I'm back worrying about what my work is useful for? Is art ever of any use? This is something I have had to wrestle with for well over 50 years now, and I think it's time to set out once again what types of answer have kept me going. I've also just been reemployed by the institution I have worked with for the last 48 years, as a research fellow. This will mean trying to show how my work as an artist is useful and that it has some sort of impact on society. Therefore the clearer I am about what is going on the better. I am very aware that many of the people that look at this blog are fine art students and that the question, "What use is this?" is one that often rears its head, so hopefully my personal thoughts will be useful and that they might help others come up with some sort of answer to the question, 'What can art do?'
I have for many years been an avid reader of the work of the American philosopher John Dewey. His book, 'Art as Experience' is probably the one that has had the most impact on myself as an art practitioner and teacher. The most important lesson I learnt from his writings was that art can be transformative. Not only can it be used to change behaviour at an individual level but that it can be used for social change. This is however a big ask and there are many people out there who would dispute this and argue that art can only reflect what goes on in society or that it is an hermetically closed activity that is always concerned with itself and its own rules; Art being about art, about aesthetics and the art world.
However I believe that art can effect change, both emotional and cognitive and that art can promote first of all an awareness and then a critical evaluation of unfamiliar feelings, or different ways of thinking about the world around us. Altered perceptions can eventually lead to social change.
John Dewey pointed out that art is not about the objects made but that it is about the experience it offers. Therefore every individual is potentially an artist by way of their capacity to participate in this experience. I.e. it is collaborative. This collaboration involves participation which itself leads to transformative change because participants experience differences in how it is possible to think, feel or behave. Art is therefore both psychological and social, transforming not only individual intra-personal processes, but also interpersonal relationships. (Dewey, 1934)
This gives what I would call a psychological purpose to the art I make. This in turn I would hope leads to some sort of introspection on the part of people who engage with it and beyond that, that the engagement itself helps them towards new ways of thinking about other people and things.
So how does it work?
I have recently been using an image of a glove puppet Sooty to carry a variety of ideas about the world and how I / we might think about our engagement with it. The idea was a very personal one, as it was distilled out of my own memories of being a boy and back in the 1950s been given a Sooty puppet to play with. As an adult who has been a professional practicing artist for over 50 years, I now feel capable of being able to return to experiences from the past and reframe them as constructions for thought and the development of feelings, hopefully in a way that facilitates the engagement of others. I also have to believe that in making these images, as others engage with them, the contact can lead to changes in people's cognitive awareness and the way they use feelings to understand the world. The objects I make facilitating what I have called in the past, externalised minds. It being easier to think or feel in response to a something externally perceived, than to have to compose everything, all your understandings of concepts and feelings, inside your own head.
At the centre of this approach to art making has been a growing awareness of animism as a way of coming to terms with the world that surrounds me. I want to talk with the rain as it falls on me, to listen to the land as I walk over it, to feel the stories of materials as I work with them, to be a bird or a cloud or a plant, or a stream and as I do/am these things, to let myself dissolve back into the world I emerge from. Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess some sort of spiritual essence, therefore everything; animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems as well as objects made by humans, such as knives and forks and spoons, as well as sculptures and drawings, are all animated and alive. This belief allows us to make contact with other things in a very different way; we can have conversations, make connections and engage with things in ways that don't have to be about separateness or difference. It sits as an idea alongside a belief in the Gaia hypothesis, that proposes that all the Earth's organic organisms and their inorganic surroundings are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system. As such the maintaining of the conditions for life on the planet, is dependent on an awareness and a set of actions that reflect this interconnectedness.
Raising awareness is the first step in transformative art practice, these blog posts are part of that strategy, if only one person goes away after reading these words and decides that they want to make a change, then the work has had some sort of impact.
These are not new ideas and I see myself as part of a global need to redefine what the artist does. For instance the shamanist tradition continues with work such as Pitsiulaq Qimirpik's, “Bart & Lisa Flowers”, this sculpture made of soapstone and antler bone, mixes a use of traditional mediums with images taken from the Simpson's, an iconic animation that has helped shape contemporary TV culture. He has this to say about his work, “Sculptures are in the shamanistic tradition. A lot of the visuals are about transformation, the body shifting into a different body, and the spectacle of transformation.”
Preminger, S., 2012. Transformative art: art as means for long-term neurocognitive change. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, p.96.
Vail, J. and Hollands, R., 2013. Creative democracy and the arts: The participatory democracy of the Amber Collective. Cultural Sociology, 7(3), pp.352-367.
Goldblatt, P., 2006. How John Dewey's theories underpin art and art education. Education and culture, pp.17-34.
Dewey, J. 1934. Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch, and Company.
Brooke, S.L. and Myers, C.E. eds., 2015. Therapists Creating a Cultural Tapestry: Using the Creative Therapies Across Cultures. Charles C Thomas Publisher.
LeBaron, M. and Sarra, J. eds., 2018. Changing Our Worlds: Arts as Transformative Practice (Vol. 12). AFRICAN SUN MeDIA.
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