⚡️
Hey Dougald. Just wanted to say thank you. I’m going to be sitting with these words for a while.
First off, I loved the idea of kidnapping people by train. Are you sure that isn’t a thing? I mean, let us not get too sure about what is Not Not-yet-imagined.
Anyway…Barfield leans heavy on imagination as a truth bearing faculty. A sense organ as well as well-bucket I think. The loss of one sense organ usually leads to the increased sensitivity of some other portal. I imagine the over-feeding of a sense might work in the opposite way and dull the less used doorways. One thinks, almost a cliche, of Homer’s blindness. And our eyes in the unending feasting upon moving pictures, frame after frame, 24 images per second and now the blood diamond silica world can fill 6 more in between each of those. Does the debris accumulate in the other senses exponentially as well?
Vanessa says it costs to become Other, to imagine deep enough, to get down far enough into the well that our own interests fade enough to hear new music, to stay long enough in the inland sea to scrub our own scent into a more reasonable proportion. Is the currency some surrender of the overindulged sense? At least is that a start. Again, I dunno.
Weddings as we know them around here lately are that exhausting thing. Wise to keep them scarce. But am always drawn to these ancestral stories of Yids like the Arizal taking the people out into the field at dusk on Sabbath to meet the Shekinah, the Bride. This is over and over again wedding unto the Resting of some One, some Many. There was at least one Rabbi that saw no contradiction with the repetition unto rest/feast of underlings also being a place to break open and find healing in the rising to meet our broken-by-consequence coming Night.
I still wanna kidnap people on a train. Can we please?
If I were picking a crew to kidnap an audience with, I'd want you on it, Andrew!
And yes to the part about weddings. Got me thinking too about Berger's To The Wedding, which might be my favourite novel. And when I fell in love with that book in my twenties, I was still thinking a lot about having studied Shakespeare with Tony Nuttall, and about intergenerationality as the work of culture, and how the mark of tragedy is children dying before their parents, while the mark of comedy is that it ends with a wedding, implying the successful transfer of roles from one generation to the next and the coming of a new generation to keep the dance going and make new mistakes. Maybe I should revisit that with Arendt and natality along for the ride.
Wow. As so often happens with your posts I found that, after reading this to myself, I felt compelled to read it aloud to my wife. And now feel the need to let it settle, then re-read, then share more widely, with friends and community. This connects up several thoughts I've been incubating lately. Thank you Dougald for your deep thought 🙏
Loveky, thank you.
I spoke to what i correctly assumed was a lightweight audience several weeks ago in London, having played with the Rubik 's cube for several months till I found the heavy i could own.
They were starving for it and are still thanking me
Beautiful, Dougald. This makes me think of the ragtag traveling troupe in “Station Eleven,” keeping culture alive after the worst has happened. We recently joined a community choir and there’s something soothing about getting together weekly to sing together. The future is indeed unimaginable and community is right there for the joining.
Also, I so appreciate what you say about art and messages and being truthful. The great Eudora Welty wrote an essay to this effect - the role of the novelist is not to editorialize, but to raise potent questions.