Art as Story

In an article last week, I described Jungís four orientations for learning, understanding and seeing the world:

• sensual (through the senses),
• emotional (through the heart),
• intellectual (through the mind) and
• instinctual (through the body/genes)

I described artists as those particularly competent at the sensual and emotional orientations, and one of the notable capacities I listed under those of sensual orientation was storytelling. That’s because stories are detailed creations, and require the journalist’s precise and perceptive attention to who, what, when, where, why and how, and ability to capture them in ways that speak to others. Stories are about telling what is (or was) from a particular perspective.

As I thought about that I read this from Zane at Lichenology:

A major new focus of business is on storytelling, and, in the larger sense, adding context and meaning to information, precisely what Zane describes as the role of art as a ‘shared participation in meaning’. The essence of good storytelling is engaging the audience, drawing them in, transporting them, making them participants in the experiencing of the story, so they really understand its meaning. And so it is with art. In a sense, all art is storytelling, helping us to understand in a sensual, emotional, intellectual and visceral/instinctual way what ‘it all’ means. It is a bridge between the four ways of understanding and knowing. Some arts (novels, film) tell stories in a clearly linear way, while others (music, painting, sculpture) tell their stories holistically, non-sequentially.

Why is it then that for most of the last century, there has been a growing dichotomy between ‘popular’ art (the mass media, including popular music, film and novels) and more complex art? We need to know this because if art is to be a vehicle for social change, it must be accessible and engaging to activists, to those who would take personal (Let-Self-Change), political, economic, social, educational, technological and scientific action as a result of the understanding that art brings them.

The reason, I think, is not anti-intellectualism or (as Joe Bageant would have us believe) a dumbing-down of the population to the point complex art cannot be fathomed, but rather that its very complexity makes it inaccessible and ëunpopularí and hence not useful as a vehicle for social change.

As I’ve said before, we loathe complexity ñ it offends us that elegant simplicity is usually an illusion, that everything is beyond our control and understanding, that effective things are inefficient and efficient things are ineffective to the point of dysfunctionality. We don’t want to work that hard. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is no time or inclination for the complex.

The mainstream media with their sound bites and reductio ad absurbum pander to our longing for simplicity, but they do not create that longing. We create the paradox ourselves (with some complicity of politicians and other corporatists) by filling our lives with difficult work (the work of making a living, the work of making love last, and the work of satisfying our needs of the moment). After all that exhausting work, to spend our ‘spare’ time on anything difficult is surely masochistic.

And likewise, too many ‘artists’ donít want to work that hard either, especially when formulaic, unoriginal, amateurish ‘popular’ works can be so profitable, and complex works so unappreciated. The enormous popular success of most rap music, trash fiction, and some really mediocre blogs can only frustrate the true artists, composers, creators, investigative journalists, craftspeople and other hard-working ‘storytellers’ whose work requires an investment of time and energy that few seem inclined to give. We all want attention and appreciation, and few will persevere when the terrible and important truths we show the world are ignored and misunderstood.

So what do we do, when none of us, not even those who appreciate the need to know and to act, has the time and energy to appreciate? To appreciate complex art or complex reality. Itís all just too hard.

For example: Andrew Campbell sent me an image of one of his works (below) as an attempt to articulate the meaning of Now Time.

Many of us try to interpret works of art on a strictly intellectual level, to ‘decipher’ it as if it were a puzzle. But complexity cannot be understood on that narrow level. We have to allow it to be internalized within us in its own way and in its own time, to ‘ferment’. We have to allow it to engage our senses, our emotions and our instincts holistically with our intellect. We have to think ‘about’ it. And in todayís world of instant gratification and attention deficit that is a challenging and unrewarded activity, and one that we are increasingly unpracticed at.

Just as we must bear the responsibility for making this world as bearable a place as possible, a little bit better each day, despite knowing that our civilization is unraveling and that what we have done will be undone (though hopefully remembered by the few brave survivors of this century), we must, too, bear the responsibility for telling our stories despite knowing that few are listening and even fewer understand. This is nothing new.

And so, we brave storytellers, each in our own way, continue to tell our stories as best we can, perhaps much as the cave artists did in the millennia before civilization, as the indigenous peoples did during the millennia of civilizationís hopeful dawn, and as the artists of the renaissances of our civilization did as that civilization churned forwards.

We, artists all — painters, composers of music, sculptors, investigative journalists and many others — represent to the world the portrait of our civilizationís fourth and final turning. We ‘just’ tell its story. Whether its meaning will be understood and provoke needed action is not our business.

Perhaps those who survive civilizationís end, and build a more joyful and sustainable society, will have the time and energy to appreciate what we do. And learn from the self-confessed mistakes that cry out in ourportrayal of our terrible world, and its terrible beauty.