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What good is art anyway? Do we really need art?
It has been argued that the human species had to wait until it has solved the problem of obtaining adequate food and shelter before it could find the leisure to produce and enjoy art. Another popular assumption is that art is only for the wealthy, with their free time and leisure, to collect and enjoy. Many believe that art is only a leisure time activity.
We know that primitive people used symbols, such as words and gestures, to successfully cooperate in hunting and foraging for food and in building shelter. We know that primitive peoples have found time to create both visual and musical art forms. The Eskimo of the frozen north, for example, with their need to constantly hunt for food have also found time to carve stone and bone into aesthetically sensitive sculptures. Art creates the symbols, words, gestures, drawings, numbers, diagrams and musical patterns, as well as the tools, that people, however primitive or advanced, have always used to cooperate in whatever tasks they faced. Far from being a leisure time activity art has produced the symbols that enabled humanity to develop the technology that leads to leisure. The origins of art are lost in the mists of prehistory.
Art creates the symbols - the culture - that gives meaning to raw reality and that transforms that raw reality into a reality that we can experience intelligently in a meaningful and effective way. Without symbols - words, numbers, musical patterns, diagrams, drawings, paintings, photographs, sculpture and the semiotic expressions - we could never understand the world. If culture is the system of symbols that enables us to experience reality then art is the means that creates the symbols.
Art is people made. A tree, for example, is made by a process we call 'nature'. But the word 'tree' or a drawing of a tree is the symbol that separates the tree from the rest of raw reality and gives it meaning. Art cannot create a tree. Art can only create the symbols that represent the tree. But without the symbol of a tree the tree would have no meaning for us. A tree may have had value to the pre-human anthropoid that climbed the tree to escape a predator but until someone invented a symbol for the tree it had no meaning. Without art and without symbols we could not communicate the meaning of a tree, or of anything else.
The human mind is a compulsive maker of symbols. The small child invents visual symbols and starts to draw before learning how to read and write. The unconscious mind creates symbols while we sleep These manifest images of our dreams are the encoded symbols the unconscious mind creates to give meaning to our unconscious experience. They may require free associations to decode their latent meaning but they reveal the creativity of the unconscious mind.
Perhaps the first symbols were simple gestures or drawings made in the air by the moving hand. Watch anyone's hands while they talk and notice how the hands draw pictures in the air to illustrate the story being told. We can never know for certain but such 'air drawings' may have preceded speech and may have been the first form of art. Our own persistent need to talk with our hands may be the enduring vestige of the most primitive form of art.
In popular usage the term art is taken to mean only the visual arts of drawing, painting and sculpture. A more comprehensive meaning would include, in addition to the visual, all literature, music, architecture, body language, sign language, all the useful tools implements, buildings, bridges, roads, cars, lorries, clothing and airplanes - all of what we also know as technology. Everything made by human effort carries a semiotic message that conveys a symbolic value. Unfortunately in our mass produced world the semiotic message is all too often that of monotonous and tiresome uniformity a monotony we try to ignore. When everything was made by individual craftspeople the products had a unique semiotic value and interesting variation.
Architecture was formerly indigenous to a particular region. Building design reflected the unique culture of its own place with the aesthetic forms its people valued. Today's high rise buildings in Singapore and in Hong Kong look the same as the high rise buildings in New York or in London or in any other city. The semiotic message is international uniformity reflecting the uniform values of international capital. Art creates the symbols that give meaning to raw experience. Only with symbols are we able to deal intelligently with the problems of experience. With symbols we propose, test and evaluate possible solutions to problems.
Art creates the symbols we use to implement the method of science Art and science are two sides of the same coin.
At one time the only way to know if a certain building design would stand up by itself was to actually construct the design and watch to see what might happen. If the structure began to collapse before it was completed - and many did collapse during construction - then architect would change the design and try again. Today with our knowledge of the behaviour of materials and how stresses distributed within a material, and with the mathematical equations that embody that knowledge we can build the structure on paper - completely with symbols - to determine if it will support itself. And now with computers it is possible to work out in a few hours design equations for complex structures that formerly would have taken years to work out on paper. And the computer will even supply the blueprints and the lists of required materials all completely detailed to save months of tedious paper and pencil work.
