What is it this art thingy? I awake sad, and I read a bit about Chairman Mao Zedong... still asking what could art do for any social revolution? Indeed, having paid much notice to contemporary phrases such as Cultural Activism, Cultural Practitioners and among some of these skills and specializations being that of Artists, especially when addressing what Arts and Culture as discourses essential for social change; I find it of essence that I outline perhaps my Understanding of Culture and Art first as words, and then as phenomena in social dynamics which has been used in attempts to collectively assimilate the human experience.
For convenience’s sake let us outline the methodology of the thoughts running in my skull, by which I wish to unravel my response to the first portion of question 1. I will attempt to define my understanding the words from the perspective that these two phenomena have commonalities with growth and change, secondly; by giving brief historical views and perspectives, I will venture into ways the words have evolved new meanings and contexts within society’s use of language.
Change in life and thought can also refer to change in language, thus perhaps I needed to set straight some ideas around how these changes effect changes in vocabulary and the meanings. An artist by the name of Zwelethu Mthethwa once interviewed had mentioned how he felt that: Everyone is a latent Artist. From this Para-phrased expression I wish to commence my analysis. Culture can by definition be generalized as compendium of ‘tendencies of natural growth within a group centered around common experiences and needs’, but to say this without tracing some history as I have come to know of the antique metamorphosis the words had undergone, it would be detrimental to an overall understanding of the perspective assumed here.
The word culture has changed meaning over a myriad of periods in human development; be it since Greco-Roman times, the more recent renaissance periods that are often attributed an Eurocentric origin; and during revolutions that are documented throughout the globe such of the holocaust of slavery – the French, Spanish, the industrial revolution and so forth. These changes should first be attributed to the human conditions which espoused necessity for such radical transformation of normative structures and societal systems. Initially I mentioned the tendencies of human growth; now imagine the analogy transmitting plasticity in time through processes of human training with regard to the new-fangled specializations that arise with the evolution of art-ideas and cultural thought metamorphosis.
By human, I am still at that microcosmic veil of the collective transformation, meaning the general state of individual mind prior to its awareness of partaking in the general state of intellectual development in a society as a whole – to use Raymond Williams’ precedent of cultural evolution.
But soon arises that ever inherent defect of rationality as experienced through the ghost of logic, which transmutes itself with every new consensus reached – the spiraling implications of the word onto its source-words – art, democracy, class and all other isms which are often romanticism, some pseudo-naturalism of elitist mobs constrained by their feudalistic origins and contradictions.
Suddenly I find culture faced with these inherent contradictions of its being a mere abstraction thus allowing practical separations of certain moral activities (intellectual or otherwise) from the impetus of society itself. An abstraction yes, but it also should still allow for the ‘court of human appeals’. Each individual finds virtue in the knowledge of representation within the collective.
But with certain rudimentary emergence of political collective-ideas in the earlier part of history as a character in this evolution, we find culture being faced with other demises such as banishment to some obscurity, usually reasoned against the art-practitioners who dared disregard common society sense. This advent also forced culture as a compendium of art-thoughts/ideas further back to areas of personalized and private experiences. Perhaps there is much I have missed – ART, what is its relation to all this culture talk? Ok, ART as a word seems to have a remarkably similar pattern of change as culture to me. Maybe I should have stayed with a structured analysis of the topic, not the lateral method I seem to be following.
From its original sense of being a skill, art had to come to some kind of institutionalization. Art had began to be signified with a particular group of skills – artisan. But that also changed, whereby art in the personalized banishment state became a sphere of imaginative truths cleaved directly from an observation of social changes; this happening at that microcosmic level of the individual. From that characteristic disposition of romantic analyst-syndrome inherited from ancient moral habits – we see art being distinguished by other words like GENIUS, Aesthetic and other exalted distinctions from society as whole. Thus we find art now becoming a tool for cultural records of nearly all important continuing reactions to changes in social, economic and political lives – a map for exploring the nature of the changes within a continuum.
With this creation of a special kind of person because of an imaginative capability to record tendencies of human growth also was created a body of moral and intellectual activities which officially took to a certain scale of integrity – a mode of interpreting all common experiences thus also beginning to change those. This new person after finding out this new theory of a superior reality says: ‘I’m relating – I actually have a function.’ This is like what Karl Gietl had once impugned in an interview.
The new entity finds a conception of the same society in its crude indifference a kind of substantial sphere of natural beauty and personalized objectivities related and not opposed to the beauty of a political life.
When conclusions about personal feelings become conclusions about society - an observation of any beauty can carry moral reference to the unified life of a society. Christopher Okigbo was at war when he wrote out his Labyrinths, other pamphlet paddling poets were incarcerated – Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Wally Serote – Niyi Osundare and many others whose activities were not merely incidental but essentially related to a larger experience. It should be noted therefore that culture as expressed by the Artist is soon impressed upon society, thus the qualification bestowed artists as purveyors of the embodied human spirit even when often in opposition to the same society’s factitious value-systems.
Artists can thus mirror a society which in turn can replenish the image self-reflected through the art-activity of these special persons as a means towards revolutionizing truths. So this pivotal role the artists play should and can relate to struggles for change in societies. Art is a freedom in itself, but when art is banished to un-freedom… it can serve to mold and amend all commonalities in human value-systems.
Is not art a professional protest against stagnant social norms, thus simultaneously inaugurating alternative grounds for change? Does the artist plot the pillars of culture’s evolution? All these questions can be answered in the following attempt at redressing the art-idea as impetus for art-activity.
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