ARtThink. May, 2023
Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.
(Carl Jung)
Interactionist ideas address people as individuals with their own functional powers. In art, art and artist are no longer something to be contained. They express themselves as individuals, paying little attention to the rules. Individuals, creating art with an interactionists brush are free to see themselves and their art as they declare it to be. Artists are no longer people to be confined and controlled. Interactionist artists declare who they are in the world and how they interact within it.
When it comes to art acting in social change interactionism has important core tenets. Art is contained in the artist just as the artist is contained in their art. This points to the individual having a valid place as social change contributor. In social change action, interactionist art identifies barriers that allow or prohibit individual social inclusion. Collectively, such art shows the importance of each individual’s placement (or not) within the social tapestry. It points the way to social change as a remedy for individually perceived and experienced social conditions. Interactionism brings the idea that potentially everyone has their own story to tell. The criteria are having something they’d like to say and/or try to create. Interactionist approaches to social change allow for creative imagining of what people are, where they fit, and how we might build or change systems and experiences that serve them better. It shows various perspectives about where and how they might participate.
Marxist oppression struggles inspire interactionism, and predictably this art tends to address the problems of self-identity in failing or emerging situations. Interactionist art often ends up being either fetishized into symbolism or compromised into propaganda. Because it focuses on individual perceptions it makes action propositions inherently prone to resource problems. Assuming resources will be available for individually derived access puts this theory on rocky social waters. Art reliably shows us these disparities. Entailed resource levels and potential for actionability arise together. Social change based on individual perceptions and interpretations of society cause change. Change causes resource controls to shift. Shifting resources create uncertainty and that uncertainty causes resource availability to contract. Contracting resources cause interactionist movements to fail.
Sometimes, and situationally, resource and organization conflict inspire ingenuity. Consider the above abstract painting of a blue lemon by fine arts painter, Vesna Antic. As an interactionist statement, the painting says the artist is creatively looking at a lemon through their point of view. But what is that point of view? Without context, we’re provoked to inquire, or we’re not. Nothing suggests actionability. Artist and scientist, Alva Noe, points out the importance of context in art. If we add context to our blue lemon, many things about this painting potentially change. Consider if this painting was made by an artist who only has blue paint.
From a contextual situational process, which is what social change requires, such an artist will have difficulty painting a lemon; however, with relatively small resource adjustments, a lemon can be derived using, as it turns out, very little yellow paint. If other colors are not available or cannot be had, a motivated artist with an urgent message might concoct their own paint or explore other mediums which can relay their art messages and expressions. Such an artist conceivably wants to know how and why people will react to these changes – these situational circumstances. The painting potentially says, I have very little yellow paint, but it was important to tell you about my lemon, so I began with what I had.
The question that’s important to analyzing interactionist thought is, how much like a lemon must a blue lemon be? Does the painting declare that all lemons are now blue? True interactionist thought would tell us no, all lemons may not be blue, but this one is, and that is enough. Making such a statement with art, however, conveys very little, if any, social change value. It is an object for reflection and admiration unless you are now convinced some lemons might be blue and set out to either prove of find them. Perhaps some people will fund the artist additional paints. To Alva Noe’s point in discussion, blue lemons either do or do not bear with them enough context for us to interactively engage with this art. Social change prerogatives here are unmet. This art, as presented, gives us nothing really to do. Art in social change must be realistically actionable. Without it, chaos, violence and social unrest erupt (Debord, 1987, Hutton, 1987).
Art interactionism assumes other people will be motivated to engage with or in the art. It assumes people will be interested enough in an artistic statement to stop, understand it, and pay attention to it in some cognitive if not physically interactive way. In the case of our blue lemon, people have their own concepts and understandings about lemons. If a lemon is now something different, it faces cognitive tests about truth, morality, and both immediate and consequential action potential. People and resources don’t support art when moral cognitivism is ignored.
Our blue lemon gently provokes our understanding about lemons, but it also confirms them. Noel Carrol’s work (Carroll, 2015), stated this dilemma within film, recognizing that art-horror must have several elements within it to bring communicative understanding to the audience. They allow people to make cognitive choices, selecting between fear and panic or laughter and disinterest. Interactionist art must be just recognizable enough without overwhelming people with stimulation and emotions that override the cognitive transactions and action potential that art provokes. Alva Noe’s discussed point in Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Noe 2015) notes the importance of context to art messages – and so, how much context must be present for a blue lemon to succeed with its audience? What of their experiences is important to include in order for art to communicate a lemon to its audience and not something else? These observations challenge our audience’s blue lemon with the questions, why is that lemon blue? What am I to do because of it? What must I do or what else must happen now. The fact that the art was produced and presented to others begs these questions in a social setting, otherwise the art is simply an object created for reflection and self-admiration.
In a social change role, a blue lemon would instruct, as art does, that a lemon has distinct qualities and characteristics. It would show us the value of considering other things which may change audience and artist concepts of what a lemon is. It might offer other similar fruits admission into a lemon or lemon-like category despite its imprecise conformity to all that a lemon is. Art, in and of itself, is capable and likely to inspire such things. However, if such art fails truth and morality tests (No lemons are blue and society cannot accept such a thing), our blue lemons become either propaganda or symbols of an artist’s abstract experimentation. When this happens arts purpose is redirected, it’s actionability is questioned and engagement potentials are compromised. Morality and truth are put into question and group cohesion declines with each passing day. With that decline, so follows the art’s social change potential and value.
Copyright 2023.
Sharon Slayton
All rights reserved.
