Should art be purely functional in times of crisis
They say things have a way of revealing themselves when they’re needed most. Whether god to the bereaved, or the mysteriously appointed answer to a scientist’s prayers, these moments of clarity - companions in a crisis - always make their way into our consciousness just at that darkest moment, right before our personal dawning. This week a book has been just that, holding my hand through the interrogation of both my own purpose and that of the wider community of artists and creatives in the wake of the continued madness that plagues our Anthropocenic era. Omar El Akkad’s, “One day, everyone will have always been against this,” might tell the story of what it means to live in the west today as an immigrant, but as I continue living in a world that’s moving further from the flawed place I at least understood, I’ve found solace in superimposing the sentiment onto my current experience. I’ve always been an outlier, but this version of that feeling is new. On the outside, but somehow still in the majority - perhaps this feeling is something you feel too?
I’ve been thinking about the question that titles this post for a while now. Should art be purely functional in times of crisis?
What is the point of Picasso when children’s limbs are being blown off. It’s been ninety years since Picasso painted Guernica, the painting many believe to be the most influential piece of anti-war art ever made. You could argue that the abstraction of the human forms being pulled from mass graves in Gaza, or the abstraction of our humanity, is one and the same thing. Our humanity - or lack thereof - posted and reposted on social media as both a destructive attempt at undermining a people, and a constructive attempt at acknowledging and standing up against wrong. Picasso for the internet age. Without cohesion in the wider artistic community’s approach to the biggest of issues, we’ll continue to get occasional abnormal provocations, talking points, a few words on a podcast before normal service is resumed, but it’s not enough. What we don’t need is post rationality in moments like this. What we don’t need is outliers. What we need is urgency, and organised protest. No chin stroking what ifs, but blind rage turned into the very fuel that examines the prison’s architecture for its weak point - that’s ALL that will do. Silence is tantamount to guilt, especially if you have the means with which to reach people.
So should we turn our collective artistic gaze towards the radical, genuinely life threatening when it appears in front of us, and how would we do it?
During world war 2, manufacturing pivoted dramatically to churn out the necessary technologies to prosecute the fighting. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic parts of manufacturing pivoted to provide the key elements required by healthcare in order to keep us alive. Even Formula 1 teams joined in, sidelined by the ban on large events and international travel, they starting making respirators, open source-ing the design for the good of all. Skill and expertise trained on a problem. In an age of such dramatic uncertainty, when the climate science clearly demonstrates our direction of travel, should the arts aim their focus squarely towards conversations around the climate emergency and the necessary just transition allowing people from all walks of life to be able to survive and continue to inhabit the world they were born into, or do we still need to be entertained / provoked in other ways. Is there any point in any other debates when that existential threat looms large over us all. And what of genocide. Isn’t a world in which genocide is permitted enough to ponder whether we require to see new self portraiture lauded at the Tate or A N other cultural bastion, whether we need the next Netflix murder documentary or a rehash of Shakespeare on MUBI, whether we need - dare I say it - Taylor Swift or sanitised rock and roll? Is entertaining an excusable endeavour in the face of probable extinction, or should all of our creativity be weaponised for both our humanity and the future of the planet.
Perhaps there’s a very real argument to be made that the self, singular reflections of many artists are in fact an important part of the discourse. Maybe there’s even an argument to be made that entertainment and art should be decoupled and treated as separate entities, offered distinctly different judgement terms - well people still need to be entertained, to switch off from reality, don’t they? Honestly, maybe they don’t. Maybe we tell ourselves that in order to justify our negation. At the very least, we should try the opposite - the current model doesn’t appear to be working. Should we watch the city burn through the very tech that contributes to the burning, while pretending we need it - life is hard enough - or should there be a real moment when we as consumers admit in tandem with we, the arts, that the objects of our attention should be the only, increasingly likely, reality that we cannot escape from with any number of Kardashians or Little Mermaids or Premier League games - we are in an end game crisis. We need to engage and start to build those respirators, to scale up the empathetic version of World War 2’s military industrial expansion. We need the reemergence of the ration books to force us to accept the unacceptable - that we have seen things to their logical end and there is no easy way to make the change that doesn’t come with some very real sacrifice.
So how do the arts tackle this when they have become an abstraction of themselves.
