...Upending Paradigms: Part 2

In a real way, everything we do is political -- the Civil Rights activists and the feminists of the 60s and 70s said that "The personal is political."  And the political is personal. Every social structure in place affects us on a personal level whether we know it or not.  Lawyers codify the law, and speakers and organizers are the catalyst for laws, but much has to happen socially before these issues get into the arena of law.  Before it becomes a real "movement" there are the artists, musicians, poets, dreamers, who tell their stories. They tell the stories of those who cannot tell their stories. One of the most effective political moves Barack Obama did in his campaigning speeches in '08 was to tell real stories about real people who were struggling to make it.  By speaking about other people's experiences, he was able to capture the imagination of a population which then aligned itself toward his ideology of "Change." It is still an effective strategy.

Stories are ideological. Stories can create a kind of psychic break in the social system; a story can mete out punishment and justice where there is none in real life. Stories can generate sympathy for the oppressed. Stories can offer a glimpse into the real life of another person’s experience, they allow the audience to understand an alternate perspective, or suggest how life might be if things were different. We have tons of fantastic / science fiction stories in our modern era that give us alternate realities, glimpses into the future given a particular paradigm. These stories have their lineage in the imaginative stories of our pre-histories, the tales of Ulysses, the mythologies of the Ottomans, and the Upanishads from India. We tell stories not only to fix in our minds the importance of certain events that changed our world, but to create a place for our strange notions to exist. 

Sometimes our ideas have nowhere to exist except in our stories, and sometimes these ideas have no possible way to be verbalized, but must be given form in drawing/ painting/ sculpture. How would the makers of Stonehenge possibly explained their awe of the Equinox/ Solstice and the workings of the Earth's revolution around the sun within a solar system? The powerful sign of the circle of Stones placed just so admitted its worshipers into the wonder of it.  Its sign is as powerful to us today as it would have been then.

How much easier is it for Jenny Saville to demonstrate the impermeable boundary of human flesh, the breakable baggie that we call our bodies, that thing that leaks and breaks and tears, than to use oil paint as a metaphor for skin? In another way, painter Francis Bacon paints the body from the inside out, examines the connection of the psyche to the visceral. In his work, we feel the body's desire and the way it sits uncomfortably next to our intellect. We feel that connection and it rattles us. Shakespeare's poetic nuances make us unable to ignore the vast possibilities of meaning in language, and how connotations can shift with a single word or placement. It unsettles us and has changed the way we think about how we communicate.

To be continued...​

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