Four Texts on Contemporary Society, Modernism and Art, Ethics, and the Artist's Theme.
By Reinhardt Sobye
On Contemporary Society
It is extraordinary (and frightening) how our civilization pushes away all response ability for its own future. I am concerned with the development of understanding and the choice of values. our existence is replete with paradox, and one of the most pressing these days is that the more we aim to secure and control our lives (in everything from medical developments to breeding fish as pets), the more unsure and uncontrollable our existence becomes.
It is characteristic of today's world that examples of the biggest selling products are weapons, drugs, pornography, and, gradually, the more-or-less illegal trade in industrial waste. And the butchering of poor children from the Third World for the sale of their internal organs on the Western donor market is no longer a hideous isolated incident, but a growth industry. Although the list is long we have grown accustomed to it. There is obviously a connection between our thoughts, our values, our actions, and those problems which "the system" as a whole creates. That is why (I think) it is of great importance to appeal to that which has been trapped and silenced in people on the altar of acceptance.
Many of Man's most cherished myths are tales about martyrs who, given the choice between a terrible death and further survival (with the consequent loss of their convictions, beliefs and self respect) chose death. Deep down (I believe) we all know something about eternity (God), and that life is a tale about the longing for holism.
But the credo of this civilization is raw power and the mirror we should use to see ourselves has been shattered. The prevailing feeling of insecurity and fear is the feeling of falling.
On Modernism and Art
Along with Modernism a new perspective of art came into being the words that interpreted what was on the wall became more important than the actual picture. The word, the text, the intellectualization flourished and became not only an intermediary of art, but its own self -acknowledgment.
A picture on the wall lost its own "voice" and had to be preserved and "ventriloquized" by just any casual theorist.
Art in itself was degraded to the ladder on which the text climbed finally to shout from the top its "interpretation" to the world. It was only a question of time before art's lack of faith in itself led to a tremendous output of works beneath all contempt (as art) but which could still carry out their task in relation to the new Zeitgeist as a weak alibi for the non-artist's occupation of the Art.
I am an artist by virtue of my pictures' skillful, artistic, and expressive qualities (especially the latter). My pictures "work", They only need the light from a lamp. Art is a language, it is an opportunity to manifest its typical common country with other people.
Art suspends time when the picture, in a thousand different simultaneous ways, crushes the mental walls of the observer. The picture, like what is expressed between the lines in a good poem, raises an invisible total world which the observer enters and ... recognizes.
All true art is created on behalf of those who see. It is the joint property of humans. An artist is a witness, a servant, a magician...
English coal miners always took a small caged bird into the deep mines; if there was insufficient air the bird fainted and thus warned the miners of the impending danger. Artists have always been such "birds of warning".
On Ethics
Ethics can be understood by looking at how the Earth's water continually circulates through creation. It flows through animals, people, plants ... it is drunk, excreted, and leaks from the wounds of prey ... it trickles through soil and earth, hurries along in streams, rivers and floods ... in mighty ocean currents, evaporates. turns into clouds, thunders several hundred kilometres in a day ... in an everlasting, uninterrupted cycle, where every small detail, in one way or another, can be diverted by others.
In short-everything is linked. There are no insurmountable limits to the circulation of water.
But the following is how we, humans, perceive the world we live in;-that there are seemingly no (or only tiny. negligible) links between what we do today and what happens somewhere else in the world in four years' time. - which is why we are shocked that the level of toxins in the Arctic fauna is dangerously high.
- which is why we get indignant at getting radioactive waste from Chernobyl in our heads (and we are going to be indignant when the North of Norway has to be evacuated because we prefer to use 10 billion kroner on a ludicrous Winter Olympics (escapism) rather than renovating the nuclear power station on the kola peninsula which is why we think it is all right for us to have a fridge and a car but warn strongly against every Chinese having the same (as it will destroy the ozone layers and God knows what else for us).
which is why we think it's quite all right to pump as much oil as possible from the North Sea, but get thoroughly angry at the acid rain which destroys our forests (not to mention the disgust we collectively felt when Iraqi soldiers sabotaged hundreds of 'I wells in Kuwait and the whole region was plunged into darkness by thick , suffocating smoke)- which is why the affluent amongst us are indignant and exasperated at the blind violence in the cities, the presence of drop-outs, at clinging beggars, at the escalation of economic crimes, at the Russian Mafia... And they build their safety in the form of electric fences, advanced surveillance systems, security firms, ghettos for the rich, ghettos for the poor. Aren't things interlinked ? Is it possible not to act against insufferable memories of war crimes, murders and rapes, against degradation... There is always a victim ... and the victims are the ethical memory of our existence... It always happens again. The next time it is a car bomb, or a person who no longer greets you. The world today has a motto: "Crime pays.The bigger the crime, the more certain you are of escaping punishment. If only the crime is big enough you will be ennobled, rich, recognized. honoured ... etc."
This is why ethical values have to be raised to the level of the absolute which only a religious justification can provide:
If we as human beings do not try to act in relation to absolute values and religious imperatives ... a gradual backsliding and relativizing. and the thousand current excuses which permits all debates today (whether it's about C02 emission, the pace of oil extraction, etc.) takes over and legitimizes the Fall.
Theme
I have always been concerned with Man's paradoxical and tragic existence: suffering, fear of death, longing for God, wisdom, sacrifice...
The meaning of life is obviously not to survive. The daily values of the western industrialized world are absurd, hideous and brutalizing.
I am concerned with the marginalized, the ostracized, the debased, the poor, the sick. the despairing. Not because I am a hopelessly sentimental romantic but because I see that the human being in us comes to the fore when the everyday control slips (youth, physical strength, health, Visa card, airbag, well-kept garden, and a watertight roof), and eternity is no longer a place where Father Christmas lives, or a current affairs program on television, but your entrance to the waiting room, the countdown to death.
I hope there is a God (I hope that Jesus was Christ, but I don't believe it) and that this life is just a stage set for a religious play that really is about to prove (in word, thought and action-particularly the latter) that you are a real Human Being.
"What does it benefit Man to win the whole world if he loses his soul ?"