Art, Emotion and Cultural Expression
in Ecoworks
Introduction
This article has been written for the newsletter of Ecoworks - an organisation which tries to combine environmental care with people care. Over the last few years Ecoworks has organised a variety of artistic and performance art and crafts activities in and off its community gardens site integrated with the environmental activities (e.g as a means of recycling scrap materials and enhancing our sites). In the last few months the debate about arts and crafts in Ecoworks has intensified - also in relation to Ecoworks role in seeking to integrate people who have had mental health problems in its activities. Ecoworks does not see itself as being set up to be a directly therapeutic organisation but there are issues to do with emotions and mental health when art is concerned. This article was written to get people thinking about these issues.
The article
I think the discussion about an Ecoworks "voice" or "voices" - and about cultural and artistic expression at the last Management Committee was a useful introduction to some important issues. This is a rag bag of assorted comments to carry this discussion forward.
I hope that we will be able, in Ecoworks, to be open to all sorts of artistic and cultural expression as we exist to encourage creative expression together. But this is not without problems. Because art communicates, whether visual art, drama, performance or music, it may both delight and offend. It may be used for beautifying that which is ugly, tarnished and corrupt, or for satirising the very same corruption; it may match an occasion or completely jar with people's moods, it may exalt the most supreme religious ecstasy but may also for the same reason be reviled by down to earth atheists; it may draw compassionate attention to the plight of forgotten people or be a medium for look-at-me narcissism, thereby embarrassing audiences who do not want to emotionally destroy a poor performer; it can be used to make the suffering of monotonous slave labour just bearable or it can inspire to rebellion; it can powerfully express personal emotional metaphors and be a medium for the intense evocative symbolism of madness or it can be the banality of sugar sweet sentiment on sale in Wilkos; it can be a dog turd encased in plastic (offensive to canines who cannot enjoy a good sniff) or a vase of roses, fresh with drops of early morning dew, glittering in summer sunlight and fragrant to a human nose. The beauty lies in the eyes, ears (and noses) of the beholder.
Therefore I think some ground rules are needed as Ecoworks goes down the route of greater cultural expression. These are:
1. Choice and variety. Great care must be taken to ensure that different "voices" and artistic expression are heard and that Ecoworks is not seen to be specifically, or especially endorsing, any particular artistic or cultural trend. Very often ideological and lifestyle viewpoints come in a package with a particular set of symbols and signs - the eco look this year emphasises "countrylife" with waxed jackets ( where possible, rather ragged) wellington boots should be green and not brown or black; yin yang symbols are out and spirals are in; the current fashionable male-female relationship is the neo-feminist earth mother with attached gentle giant or.....
The point about this is that people looking in on Ecoworks from the outside might very accurately see this not just as a fashion statement but the signs and "identification codes" of an informal social network or "club". We have to be careful we do not put people off who might not have made up their minds about all those things that the "inner circle" believe in. Some people like the security and comfort of joining a "club" but such a club can become a sect, or even worse a cult, when its codes, ceremonies and ideas start to harden the boundaries between the in-crowd and those lesser mortals who are not a party to the mysteries and truths that the inner circle alone understand.
This is why we have to take care that we create space for viewpoints that may be divergent and seek to find ways to minimise the conflict between them. Our goals are to combine people care and environmental care and to do this in practical activities. We must take great care that cultural expression does not frighten people away because they are seen as "the" Ecoworks viewpoint. I'm sorry to say it but I know some people have inn fact been frightened off in the past.
2. It is important too that we do not pressurise people in the matter of their participation. Ecoworks is primarily recreational and re-creational in its approach to activities. Involvement is voluntary and people do as much or as little as they want. I think we want an organisation where people can feel free to try things if they want to, and be gently encouraged if they feel unconfident and insecure about their skills and abilities - but we must avoid pressurising people in a host of contexts and settings. I have awful memories from my schooldays of being obliged to participate in singing and then being denounced as "the growler on the back row". Many people with mental health problems have suffered embarrassment and humiliation of this type and this partly explains their chronic lack of confidence and reluctance to get involved. A very fine line must therefore be trodden which, while encouraging to those who take up options for activities do not pressurise and respect the pace at which they want to go, as well as the amount that they want to try.
3. Thirdly I think its worth thinking some more about the mental health dimensions of art. Ecoworks is not an organisation trying to do therapy but many of us who have been involved have had mental health problems. Many of us do go in for metaphorical thinking and expression rather a lot, particularly when we get emotionally charged up or run down. Art, performance and celebration that takes a ceremony form can rest heavily on emotionaly charged symbolism and metaphor for its aesthetic effect.
So what? you may ask Well I think we need to be aware that we are sometimes trapped in our metaphors as much as liberated by them. To illustrate my point I would like to mention an e mail discussion group that I recently got involved in where someone, frustrated by psychiatry and psychiatrists, referred to developing ideas that "would hole psychiatry below the waterline".
Of course psychiatry is not a ship it is a powerful social institution whose way of understanding distress and personal disorientation are the generally socially accepted ones. A powerful network of interests has built up around that way of thinking which is integrated into the legal system, drug companies, academic and training institutions - not to mention a very large number of "carers". To change the commonly accepted way of thinking about psychiatric problems would require a huge devotion of resources and time to legal changes, retraining, re-organising institutions, and would mean big losses to drug companies, big changes in salaries and status to a very powerful group of professionals. In consequence to imagine that well reasoned argument and well researched studies are going to (metaphor) "hole psychiatry below the waterline" is a fantasy. It is a fantasy which, if it is the basis of one's personal orientation and motivation, if it is something that one is pursuing as a life strategy or a "life game", will be bound to leave one permanently frustrated. Even well researched and powerfully argued critiques of pyschiatry are mostly ignored.