Symbols enable us to solve problems on paper or in the computer. But there will always be occasions when it is necessary to test ideas and solutions, computerised or otherwise, in the experience of raw reality. Symbols can represent reality. They can give meaning to reality. But they cannot replace reality.
The aggregate of symbols that art creates - words, numbers, gestures, musical patterns, signs, diagrams, drawings, non-verbal semiotic messages - that transform raw reality into something we can experience intelligently, this system of symbols is what we know as culture. We often think of 'culture' as something to add on to the surface of whatever our technology has enabled us to produce. After constructing a complex building we decorate the surface with designs or patterns and hang pictures on the walls believing that we are adding to culture'. We easily forget that culture is the system of symbols that enabled us to design and construct the building. Decoration may be a part of culture but culture is much more than decoration.
Often confused with decoration is that part of culture that is assumed by some to have no useful purpose. These are also called the 'fine arts' and include literature such as poetry, fiction and essays, the visual arts such as drawings, paintings, sculptures, jewellery, photographs and prints, and the musical arts such as song, dance and instrumental. But these systems of symbols also transform raw reality into meaningful experience. The literary, visual and musical systems of symbols enable us to perceive what we see and hear with deeper understanding and with increased intelligence. This improves perception brings with it an enhanced quality of life and living.
As we look at a painting we see how the painter has perceived certain aspect of life. The painting is an organisation of symbols experienced as line, colour, value and texture - that allows us to shadow the painter's perception of some part of the experienced world. If the painter is more keenly aware of some aspect of experience, more perceptive than we are, then our awareness is enhanced by studying the painting. A sculptor's ability to find three-dimensional symbols for experience, the writer's ability to find verbal symbols for the 'slice of life' experiences, the musician's ability to find tonal or atonal symbols for experience, all allow us to share the unique understandings of these artists. The more perceptive the artist the more our lives are enhanced by the work. Art makes available for all the perceptions and visions of the most sensitive and creative minds.
The visual arts are often divided into two camps - the representational and the abstract. If the symbols seem to suggest a recognisable object the art is called 'representational'. If the symbols are combinations of line, colour, form, texture and value (also known as the elements of art) but without any recognisable object the art is called 'abstract'. But all art is both abstract and representational. Abstraction and representation are two aspects of producing art. First we abstract from experience its significance and then we represent that significance with appropriate symbols that we may invent. We have now re-learned what primitive peoples have always known - that combinations of line, colour, form, value and texture can symbolise and represent the aesthetic experience of feeling and life. All symbols are abstractions of the reality they represent. All visual, literature musical or architectural - achieves its unity through a dominant theory repeated with variations. The unifying theme may suggest a recognisable object or it may be the particular combination of line colour, form, value and texture.
Innovation
In art, as in all human activity, there are both the incorporators and the innovators. The incorporators produce and reproduce only what has been produced before. They incorporate into their art the existing accomplishments of others. The innovators also incorporate existing accomplishments but in addition they innovate by perceiving differently and creating symbols for their new perceptions. Almost all the useful work is produced by incorporators. The highly skilled professionals who accomplish the complex technical work in our industrial society are incorporators who have learned how to include existing knowledge in their efforts. Everyone has to know how to incorporate the relevant skills of the past into the tasks of the present. Innovators are very few. But this tiny minority creates the new perceptions upon which all real progress depends. Without innovators the growth of culture would cease.
We recognise the innovators who have appeared throughout the course of history. Art museums, for example, collect and exhibit the paintings and sculptures created by those whose innovations have influenced the development of the visual arts. Private collectors who buy paintings and sculpture for a financial investment try to purchase what they hope will increase in value - the work of innovators. Art dealers try to convince collectors that they have innovative art that will increase in value. To promote the illusion of innovation the art media has developed a jargon of confusing expressions known as artspeak' - impressive sounding but essentially meaningless verbalisms - that tries to surround certain art and selected artists with an atmosphere of originality. But only those artists whose work has endured long enough to determine its permanent influence can be safely recognised as true innovators. And by that time the price of their work has escalated far beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest collectors.
