What is the Role of the Artist Today?
These role descriptions come from a number of significant artists, architects, philosophers and social activists for whom the experience of the creative process is the ‘art’. This creative process connects human consciousness with the surrounding environment uniting the ‘self’ with what is deemed to be ‘other’. This occurs through the sensory languages of sight, taste, touch, hearing and sound. In many cultures there are other senses beyond the familiar five senses, which enable a more conscious articulation of human experience.
The story of the role of the artist is the story of the substitution of imaginative satisfactions of human needs, for real ones. The artist codifies human experience in numerous sensory languages, through which humans create their own worlds. Ervin Laszlo is a world leader in the study of human patterns of thought:
‘It seems the self monitoring capacities of the human nervous system, coupled with its sensitivity to the environment emancipated us from the confines of sensory reality and placed us within a world we ourselves created. We could surround ourselves with ideas, modes of feeling and beliefs which are only indirectly related to the world around us.’
~ Ervin Laszlo The Systems View of the World
This substitution through sound, picture and gestural language gives the capacity to feel, envisage and to believe, becoming sensitive to different kinds of knowing, rationality, beauty, faith and morality. This is the role of the arts in all cultures crossing the spectrum of consciousness from cultures founded on the wisdom traditions of 50,000 years ago, to cultures which have replaced rationalism for ancient wisdom. What art is and what the artist does varies according to the values of the people of each culture, group, society.
The role of the artist in a society at any time is determined by the consciousness of the culture of that group during that time. In a multicultural society the role of the artist shifts from roles ancient to modern to post modern so the role of artist in contemporary western cultures may at one moment in time be that of the shaman in an ancient culture and at another the individual genius of modernism. The themes of each moment in time are expressed through these ‘artistes’ who consciously live them out through expressing the depths of their experience.
‘Each epoch generates a “thematic universe” – a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in a dialectical interaction with their opposites...’
~ Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, Continuum, 1982) p91-92
Freire suggests that the study of these universes is a useful insight for those who wish to understand why a significant theme of our own era is that of being stretched in so many directions by
‘...force of faith and reason, of imposed versus self-led development, of cultural diversity and cultural privilege.’
~ Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, Continuum, 1982) p91-92
What are the significant thematic universes of our own era? The themes are so complex perhaps it’s time to look at apparently less complex societies to see how they made and make sense of their continuous and cyclic time.
The Artist as Cosmologist
Re-connection with the Wisdom Traditions is occurring within the very cultural traditions which devalues/d them through colonisation, by destroying the unified consciousness with the land and nature. In Australia a re-connection between the knowledge and wisdom of 50,000 years or more and contemporary ‘knowledge’ is emerging from the new physics of the cosmos.
‘A cosmic field that underlies and links all things in the world is a perennial intuition, present in traditional cosmologies and metaphysics. The ancients knew that space is not empty: it is the origin and the memory of all things that exist and ever existed...’
~ Ervin Laszlo An Integral Theory of Everything, Science and the Akashic Field 2004
The Artist as Shaman
The sensory adept of today is able the leap across the isolated individual ego into the ‘other’ or transpersonal forms of consciousness.
‘‘[Our]... power to create is ultimately based on [the] ... power to sympathise, for sympathy is among [our] ... powers ... sympathy implies exquisite vision: a power to receive as well as to give: a power to enter into communion with living and lifeless things: to enter into a unison with nature’s powers and processes ... Sympathy thus understood as power, is the beginning of understanding, for knowledge alone is not understanding.’
~ Louis Sullivan, Architect, quoted by Greg Burgess in The Multiplicity of the Whole Greg Burgess, A. S. Hook address, Architecture Australia, p98
The Empire Ruins and Networks Art in Real Time 2004 conference held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, suggested some more key themes for the artist’s role:
‘What is the role of the artist today?
