Making Small Fissures in the Status Quo to Upending Paradigms: Part 1

An astute student in my illustration class recently sent me this question: "Because some art material/idea(s) is frowned upon, does that make it worthless? Why should anybody have to fear what society might think? As artists, shouldn't we be the front-runners to confront social norms and boundaries?"  As a student, you may have studied Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" DeKooning's "Women", Judd's minimalist sculptures, the "drip" paintings of Pollack, Matthew Barney's "Cremaster series",  all reviled for their "outlandishness", their "insensitivity" to materials, their violence to "proper" anatomy, their strangeness or lack of convention.  But all of them stood the test of time and are now considered important works. Why? Why do we say that Marquis de Sade was a vile man with violent notions of social behavior within his literature, but that his work was important? What does the "fine art" establishment today have against comic books, illustration, and graffiti art? Why do the mavens of "high" western literature frown upon  fantasy and science-fiction? Why do the critics of opera and classical music generally turn their noses up at urban hip-hop and rap?  What gives here? Do the conventional norms feel threatened? Obviously. 

Social norms tend to want to dictate what is acceptable. First of all, we should ask: what and who are these agents of social norms? They are our religious institutions, family structures, and governmental agencies; they are also our educational institutions, corporate structures, and our media sources. You might be able to think of some others. They are all the things which envelop and bind us to what we deem is acceptable and proper to a relationship with others. These social norms are a kind of contract for living harmoniously within a larger social group. And of course, these social norms differ between groups--witness the difference in what is considered polite in your own family and that of another's; the expectations for decorum may differ quite a bit. Those works of art that come along to rock the boat with unconventional forms and content may initially take a beating but they can stand the test of time if they speak the underlying truth about our conventions.

The agents of social norms have quite a bit at stake maintaining the status quo. After all, the agencies themselves (churches, governmental bodies, corporations, etc.) place actual people in positions of great power to head up these organizations. Think and compare how much moral and social power the Catholic pope has when he talks about birth control, and think of how much clout somebody like Steve Jobs has when talking about charter schools and dismantling public education...   Promoters of certain forms of music, literature, art, all have their own status quo to maintain, and they tend to rigorously guard these hierarchies for their own existence and access to power. Are any of these less culpable? Do they use methods any less ideological? There is always a carrot and a stick: sometimes it's heaven in an afterlife or economic boom in this life, we pay attention to these ideologies when their view of the world is in alignment to ours in some way. 

But what if they aren't? What if we don't agree? What if a worldview is completely antithetical to ours? What if the ideas of another culture, another generation, another religion, another political system is so damaging to our way of life that we are marginalized?   This is a depressing situation to find oneself, particularly if that paradigm is one in which we currently live, one that dictates our station in life, our economic status, our social worth, class, or our actual ability to life and thrive? What do we do? Think of the activist in Palestine, or the student in Tiananmen Square, or the folks at Stonewall. Do we riot, throw rocks, stand in the way, set up tents in a park near Wall Street? Yes, and perhaps Gandhi's methods work just as well for provoking social change. 

But what else can we do?

To be continued...