To be honest, I returned from Cozumel overwhelmed by the knowledge that my beloved ocean is being clogged and polluted by plastics. This swamped me emotionally and I couldn’t create the installation that I originally envisioned.
Wondering if my frozen state was typical of the paralysis that keeps most of us from facing the enormity of our environmental problems, it dawned on me that bonking my patrons over the head with visuals had the potential of freezing everyone else just as surely as it was freezing me.
So I changed tacks. On the surface it appears that the new work that I will be showing at the Open Studio Tour on April 24-25, 2009 isn’t related to my original intention. But it is. Let me explain.
I have been reading and re-reading
The Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik for the past 6 months. The thesis of this wonderful book is that modernism has failed us, co-opted by the same corporate culture of consumerism that modernism originally opposed.
For contemporary artists who are disillusioned with the current state of affairs in our consumer culture, the author proposes that there are 2 distinctly separate options. Confusingly, BOTH are called post-modern yet they are distinctly different. Gablik suggests that this is a dialectic that cries out for synthesis.
On the one hand, many post-modernist artists deconstruct consumer culture to show what’s wrong. Or cynically co-opt it by intentionally creating sofa art. Both approaches attempt to stand apart from consumer culture to illuminate or deconstruct what’s wrong. That’s where I was going with my plastic trash art.
On the other hand, there is potential to love people into changing their behavior by creating an “enlarged ecological perspective, and greater access to the mythic and archetypal underpinnings of spiritual renewal”. This resonated with me as I immediately recognized that this is what I do when I get into a funk: I pull myself out by reconnecting with the archetypes of the natural world.
In my experience, being deeply rooted and connected to creation via the natural world changes the way I see myself as a co-creator of the future. Which changes my behavior.
So perhaps I can help others see what I see and move consumer consciousness forward by “reenchanting” my own art.
This has turned into a delicious adventure.