How can artists respond to a post 9/11 world where critical discourse and civil liberties have been subjected to increased levels of constraint? Can we create new models of artistic and cultural collaboration now that cultural difference has become the target of new types of surveillance and border control?
Can art expand the democratic principles in public culture?’
~ Brochure for Empires Ruins & Networks conference, ACMI, Melbourne, 2004
Community cultural development is a way of working for artists who wish to engage collaboratively with people in creating arts programs which articulate the perceptions, feelings reflections and symbolic representations of cultural difference. It raises awareness not only for the targets of cultural difference but demonstrates the human consequences that such surveillance measures have on the wider community being protected.
New models of artistic and cultural collaboration are occurring through the role that artists play within community cultural development programs and projects throughout Australia and in particular the State of Victoria.
Carmelita Gomez is a Victorian East Timorese artist who is establishing an East Timor Choir Project for East Timorese migrants in Victoria who wish to keep the language and memories of their homeland alive as well as to support each other in their new lives in Australia.
Community cultural development programs and projects have been always been carried out by communities before the term was coined, but since the 1970s the Federal Government of Australia through the Australia Council appointed a Community Arts Board which later became known as the Community Cultural Development Board, which allocates government funding. The artists who are developing these new ‘models’ are those who understand the paradoxes of the artist working as a self expressed individual as well as the roles needed to work in community. Artists can choose to work this way in conjunction with other forms of production, in a progression of methods of working in the studio, teaching skill classes in communities, designing and leading community arts projects to collaborative design and implementation of community cultural development programs and projects, each demanding the acquisition of new and different roles. They are working in new ways to develop skills and political awareness within the communities in which they are engaged on a longer term basis, rather than shorter term community arts projects
The Artist as Creative Collaborator
Targeting cultural difference with surveillance and border control is not new. Consider surveillance and border control of the first peoples of Australia. Today’s ‘new types of surveillance and border controls’ are in fact just the imposition of another layer of new technology grafted onto the mindset of western values, that ‘thematic universe’ of modernism - progress, land ownership, in short cultural colonialism. The necessity to change the mindset of imposed design culture upon indigenous groups in Victoria is being addressed by architect Greg Burgess through his collaboration with indigenous groups in Victoria with whom they collaboratively designed the Brambuk Cultural Centre in Victoria. He outlines his architectural design process as being that of a ‘social artist’:
‘The idea of the architect as social artist suggests that the architect has some responsibility for social health. It suggests that the architect works with the ecology of groups and communities, effecting change - working beyond the narrow confines of the individual into the future of humankind. Building is viewed as process, not only product. The process is a dance of constant negotiations. At the end the trace of the dance is seen in the building.’
~ The Multiplicity of the Whole Greg Burgess, A. S. Hook address, Architecture Australia, p98
Brambuk Cultural Centre serves as a one of these new models, if we accept that ‘architecture spans all the arts’ (Burgess). The building process, as a verb, pertains to all ‘models of artistic and cultural collaboration’ and can be viewed as a narrative of democratic process. Viewing the building metaphor in this way can assist us to visualise the numerous possible forms of the democratic process.
How has the building/artwork been created? By an individual genius architect/artist? By a team of genii artists? By an untrained architect building designer? By a collaborative process in which the trained skills and perceptions of the architect amalgamate with elders from Halls Gap, representatives of three indigenous cultural groups in the Grampians region of Victoria.
Can art/architecture expand the democratic principles in public culture?
Community cultural development practices are based on processes for growing cultural democracy through working directly with communities, living out these principles in direct engagement with people in schools, housing commission estates in which many refugees are housed, neighbourhood houses, indigenous communities, hospitals, prisons, special residential units, day centres for the disabled.
