Something always sings
(This is a speech I gave at the recent opening of the Atheneum in PE – if you find yourself in the area, go take a look it is genuinely inspiring. And if you’re not in the area, get into the area and then do the same….)
Thank you first of all for inviting me to speak tonight. This is a beautiful space not just in itself, but for what it represents, what it means for the people of the city and, most importantly, what it says about the value we place on creative spaces.
I’m told – by those who wield a palette and paintbrush in a manner more effective than me – that artists view the world as their inspiration, and that what we see on the canvasses they create, in the sculptures they chisel and in the words they write, is an attempt to capture a notion, a thought, a philosophy, a dream, a nightmare, an argument, a suggestion or provocative statement. An artist’s work is always just a single piece of the puzzle they create in their lifetime, the argument they have with the world around them, the visual representation of a moment in their minds. All of this seems to suggest to me that Oscar Wilde was right when he said “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Or, as Tom Stoppard wrote in Travesties, “To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war.” So it’s a source of fascination to me to watch what is happening in the art world in Port Elizabeth… this healthy spirit of collaboration and co-operation by your artists, this almost counter-intuitive coming together for the purposes of creating alone. You’re finding strength in numbers. Or put another way, you’re finding safety and comfort in numbers and in community. On the one hand it’s encouraging. On the other, the reasons behind the notion that artists in South Africa today need to find comfort, is chilling.
The arts are under threat. We know this. And the threat isn’t obvious – it’s not blatant, out and out censorship, arrests, muzzling and the clumsy, sometimes violent attempts at forcing a party line from every pen and paintbrush. History has recorded that in totalitarian states in the past, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Today’s threat is in many ways more insidious. It’s the threat of neglect. Of disregard. Sometimes even disdain. The threat comes from the absence of regard for the arts we see in our society. It comes from the fact that children can leave school without ever having touched a musical instrument, written a poem and read it aloud on a stage, without having experienced the exhilaration of a live performance. And I’m not talking about Shakespeare, Mozart or Rembrandt. Of course I include them, but I talk also of the words of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and JM Coetzee, the choreography of Keita Fodeba, the music of Cesaria Evora, Sibongile Khumalo and Miriam Makeba, the art of Sokari Douglas Camp and William Kentridge.
Art Galleries are left to crumble or get by on the bare minimum, libraries can’t keep their doors open, and public spaces for art appreciation, practice and immersion in the arts are few and far between and, inevitably, driven by the passion of a few individuals and the cash of a few benefactors. Increasingly, and perhaps logically, the arts are taking a back seat in our society. So Arts Education – that is both education about art and education through art, for children and for adults – remains a distant dream.
Yes, we have other important things to do with the public purse. We have houses to build, schools and hospitals to create out of thin air, jobs to create and the elderly and vulnerable to protect and care for. Those are important. But so too is something else: social cohesion.
South Africa, as we keep hearing, is in desperate need of this “social cohesion”. It’s a phrase that sadly exists mostly on the pages of politician’s speeches and is seldom seen in the way we prioritise the arts. Because social cohesion is a nice phrase that essentially means we need to learn to find each other again. We need to pull ourselves together as a society and discover our humanity again after decades in which that humanity was trampled upon and left both the trampled and the trampler poorer and weaker. But the truth is this. We’re not going to find ourselves on the battlefields of the rugby or football fields; nor will we across a boardroom table, in the corridors of parliament or as we drive past each other in rush hour. We’ll find ourselves only through the arts. We’ll find each other through song, uplifting words well spoken, dance, music, celebration, mutual appreciation of beauty.
But we live in a society where this is spoken about but never acted upon. Consider this quote: “The artist does not create for the artist: He creates for the people and we will see to it that henceforth the people will be called in to judge its art”.
Those words resonate with us all because they represent a chilling arrogance on the part of the speaker that feels familiar to us. There’s a threat implied in those words (“we will see to it”); and an implication that the arts and free expression somehow need to serve an unseen master. No-one here would be surprised if I told you they were the words of certain political leaders we’ve had in our distant past, or even perhaps some from more recent times who may or may not have controlled the purse strings of the arts. But they didn’t. They were words spoken decades ago by Adolf Hitler. The sad thing is, they feel as if they could have been said in this country.
The threat is marching toward us and its path is being cleared by neglect, disdain and disregard. As a result some of our languages will fade away; the nuances of our many rich cultures will begin drifting backward into the dust kicked up by McDonalds, the iPhone, MTV, and Idols. And the less a country realizes that, the more it falls to the artist to shout it from the rooftops. And if the rooftops don’t exist for shouting, then the artists need to take it upon themselves to build the rooftops, and then to begin shouting. And that’s what you’ve done here. Fortunately, today in South Africa, we have an Arts Minister who is more likely to be listening than many we’ve had in the past. So maybe your shouting will not be in vain.
The threat comes from another direction, though, even less in our control. As the global economy flounders and recession bites, big corporates have less and less available to spend on perceived luxuries like the arts. Wallets are slammed shut, budgets are cut and big business is thinking like small business again. But it’s depressing only if you focus on the here and now. How will we perceive this era in 50, 60, 70 years’ time? Let’s learn and take comfort from what has come before.
In the 1930s America was in the grips of the Great Depression. But it was in that decade that the jazz standard Summertime was written; that Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller came to the fore, and we saw the birth of swing. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hit their stride; and buildings like the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center were completed. Andrew Mellon gave his $25 million dollar art collection to the American people and contributed $10 million to the construction of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The world saw great works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck. And in case you thought everyone was wandering about feeling sorry for themselves, remember that the 1930s gave us Dr Seuss and Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people. I mention this all for one reason only – to demonstrate what I think we all know: that artists, architects, musicians and writers will always find a way to make their voice heard. No matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how hopeless it all seems. History has proven to us that the arts can survive in the absence of a strong economy; but an economy can be stimulated and can flourish through artistic endeavour.
As I look at this wonderful space tonight, I’m reminded that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “In the mud and scum of things / There always, always something sings.” And the opening of this building is a reminder to all of us that the arts will always prevail; and that the arts will always have a home in the hearts and cities of civilized nations. I applaud those of you who have made this happen. Who have kicked down the doors of bureaucracy, had sleepless nights, gone out cap in hand to bring this vision to life. The work you have done is important. What you have created is immense. And you’ve made sure that, somewhere in the heart of Port Elizabeth, something will always sing.”
Short URL: http://www.tonylankester.com/?p=667
Posted by tony
on Jul 29 2011. Filed under General Thoughts.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
