Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.
—Marshall McLuhan
Should you make art in uncertain times? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to volunteer at the Food Bank?
Art gives you control over something. If the world seems completely mad, create art. Mange the process, align the materials. Leave a half finished project in a place where it won’t be disturbed. So it is there for you always, just how you left it. Art can and will become an oasis of emotional and mental calm. The calm you create with art applies to big chaos and small.
This is not selfish. As much as art helps us personally, what we create and even our process of creation, contributes to the stability of our community. After a disaster, artists are the second responders. We make meaning from the immediate past, fire, earthquake, politics, war, we help our community to process what just happened and find ways to cope.
We cannot chose how the art will be received, but we can choose to be a helpful voice.
We understand that art therapy can help with emotional breakthroughs as well as help process trauma. But it also can be larger than that, reach farther.
About the time of the Paradise fire in Northern California, the Fire Service contacted the local Arts Council. How can they get the message out to the public that one of the best ways to prevent wild fires was through – fire?
The forest service needed to promote the use of controlled burns, a successful indigenous method of managing the forests. But they were not gaining traction. Smokey the Bear was a hard act to follow. To help them, the Forest Service turned to art. And it worked. An Art installation, Forest= Fire helped change minds and explain the need for controlled burns to get ahead of wildfires. But, while we learned that controlled fires were actually helping prevent massive disasters, Cal Fire still needed to post signs begging drivers not to call 911, the smoke they see is intentional. Californians are very twitchy about smoke.
Two outcomes of turning to art after a disaster: you engage in community, and you heal yourself.
How many of us emerged from the pandemic with different habits, ideas and even relationships? If you are reading this, found a way to re-enter. Many of us created what we call Covid projects. Amy Tan turned her Covid bird watching and sketching into a lovely meditation, the Back Yard Bird Chronicles. Lin Manuel offered up the film version of Hamilton to play for free on July 4, 2020 as a way of uniting us and giving us all a brief reprieve. I (ahem, finally) read James Joyce’s Ulysses and created a poetry collection based on the work.
Creating art is an important process for the individual and an often critical product for the public. When we need help, or comfort, or an answer, we turn to art. This is our job.
The job can be lauded or thankless, which depends on talent to be sure, but also timing.
At the start of the Great War, artists, poets like Wilfred Owen began composing poems about the glory of war but ended with the “pity.” You can change your mind, or you can amplify your initial doubts. While Owen wrote new work – before he was killed in the trenches, the Dada artists followed up armistice by creating nonsense art. Because what was the point of it all? You could say Dada was a large scale Spanish Flu project.
Duchamp turned a urinal on its side and called it a fountain. Hannah Hoch created disturbing collages. Max Ernst painted human figures fused with machines. The Dada’s produced plays that made no sense and closed after a single performance. But that was the only possible response to a war that was a meaningless, destructive flex.
In Maui’s upcountry, an art gallery is filled with paintings and sculptures by artists displaced by and responding to the 2023 Lahania fire. My friend, who had worked in the now destroyed art co-op housed under the banyon tree in downtown Lahaina walked through this new gallery exclaiming over and over – “Oh that is XXX, I’m so glad she’s here (meaning her work). There is YYY I’m happy he is still painting.” The exhibit was a direct response to the disaster, expressing loss, and sorrow. It was difficult to hold back the tears.
Yet there was hope. A photographer took drone shots capturing a Paddle Out, hundreds of surfboards and kayaks majestically moving out to sea, expressing community, solidarity and continued connection to the earth. Like a dance.
The manifesto of the Blue Rider group expresses this well (a partial list):
•The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
•The more frightening the world becomes … the more art becomes abstract.
•Painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in and from the struggle with one another, a new world which is the work of art.
•Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.
We use art to process what just happened. We make art to heal. As friend commented about Wayne Theibaud’s vertiginous hills and streets. “It’s not really like that, but it feels like it.”
It feels like it. Do you remember lines of poems, a stanza of music (music is especially powerful to evoke memories). A scent? It is a comfort or a trigger? That is the power of memory, but also the power of art to evoke memory. You can be part of that power. Maybe this is the moment you transform what you thought was just a hobby into a full blown art piece. Maybe this is the time you risk expressing your grief out loud which invites others to honor their grief and loss.
Are you feeling crazy and unglued? As you assemble the pieces of a collage, you can re- assemble the broken pieces of your heart.