Capital has wound its way so tightly round the brushes, strings and theatres of creation that we thank it for destroying our way of life. We are so in bed with power that it’s hard to imagine another way. Our venues are sponsored by fossil fuel behemoths, our awards by banking services, our places of education hold shares in companies that deal in the apparatus with which to violently control that education that we wish to receive. I speak as an artist whose collective pages post thank you messages to Spotify for playlisting our music. There needs to be real systemic change across all sectors.
A couple of months back I saw a terrifying play at Soho Place theatre in London. Kyoto, the story of the road to the Cop 3 climate conference and the struggle to get the world’s nations to collectively agree that climate change was actually real, was both great art as entertainment and thinly veiled activism. It’s possible to be both. I’ve heard two mentions of this show in popular media since. I’ve listened to multiple hours on Brutalism and the American dream, on papacy and the church, on Oligarchs and gender equality and sex crimes and the future of the Middle East, on manufacturing and tariffs and pensions, but if we don’t combat the big picture then none of this matters. It’s not to say that I don’t fully agree with the idea of debating all of the intricacies of the complex era we live in, of course I do, and I’d argue to the death for the unrepresented, but let’s take the music industry - which I’ve been active in for my whole life. I can’t think of a single song that has referenced the climate crisis in any meaningful way, at least one that’s gathered any momentum, during that whole time. A whole industry, switched off to the real possibility of climate breakdown - proven by its output. Sure, there is debate and people pledge their support and are vocal about the genuine danger, but has anyone made art about it? It’s a side quest, decoupled from our reality of keeping a roof over our heads. Ok, it’s a lot to get our heads around - it’s not as simple as a love song to put into words - but we need to start trying. And what about war, famine, forced immigration - the songs don’t exist en masse. What used to be a medium for the sharing of collective multi-lifetime lessons is now pretty much exclusively commerce.
Plenty of artists continue to engage with these questions, it’s just that it doesn’t draw the attention of the masses as regularly as other topics do. We don’t want to know. Maybe we can’t process it easily, or it’s too scary, or it’s just too hard to imagine changing our lives to help. What if we couldn’t fly to go on holiday, or worst still watch TV, or get unneeded items delivered to our doors tomorrow morning, or speak because someone might think we’re being antisemitic. The irony of course is that without confronting both our own mortality and that of every other living organism on our planet, there’ll be nothing left to switch off to or swipe past. Maybe that’s why the arts should be weaponised more formally. We, the dedicated task force that unites all creativity have decreed that for the next X months we will only deal with the collective bigger picture. Arts councils must only provide funding to those doing the real work of interrogating the tipping points, of reimagining the future. There will be no new films to stream that don’t square up to these societal failings, no photographs that don’t encourage thought on our futures, no music that talks of petty personal injustices or the break up of personal relationships as if the world had stopped spinning. No new novels about small introverted issues, no theatre runs for worn out stories that deal with the rise and fall of a main protagonist. What we would be talking about is of such greater importance that the collective effort and the resulting flooding of the cultural space would force interaction and engagement and make the case for change so well so that after the designated time there’d be no going back as we realised the error in our selfish ways and couldn’t bear to engage with them any longer. That in the face of what we managed to achieve the self fades into insignificance. Or perhaps the revolution in thinking would negate the requirement for personal emotional interrogation at all, as we transcend the self both altogether, and all together. More probably, collective action, engagement and success on one issue might bring us closer together on so many of the other issues that we’ve been discussing with our art, that they might need discussed less. Perhaps an appreciation of each other and the development of networks that cross race and class and borders might actually make the things we rally against seem insignificant. Not insignificant to those whose lives it affects, but insignificant to those whose lives it never affected in the first place. Who needs to shout fire if there’s no flames, or rather, who needs to put out the flames if there’s nothing around to catch fire. The only thing that was burning was the prejudices on the peripheries. If our collective fires can burn beautifully and without issue, it might even be art in and of itself - the interrogation age being over, completed. The new age being true beauty.
Perhaps the art-facism of forced engagement in the participation in, and or creation of work that tries in true art tradition to face off against the powers that enslave us seems dramatic, but is it worth considering in the short term to save all of art? Thousands of years of instrument making, cave painting, looking towards the skies. It might not work, but that’s never been a good excuse not to try.