Actually it is the pursuit of futile and permanently frustrating life goals that are subtly held in place by comforting metaphor ways of thinking that can be a source of mental health problems. We can give ourselves comforting romantic and cultural metaphors that may be tied up with our very identity which help us avoid the reality that what we are pursuing might be futile. Such metaphor fantasies help us imagine a heroic role for ourselves overcoming the odds to win through. But when our frustrations are particularly intense then the emotional energy we feel can magnify these metaphors in our minds until they so predominate in our stream of consciousness that we cannot get round to tidying up, doing the washing up, collecting the giro and clearing up the cat shit. The next thing you know we get admitted to a psychiatric ward again.
Of course if we arrive at collectively used metaphors that we find pleasing, that we might intone or gesture together to give expression to our emotions this is a bit different. However the people looking in from the outside have a legitimate reason to think we might be getting cultish. They may also think that its not the ceremony that they believe to be the true one which they perform at their church, mosque, temple, ashram or sweat lodge......
4. A fourth point is that art and performance is about putting people and their works on display and that can be an excuse to indulge in narcissism - where narcissism can actually be a problem in interpersonal relationships. It's worth thinking about how the arts normally work in relation to their audience or viewers. People choose to go to an exhibition at a gallery , a concert or a play, usually on the basis of what they know of the artists or performers. Or they decide to go because of the reputation of the organisation choosing the works on display or being performed. There is an element of choice here and an elements of, for want of better words, "quality control", exercised usually by people hosting or producing an event. Even when one is putting on a gig or a benefit there is an element of choice - people see the poster saying what is on and decide to go or not.
On the other side there are artists and performers who want what they have done noticed, thought about and recognised. It is the stuff of myth that artists whose works of genius are not recognised, because they are before their time, are subjected to a corresponding emotional trauma. In his book "Against Therapy" former therapist Jeffrey Masson, notes that if one reads enough biographies the thing that is common to most of them is that people find the same thing hurtful. This common thing is that they have all, at one time or another, had to endure not being understood and/or being unable to evoke an interest for what they achieved , or created, or what they have said. Of course artists and performers crave an audience and, in the put-down jargon of psychiatry, that craving can be called names by describing it as "attention seeking" or "narcissism".
That said "attention seeking" and "narcissism" are real psychological phenomena. There can be a very fine line between a pathological wish to have oneself noticed and a healthy need to have one's works recognised and used for what they are - so that one has not wasted one's energies in their production and so that one gets something back. How does one tell the difference between the one and the other? Sometimes it is not at all easy - however within the general art world the normal filtering and choosing process will ensure that over the long term it is those that have the talent who get the appreciative audience that they deserve. On the other hand when one feels that one is being either subtly, or not so subtly, maneovred into the role of audience then one may get a grip on issues of working with the narcissistic performer or artist. This is when one feels discomfort at the expectation that one will be appreciative and one feels a pressure not to hurt the feelings of the artist. When one is manoevred or pressured into the role of audience or spectator one may feel embarrassment, indeed hidden resentment far more than aesthetic delight.
This is because, however good the performance or the art, one is firstly reacting to an emotional pressure not to hurt someone's feelings when they are doing their "look at me" turn - more than looking at or listening to the work of art itself. Even before one has heard the work, or seen the masterpiece, one is trying to construct the diplomatic and tactful comments which express how much you are prepared to say nice things at odds with your underlying annoyance. I suppose one can construct psychological models as to why people play the "look at me aren't I wonderful game" but here the more important thing is to draw out the issue of how it effects relationships. If someone bursts into song and it matches the mood of a collective group then there is likely to be appreciation because the artist has responded to "where people are at and where they are coming from". An artist who is sensitive to a group like this is likely to get a collective appreciation because the members of the group feel their mood has been recognised and when one feels recognised one also feels valued. However if someone bursts into song out of context and it isn't really "where people are coming from" then people may feel put out because where they are coming from really isn't being recognised. In a way you could say that the artist or performer is not really noticing their captive audience as they are, only as they want them to be. Indeed the implicit message of the artist may sometimes be that the audience are not good enough as they are - they need uplifting and educating in some aesthetic way. A problem here, however, is that people often do not react kindly to people trying to better them. In order to better people you have to assume you are already their superior in some respect - an assumption that the audience may react against.
What this means in Ecoworks is that we should as far as possible ensure that arts activities and performance events are appropriate to context and audience as well as including an element of choice for audiences. In my view art and performance in Ecoworks needs to be advertised for what it is and events should occur at times specifically set aside for it to allow people to be able to choose to whether to involve themselves or not. In a phrase no captive audiences!
In conclusion this is not a case for abandoning arts and crafts activities. This would be to impoverish Ecoworks. It is a case for saying that Ecoworks as a collective entity should not be seen to be collectively endorsing any particular viewpoint or artistic expression, that it should allow for choices and that the artsts should be open to the promotion of discussion.
Brian Davey
31st January 2000