Because computers can be programmed to deal effectively with large classes of detail, can produce visual patterns, 'pictures' or mathematical equations and can show the 'other side' of spatial concepts such as architecture and sculpture, it has been assumed that computers might also create innovations in the arts. The term artificial intelligence' has been invented to indicate the amazing feats of computers that are predicted to soon surpass human intelligence in creating now solutions. This requires us to look carefully at what is meant by intelligence. Human intelligence is often confused with such faculties of the mind as memory or the rapid manipulation of mathematical symbols. Now we find that computers can memorise and recall much more and with less error than any human mind. And computers can work through the most complex mathematical equation much faster and with greater accuracy than the best of human minds. This should help us to recognise that such faculties as memory, manipulation of symbols and working out equations is not what is meant by human intelligence. Instead, human intelligence is more accurately defined as the ability to learn - and by learning is meant the ability to change behaviour. Computers cannot change their behaviour. They can only be programmed to do what has already been done in the past. They can repeat the past much more rapid and with greater efficiency than any human mind but they can on repeat the past. Only the human mind - however imperfect and inefficient - can change behaviour, can innovate and create art.
Innovations can occur in any field of human activity but they are not always welcome. Established professionals find security in the identification with well recognised and widely accepted ideas The often feel threatened by innovative ideas and will fight to prove the new ideas 'wrong'. Some fields, such as chemistry and physics welcome innovations more readily than other fields. A few researcher have even been known to falsify reports in the hope of achieving cognition as 'discoverers'. But such deceptions are quickly exposed by other researchers who test and re-test to verify all reports.
Innovations in economics and social organisation are resisted with much more vigour and venom. Innovations in social-economic theory become a threat to the existing power structure and the privileged position of its parasitical beneficiaries in the ruling minority. New social-economic ideas cannot be tested and evaluated - as can; hypothesis in physics - because no ruling elite can allow any alteration of its power and control. New social-economic ideas are condemned to a media blackout and are ignored by respectable professors and intellectuals. A society with beneficiaries at the top making the rule for the exploited mass of workers at the bottom depends upon everyone continuing to see that static societal structure unchangeable, immutable, eternal and even as God given. If the exploited working people should ever see the social-economic system as capable of change they might try to change it. If the workers - the useful producers of all wealth - should ever begin to suspect that existing property arrangement to be the means of their exploitation they might start seeking a different system of ownership and control of resources.
Totalitarian rulers recognise the power of art. Their government are particularly fearful of innovative art and take extreme measures to control all art. Plato would have banned all poets and creative artists from his ideal totalitarian state. The Nazis under Hitler and the Bolsheviks under Stalin established strict limits for all art. Writers, musicians, painters and sculptors were required to keep their work within narrow boundaries set up by the state. Only those themes and images that reinforced the power structure were allowed. Severe penalties were inflicted on any transgressors The art produced under these controls may have had high technical qualities but was all of uniform monotony devoid of any creative individuality.
Ancient totalitarian regimes also limited art to narrow and static forms. The stiff and formally rigid figures in the ancient Egyptian sculptures, relief carvings and paintings suggest the stiff and formal rigid social system with its class structured hierarchy of priests, nobles and pharaoh. Apparently the Egyptian rulers enforced strict rules for all art.
When the Athenian Greeks built the Parthenon they had developed a figure art radically different from that of ancient Egypt. The figure sculptures from the pediment of the Parthenon and the relief carvings of the metopes (the 'Elgin Marbles' now in the British Museum in London) express a flowing grace of human form that breathes life into the marble. The nude male and draped female sculptures all reveal the lithe and lissom grace inherent in the human form. Even the horse's head is one of the most elegant animal sculptures ever carved in stone. Athenian society at that time was far from a completely libertarian and egalitarian system but it did support many free an libertarian views among its citizens. And the Athenian figure a embodies and symbolises those libertarian values. Their neighbours in Sparta, dominated by a rigid military hierarchy, produced no art to compare with that of Athens.
The prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux and the other art of that time give us examples of art produced without the influence of government or any hierarchic social structure. We cannot know what social organisation these prehistoric people of the Upper Palaeolithic period may have had. There is no written record. But we know the technology was limited to simple hand tools of stone, wood or bone They had no agriculture. They obtained their food by hunting an foraging. Such primitive food collecting methods required a high degree of cooperation. With such limited technology, each individual. could contribute to the collective effort only enough to sustain one individual. When each individual must contribute to the collective food supply there is no opportunity for a parasitic ruling class to appear. When even the shaman has to help bring in the food the can be no parasitic priesthood laying down rules for others to follow.