‘Entering into the other’s space, across the culture of the land-across the wounds of dispossession and colonialism – one listens, sensing out resonances, shadows, fleeting openings. With the women we map the site – footsteps making and marking out the features of the ground. We follow the givens of animal track and trace; make neighbourly shifts to accommodate rock and tree, dunal directions; the grandeur of the rock always to our back. We skirt between and around the lie of the land, to make a space in which timeless rituals of figures in a landscape can find a gathering in – a natural gathering up. To commune with the sensitive chaos of the other, one open one’s senses. I am listening with my back, my hands, my feet. My bodily space is alert. I am feeling my way.’
~ The Multiplicity of the Whole Greg Burgess, A. S. Hook address, Architecture Australia, p99
Burgess’s works express a cooperative and co-creative approach both to materials, animals and human beings, an ecology of mind similar to that described by David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous:
‘Genuine art, we might say, is simply human creation that does not stifle the nonhuman element but rather, allows whatever is ‘Other’ in the materials to continue to live and breathe. Genuine artistry, in this sense, does not impose a wholly external form upon some ‘inert’ matter, but rather allows the form to emerge from the reciprocity between the artist and materials, whether these materials be stones, or pigments or spoken words. Thus understood, art is really a cooperative endeavour, a work of co-creation in which the dynamism and power of earthborn materials is honoured and respected. In return for this respect, these materials contribute their more-than-human resonances to human culture.’
~ Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous Vintage, 1996, p278
New ‘models’ require a shift in consciousness of this sort in which the artist is a sensory adept whose practice is to reconnect to the senses so as not to rely only upon external instrumentation to sense and interpret the world around us:
‘The wisdom of the traditional indigenous relationship to the land is accessible tangentially, mediated by a sensitive poetics. Ecology, spirituality and the arts are making ground in this direction.
Architecture spans all the arts and includes culture, religion, and philosophy within its context and so is liable to the critical reflexivity of postmodern thought. The building like the self, can be consciously deconstructed – its parts separated out and put back together in exciting and alarming ways, which challenge and confront set notions of the purpose of architecture, challenging history, culture and institutions to review themselves. Somewhere however in this ‘sea of otherness’ one also seeks intactness, repose and poise of empathetic relation in architecture.’
~ The Multiplicity of the Whole Greg Burgess, A. S. Hook address, Architecture Australia, p98
The Artist as Activist
The activist acts to change current consciousness of the culture through firstly having acquired an informed perception about the state of the environment, and having acquired the necessary skills to change their personal consciousness into new patterns which shift the conventional paradigm. So the role of the artist as shaman develops the skills to change consciousness in order to empathise with other forms of consciousness, by altering the common forms of organisation of his senses.
‘Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organisation of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple non human sensibilities that animate the local landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly the common speech or language – in order to make contact with and learn from the other powers in the land.’
~ Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous Vintage, 1996, p9
The role of activist is to change one’s own consciousness through one’s engagement with materials in congruence with the values one is attempting to absorb, rather like achieving the alchemist’s Magnum Opus, the transformation of gross lead into gold.
In a recent discussion about the role of the artist with Jon Hawkes, Director of the Community Arts Board from 197?, said
‘For most painters I know, the reason for doing the work is because of the joy in the making/doing of the painting through the desire to express yourself. We’ve forgotten about art that has no audience. I believe art is a verb not a noun. This has all come about because of the specialisation of labour. Culture is about questions about doing things, what reasons we do things for and how these values are negotiated.’
~ Jon Hawkes, Director, Community Music Board, in a student discussion at the Victoria College of the Arts Community Cultural Development Post Graduate & Masters Program
The artist must first fine tune their visual, aural, tactile and kinaesthetic skills in order to use these highly developed sensory faculties to empathise or enter into the consciousness of ‘the other’ without losing self consciousness, without becoming swamped by the consciousness of ‘the other’.
This is an important aspect of the artist’s role in community and this sense of ‘invasion’ is a common issue among young artists who have not developed this faculty. Organising of the senses requires developing a skin which is consciously permeable between self and ‘other’ which sense boundaries and filter issues of transference and projections from other people.
