Thursday, April 26, 2007

What is art for?


Thus far in my academic research have been interested in the functions of art within the human experience, and its role in recovery, service, peace and justice issues. I partly define art anthropologicially – similar to what Ellen Dissanyake refers to as a "species-centric view". This emphasizes those creative thoughts and acts that form social cohesion, and fulfill the psychological needs of human beings. Art reflects human behaviors and activities like ritual,myth, narrative creation, and play, that help us find meaning, release life stress, and help us successfully survive in life. From a contextual perspective, I consider how humans experience the world within both priveledge and poverty.

Lately I’ve wondered about the comforts of priveledge and how they often end up in spiritual poverty. Remember the words of Mother Teresa, as she visited the States in the 1990's? In comparison to poverty, she saw that the spiritual poverty of the US is a much graver problem. When I think about my own U.S. cultural expereince, I get discouraged by cultural inheritance of excess and debt, the global extensions, and Walmart, the discourses of Fox news. I get discouraged at the fact that these things are in me - in my own consciousness, habits and lifestyle. The deeply ingrained values of Individualism, secularism, and capitalism have brought me a sense of disappointment at my own embeddedness. It seems I spend so much energy trying to overcome this conditioning, and yet the personal commitment is still met with my own laziness, and apathy towards change. I feel like I’ve been orphaned by my cultural forefathers, and have inherit a dis-ease that celebrates surface over depth, abandons the blessed community, and has forgotten the sacred awareness and concern of all life and nature. What is the vaccine for an epidemic of the loss of the soul, and for the pain of the gap between the reality of the mirror, and the people we hope to become?

Art meets the crisis of life, reconstructs it, and provides a slow, but true process of transforming our perceptions of ourselves in the world. The space of creating attunes our consciousness to our deepest nature and call of being as it is ecologically related to others. Not only is it an antidote for the loss of meaning that returns us to Presence, but it is a third space that sutures the heart to an ethical commitment to life and change. In the experience of making art, we become silenced, but keenly awakened to our own potentials. It is here that illusions become transparent, and we learn to find affirmation in the possibilities of now to move energy in different and emancipatory ways.

1 Comments:

Blogger BG Dodson said...

Oh...VERY well said.

And a most intriguing examination of the 'what'.

3:58 PM  

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