Can one’s art be self-effacing yet remaining convinced of the power of its form?
Does the highbrow and popular embrace artists often receive tamper with their creative temperament?
Is there ever truly a fear that perhaps the artist can defile the selfsame subjects depicted through personalised re-imaginings or misinterpretations?
Why are we quick to umbrage, this propensity for atrocity in art, when faced with truths we cannot stomach, those that challenge the pomposity of self-assured infallibility?
Does the artist harbour a secret hectic greed, ruin-prone and ill-advised class envy that is prevalent among many artists, that also adds to the reticence we find in their expressions.
Art’s is a voice that shades into a variety of mouths, as well as orifices of all social lamentations and cravings for full sensitivity to the imaginative rather than the engulfing nightmare.
Mad identities granted him (the poet artist) license to invade other spaces, as a naughty character with will torn between a duel with the world and its gods.
A terrified reverie of conversation with ghosts, when things are left hideously doomed and deranged. This is the source of the poetic, an unnamed representation of a sordid world, viewed through salved eyes of romantic mysticism gone to extremes.
Artists are adrift in a turbulent world, finding sanctuary in words often mangled by cliches and poetry of paints and colour, with the motive to reflect on the power of the trivial and mundane.
And this veneration of mundanity has allowed for innocence to permeate their work often in gleeful deployments of their creative energies.
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This quintessential urge to interpret cultural turmoils and social constructs, where does it position the individual’s perspective, that soberly lasting yet psychological vantage through which each artists views their world?
Is there poetry in these demonstrations and protestations, is art but a conflicting self-analysis of where we are and where we aught be as society?
Is there a space for artistic expression that cuts down and contemplates the world we have vastly destroyed, in richly entangled pictorial depictions or textual narratives, a verse to voice the sordid and rebuke the paradise of our mono-culture?
That reductive optic through which artists view this complex world is fast becoming a decimated habitat of imagination, constantly under attack by consumerist urgencies and an assortment of structural obstacles, leaving artists who merely produce art that is often palatable and sedative.
And that is the challenge faced by many cross-disciplinary creatives, as they are breaking through traditional veils and intermingling modes of representing commonplace sentiments of how we as humans have ineluctably altered the face of our planet.
Those wild and diverse forests of the mind have also been cleared at the rate of human desires and their obsolescence, a conceit that encourages a collective re-dreaming of those lost botanies and landscapes in jungles of a history past and yet tragically living.
Often in our otherworldly momentary glimpses we see possibilities from the murk of contemporary gluttony and predation of this world, yet how do artists communicate those intricate frequencies through obsessively re-run conversations in which they might say something amiss?
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But, does art require patronisation in order to flourish in this culture of investor mentality that is driven by a select grouping from an elite cultural pedigree, and would artist even thrive within societies that do not feel they owe much to artistic philosophies and praxis of these under-resourced creative practitioners?
Does art for patronage imply that artists are neglecting their colossal responsibility of recording the past and present for posterity and not erasure, or can such patronage illuminate on evolving new artistic careers?
Powerless to effects of social atrocities, many artists have an overarching fear of an eminent end and often feel trapped in a ditch non-responsiveness to events beyond their control, not wanting to interrupt the reveries of a placid cultural system.
Does this sense of impotence, a life spent in years of vital creativity, ever reach a precipice where the final fall or ascension occurs? Do artists still sell their proverbial souls to the devil in some Faustian ritual authored in an eternal cycle of demand and supply?
Arguably, the view that art is solely evaluated imaginatively by those invested in its beauty (or any degree thereof) and also its worth as ascribed by economic barometers of profiteers, is wilfully naive; because captivatingly through art can we then find an accessible vehicle for profound thought about all intriguing premises of life.
This contemplate relationship with collective existences and material vitality of personal life, is what should drive and sustain the unruly spirit of the artist, combining nostalgia for the romantic while daring to glare at our strife-torn present.
Perhaps this abiding notion that art can become something beyond the sensorial is rooted in a humanism that views the entirety of life as intertwined, and through this simple lens artists can venture into troubling and unapproachable portraits of their monumental times.
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Relinquishing the modern assumptions about what constitutes accessibility of art , one finds that the nature of the artist’s private and public character does inform much of this accessibility to their artistic practice.
My Video Poems, for instance, I find to possess a literary texture, and my literary works to possess an audio-visual dimension. Although the correlation might seem arbitrary or coincidental, it is a rumination of a deep-seated urge towards incompleteness, such as with all things in life’s transience.
There obviously is an underwhelming effect to the tedium induced by multiple layered deliveries of an artistic depictions of event, moments, memories and speculations, but this multiplicity inquisitively questions whether “is this all there is”?
Similarly, with my “not writing for the mob”, I am not attempting to offer exclusive access to my word-work, but rather to interrogate language as a tool and medium, an effort to “teach English a lesson” as renowned author Professor Wally Serote once put it in an interview - a western tongue melding into the language of my dreams or vis-versa.
Maybe an alternately politicised upbringing wrought with anonymous exposure to subversive literature, music and cinema have left an undeniably indelible cog in the mechanism of my thought processes, and perhaps that also affects my cognitive renditions of my thoughts and chaotic poetry.
Yet my concern if for the human and fragile in the midst of the brutal, reflecting on moral choices insisted on myself by myself, and to suffer the full consequences of choosing to confront the engulfing nightmare of creative life.
A tormenting century this has undeniably been, with artists vacillating between the horrors of COVID-19 and the isolation enforced through quarantines, border and theatre closures - here new myths about togetherness have to be cultivated or forged.
Therefore, my personal obsession and pre-occupation with demolishing linguistic borders in frenzied gesticulations and textual choreography, with subverting meaning and context, these are metaphors that reconcile horrors with all promises of life.
Paul Zisiwe 2023
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