The Artist as Troubador
In the same student discussion, Jon Hawkes favoured the role of the artist as troubadour, moving from city to city as all communities need foreign input and new ideas. However,
‘The mystical tradition embodied by the troubadours is not widely recognized. There is reason to believe that these troubadours originated in Saracen Spain, and they were an act of spiritual impregnation of the West by the Near East... The seed that would grow a religion of love in the mystical tradition. ... some also note that the very word 'troubadour' derives from the Arabic root TRB which means (among other things) to find. The troubadours were finders.’
~ www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/glossary/troubadour.html
Perception of what is going on in and around us and the articulation of these events through form is the work of the artist. Bob Dylan is the role model for all troubadours of 2005’s baby boomers and in this review of his 2005 memoir we read
‘The instinctive juxtaposition of savagery and tenderness, the extraordinary marriage of material, ancient and modern, articulated in that feral note of self-laceration have always been keys to Dylan's art. Like all the greats, including Shakespeare and Blake, he also has a spooky ear for the radioactive, associative power of language. So Tangled up in Blue, for instance, one of the great songs of all time, takes us into the locked room of the broken heart and also reminds us that it's poetry, not prose, which reconnects us to our childhood selves...’
~ Robert McCrum The Observer September 25, 2005
The Artist as Organiser
Organising skills are essential to community cultural development but are often regarded by artists to be of secondary importance to the ‘art’. It is crucial to reconstruct the mind set in which the organisational aspects are of equal importance. It is even worthwhile making a conscious effort to ensure their equal attention in daily time management. It is in this very arena of oranisational consciousness that renders the artist to be stereotyped as ‘impractical but creative’! Business skills are now frequently included in arts training programs and mentoring is a necessity in the modeling of alternating thought processes ranging from poetic thought in paint, stone or multimedia, to contractual arrangements, team building, marketing, action research processes, responsibilities for participants, indicators for success, evaluation and professional development.
The Artist as Cultural Leader
Considering all the roles that an artist will play at various times in various projects, leadership is a neat term that includes everything which creates kinship.
‘My cultural clan and that of most artistic leaders, revolves around the bringing together of a clan. Theatre and dance companies work as creative clans in artistic cults and Bangara is my cult. People become part of the cult because it is their life. They are in a spirit of cultivation where they feel secure and fulfilled. In the Bangarra cult, our religion happens to be indigenous culture. This brings with it a strong personal bond, like a creative kinship.’
~ Stephen Page, Director, Bangarra Dance Theatre
The thematic universes across which artists stretch their consciousness unite in the urgent need for a new system of values, a shift from the ideology of growth and progress defined as more and bigger. Western culture has transformed the face of the earth in its own image. We are consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate. All the people of the world cannot live as Westerners do today: the Earth is not rich enough for that. But what is there on which to base our cross cultural, multi faith values in an understanding of human nature?
We can begin with challenging and confronting set notions of the role of the arts and artists in the building of culture in communities, by challenging history, culture and institutions to review themselves, to turn themselves inside out.
The story of the role of the artist began with the story of the substitution of imaginative satisfactions for real ones. Perhaps the next chapter can now include the consciousness of how this substitution through sound, picture and gestural language occurs. Perhaps reconnecting the mystical elements of myth with the new physics can re-unite the great schism between moral and natural sciences, reconstructing the unified cosmos, making sense and value of the global perspective, of the coexistence of diverse cultures and notions of time.
So at once the artist is troubadour connecting with the spirit of the times, a creative collaborator in giving voice to other individuals and groups, a shaman who leaps across the isolated individual ego into the ‘other’ or transpersonal forms of consciousness, the organiser cultural leader and business person.
The obvious question arises, ‘Can one individual play all these roles?’ The answer is that many contemporary artists already move across these roles at different stages of project development. They are driven by the need to integrate individual self expression within a whole social political economic and ecological environment.