Those who were fortunate enough to have visited the caves Lascaux before they were closed to the public could only have be impressed by the vigorous vitality of the paintings. The recently discovered caves of Grotto Chauvet (1994) reveal more prehistoric paintings and engravings as vigorous and as aesthetically sensitive as those of Lascaux. As examples of animal figure art filled with like vitality and vigorous movement and rendered with a delicate aesthetic sensitivity these paintings have never been surpassed.
Since our own advertising art uses pictorial figures to promote sales - successful money hunting - it is easy for us to assume that these animals were painted on the cave walls only to be stabbed with arrows in order to promote magical hunting success. Perhaps we can not abandon our own mythological fantasies and begin to see this art of the prehistoric people as symbols that gave meaning to their raw experience, symbols that embodied the vigorous freedom and vitality the people who made them must have known.
Innovative society
If innovative ideas can lead us to create a liberated social-economic system, what would be the structure of that social system? There is no specific and definitive answer and no blueprint. What we know about the liberated society is mostly what it would not be. The new society would not have a class structure with property and resources controlled by the ruling minority. It would not have a political government. It would not have a state. Institutions such as the military would not exist. We can safely assume that any free society would rely upon mutual aid to get the necessary work done but exactly how the mutual aid would be accomplished we cannot know until people resolve to put it into practice. We can review previous forms of mutual aid such as the collectives that developed during the Spanish Revolution, the organisation of the Kronstadt rebellion again bolshevism and the Makhnovist Movement of the Ukraine. The historical antecedents can give us many important insights and valuable encouragement. But the particular form of any new institution must await the building of that free and liberated society.
We should be cautious and even suspicious of any blueprint detailed pattern that tries to outline the form and structure of the new society however logical and sensible it may seem. History likes to repeat itself and these blueprints for the future are little more than well disguised repetitions of the past with many of the errors of the existing social system concealed within. Even their authors an advocates are unaware of the unacknowledged mistakes of the past their blueprints contain. The Russian-Bolshevik experience reminds us of how Lenin's blueprint for the new society was actually no more than a repetition of the totalitarian past with all of the old Tsar's brutal bureaucratic bestiality brought back to life with new names and new faces.
The building of the truly free society is a creative act and that means a creative society. A free and liberated people will regard their society itself as the medium of a creative art just as paint is considered a medium of the painter's art, and stone one of the mediums of the sculptor's art. As any artist must study the art medium to better understand its potentials and possibilities, so a free and liberated people must study their society to understand its potentials and possibilities. As any creative artist must be willing to try out and test new ideas and methods so a free and liberated people must be willing to try out new social and economic ideas and methods. They experiment and evaluate with the medium of their art - the society itself. Unlike contemporary society where innovative social and economic ideas are ignored and censored a free and creative society will welcome innovative ideas to test and evaluate.
When a creative musician begins work on a new composition it is not possible to know in advance the specific and detailed form the music will take. When a painter or a sculptor begins a new work there is no possibility of knowing in advance what colours and forms it will assume. When a creative people begin to create a free and liberated society there is no way of knowing in advance what specific form the society will take. Like any creative art the creative society can only unfold and develop and find its own form through the efforts of the creative people themselves.
No creative literature, music, painting or sculpture is identical to another creation even when made by the same artist. One creative work of art may resemble another work but is never a copy of the other work. One creative society may resemble another society - may have many aspects in common with other creative societies - but will not be a copy of any other society. In a free and liberated world there will be many different societies each with a different particular structure and each trying out and evaluating different and innovative social ideas. And each society will share its insights and new understandings with other societies as any creative art has an influence on other artists.
Creative art - like evolution - leads to ever more variety and complexity.
The practice of creating art brings out the potentials of the individual who creates the art. Art is the means through which each of us can develop and realise the most of our potential abilities. Not only does the creative society develop the potentials of that society but only the creative society will it be possible for each of us to find and real our full potentials as human beings.
© Lynn Olsen The Raven 33 pp1-9
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