A R T V S S E L F D E S T R U C T I O N O F H U M A N I T Y
A R T V S S E L F
D E S T R U C T I O N
O F H U M A N I T Y
BY ELISABETH HINKEL
Well, it is a strange period of time we are finding ourselves in. While the physical “outside” life seems to be halted to almost a complete standstill with only the most necessary gears of our society carefully turning, the virtual global world is being used to its capacity and stocked up with bandwidth to allow a satisfying virtual connection experience. Everyone and everything speaks of the COVID-19 pandemic. A negative mirror juxtaposing empty streets with an overflow of social media traffic. Covering our faces with masks and our hands with gloves, we ungird our inner life online: with an awful lot of jokes and memes ironically reflecting what is most disrupting to our souls; with challenges and hashtag chains trying to help, connect and endure; with a retreat to spirituality and calls to action.
We at Improper Walls (and I as myself) are doing the same, focusing on the feeling that it is not social distancing but physical distancing that needs to be practiced. We are navigating through an unknown situation with tools that are stuck in old patterns, longing to connect through words, images or video. It is also a self occupation, a shift from the delayed or canceled events that would have happened pre-Coronavirus to a creative approach towards the possible.
I polemically headlined this essay as if art and humanity are opposed to each other, as if humans seek to destroy themselves and by themselves it is suggested by rendering their natural habitat inhabitable. Forget all these claims for now. We live in a complex system inextricable to any of us. Humanity is in a double bind situation - whatever solution is chosen, it will have a negative impact.
What has art to do with any of it? Looking back to prehistoric cave drawings we will not learn much about this question, except that it is a topic as old as the hand shaped prints found in caves all over Europe and across the oceans. Men, women and children have pressed their hands up against the walls and sprayed a paint made of water and pigments on it, creating a negative print of their presence. Does art or do artists contribute something that science can’t and what is it?
On the empty earth, these hands will remain, on the granite wall, facing the ocean’s roar.
Unbearable
No one will hear anymore
See anymore [...]
I will love whoever will hear that I cry out that I love you.
Marguerite Duras impersonates the perspective of the prehistoric creator in her 16 minutes long film “Les Mains Négatives” from 1979. This perspective is condensed into a poem about the desire of the isolated individual to find connection, while the film visually only shows long shots of the early morning streets of Paris, with few people starting their working day. The words and film add holistic layers to the reality of scientific research which has very limited theories about the origins and reasons of the hand prints.
Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, cyberneticist, biologist, philosopher and sociologist) says: yes, art can (artists can) contribute something unique. “Conscious Purpose versus Nature” is the title of an 1968 published essay which confronts the going ons in this world, from politics to environmental disasters, from drug use to evolution to the bible. In it he describes the conscious mind that is guided and in its perception limited by purpose: If I want the apple, I use a box so I can reach it. If an insect is eating my crop, I will find a poison to defeat the insect and protect the crop. But this intervention has become so intrinsic to the system that the knowledge about consequences of actions fall out of our reach. Bateson suggests that the only solution to this problem is to acknowledge that the problem is systemic.
And exactly there it is, the ability to see oneself as not opposed to the other but as part of the world. In Batesons words: “But in the making he [the artist] must necessarily relax that arrogance [to stand outside the system] in favor of a creative experience in which his conscious mind plays only a small part.” The artist/poet/musician/novelist creates something that is not only an instrumentalized aesthetic for purpose but can describe something else, something that lies outside of pure conscious purpose and has a glimpse into the system they operate in.
Above him the forests of Europe
without end
He stands amidst the rock
corridors
paths of stone
everywhere
You, who have a name, who have been given an identity, I love you with an indefinite love
Sources:
Gregory Bateson, Conscious Purpose versus Nature. In: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York 1972.
Marguerite Duras, Les Mains Négatives, F 1979.