Day Thirty...

To start off, lets assume the artist, a self-conscious vehicle of the spirit of the people; how does the artist become this?

Is it because are truly Critics of Society?

Art, since the times of Aristotle has been viewed as somewhat of a phenomenon imposed upon its bearer; this meaning, to me at least that the style or ideas of style as inflicted by the individual’s reality-definition is substrate transmission of the received stimuli after calculative correlations and summation into generic fabrics of morale within society I live in. Morale is mere example of what any art-activity can accomplished on behalf of the collective social awareness. Therefore, the artists can be duly credited with all constructive pressure that sustains all culture and thus implying a method of becoming the essential vehicle of collective knowledge even more poignant in times of struggle for transformation of alternate perspectives. In situations of social oppression based on all other biases and handicaps of culture as has to be transformed, we find it necessary to eradicate some notions in order to pave way for change within each institution’s evolution. Here, culture becomes an anti-acid for the cultural belly which is in itself a melting pot of ever-transient methods of growth.

The artists’ concern for freedom would then mean an inverse of ART-AS-Freedom hypothesis which I hope was deciphered in the opening pages of this essay; thus transforming the mandate of this skill into those of ART-FOR-freedom.
But, this would seem to contradict all notions of freedom as that human imaginative truth which should be a model of fixated truths as those that history is concocted from. Art as the freedom should have been the author of tendencies of free activity, but now that it seeks to reform the exact notions it has planted… we begin to see art becoming a form of social re-engineering experiment, ever in flux of stimuli which charge and trigger all exponential growth that permeates all human activity.

But, there are risks to criticizing the normative structures of social liberties which can include the loss of those same liberties on the side of the agitating artists, since the majority tends to be capacitated towards negativity and antagonism of that which is of minority opinion. Andre Breton called this ‘The Hatred of the Marvelous’ – and this capacity can overwhelm any expression uttered with immediate aims of instigating change.
Ok, like most changes in life and thought-patterns to which any language in the world can refer – the same thought system-changes can dictate the language of their transformative period within a continuum of evolving cultures.

That language can either please or displease portions of society in its segregated reality-definitions, either making the artists for instance “fully fledged Writers” or despots who deserve society’s scorn, for their rejection of that which had already been admired.

This could be a way that most writers and poets are viewed by their readers/society; and also by those who have learned to commodify this special skill for gain in other modes of social transactions. Class as a cultural reality itself tends to feed into this paradigm of censoring thought and reception of subversive definitions of the word, thus we are came across ideas of democracy, industrialism and classism as adjunct of culture as a whole. In societies clustered with contradictions moral or otherwise, there rises the urgency towards problematizing dissent/opposition and sadly the ones plagued with imaginative experiences/truths tend to suffer the first blows.

I must also emphasize that the word imaginative is not implicit of escapist and illusory tendencies attributed to its meaning. By ‘imaginative’ I import into the realm of art-activity the capacity for the unknown – an imperative for change – yet determinate, thus only cultivated minds being those privileged to see/transmit it. Avenues of contemporary mentalism still remain to be shaken by such anarchic alterations of psychologies infused upon societies as normative and thus becoming imperatives of specialized kinds. Censorship can become an individualized imperative in that through society’s reluctance towards change, it would homogenize responses to the unknown, thus also heightening the phenomenon of self-censoring societies and individuals.

The risks are further enhanced by the historical dependence of expression on institutions who had in the earlier parts of the past century entrenched ideas like industry, system, commodity, trade and so forth, and thus placing vulnerability on originality. The same structures which formulated classes into markets with homogenized value systems can be those same structures controlling language developments; for their homogeneity is sustained by language (commonly English) which somehow fails to grow with the exponential rate of change introducing newer imaginative truths into the collective world-mind. If therefore the artists are charged with individually confronting such stagnation, how will society still manage to elude the vices of mono-culturalism?

This analysis I will provide in relation to another phenomenon – egalitarianism as expressed and impressed through art-activities under the age of globalization and commodification of art as for trade-item. First before providing alternative answers to questions posed, I will attempt to refer to other sources and texts of significant abstractions which might serve to verify the hypothesis I will henceforth offer.

Art in South Africa:
Through the Colonial Prism

I believe it would suffice to say that the South African political climate of the earlier 1900’s had become and remained a volatile one for varied sectors of society. Many disparities which characterized the colonial culture since then, evolved through that epoch having gained further appurtenances towards segregation. Ideas which today filter into present political ideals can still find root at these and other phases of the South African experience. The iron claw of white supremacy saw African cultural expression banished to barbarism, and the impending consequences of cultural extinction took toll. The separated-ness of class systems in the country insidiously introduced charters essential for cultural segregation and castration for many; culture stood forth as an entity which revealed a Cosmo-demonic side of its mirrored face. Other ethnicities’ knowledge systems were thus vanquished with vile disregard – labeled as “uncultured”, therefore revealing another meaning assimilated into the word since its inception.

When Steve Biko highlighted the capability of culture as propellant of collective minds towards an appreciation of its past, he also identified other facets instrumental in this transformative process; the by-products of culture (art, music, poetry and literature in any form), these become subject to the entire and absolute awareness of self in present temporality. This impressed upon the artists the responsibility of being truth-mirror standing in relation to other interacting complexities abound. The atmosphere which throughout history had exemplified an atmosphere for art’s perfect germination had been those of strife, contaminations and other virulent epochs of hardship in human history. These selfsame epochs had also made platforms for a realistic approach towards cultural anarchy – a phenomenon characteristic of one class’s cultural norms taking excess acknowledgment over others.

Through such nepotistic majority validations of a single cultural system, we still see the advent of banishment loom as other subaltern cultures are repressed as to not infect an entire system created through class-centered values.
Any opposition of such a thought-system is then what I call the root of cultural resistance/revolution/struggle against the aforementioned mono-culture.
Art as a weapon:
Towards Regaining Freedom...