An artist whose work does often give me joy and nourishment for life. Andy Goldsworthy's "Rowan Leaves With Hole."

An artist whose work does often give me joy and nourishment for life. Andy Goldsworthy's "Rowan Leaves With Hole."

So let’s imagine you are a progressive, committed to social justice and peace — and close to burning out. You once had tons of social change energy, but now are deeply despondent about the state of the world or the corner of it you have been trying to improve, and just as despondent about your relationships with your activist colleagues who are, to say it politely, difficult. It happens.

So you turn to — what? Banned substances? Passivity? Republicanism? You know better than that, so you turn to spiritual teachings, practices, meditation, prayer, the mountains, whatever it is that floats your spirit boat. You go to classes in relating to difficult people. You read Tikkun.

My question is: do you also turn to art? Let’s leave fiction, theater and poetry aside for now. Do you turn to the visual arts? Does a quick gallery tour in your city help revive your spirits? Does an art magazine, or the art section of your bookstore?

I have to say that a long time ago I stopped looking to art for that kind of help: for inspiration and nourishment in leading my life and helping heal the world in whatever way I can. That way, when it does help, I’m nicely surprised, instead of being in a further state of disappointed rage at the art world and the pervasive harm I feel in my incoherent bones that it inflicts on us all.

OK, there are many exceptions. BUT. How to find them? Gallery tours and scouring the magazines and art bookshelves rarely if ever pay off for me. I haven’t tried to express these thoughts in public before, probably because I’m intimidated by high culture, by the idea that some art professor will tell me I’m shallow. Am I a lazy, petulant Philistine? Probably. But why should I have to search that hard through the haystack? I’m not only looking for modern Fra Angelicos, I’m not posing an impossibly high standard. Why should I have to read so much fine print next to an incomprehensible artwork in order to find out that the artist has good intentions? When that is all I get, it enrages rather than nourishes me. I still feel that Art in our time is not helping!

I’m digging in my subconscious here to find why I have such anger at the art world. I was trying to explain this when interviewing an applicant to be an art intern at Tikkun last week, a very smart young woman artist fresh out of Yale, and I was bothered by my own incoherence. Then the next day I came across this, in Kim Chernin’s The Woman Who Gave Birth To Her Mother: Tales of Transformation in Women’s Lives (which I bought last week in a secondhand bookshop because we have a brilliant article by Chernin in the coming Tikkun, and I realized that I had loved both books of hers I had read, and had best find some more — for my own sustenance. So, flat in bed with exhaustion last Saturday after getting the NovDec Tikkun to the printer, I read the book cover to cover and was indeed sustained by these true but disguised or composite stories of Chernin’s psychotherapy clients).

This is about a young Italian woman who becomes an artist in the 1950s. As a teenager she has an exceedingly close relationship with her mother, but her pursuit of art creates a rift. She says:

My mother was so unhappy with this modern art. She didn’t understand it and she didn’t like it. The bleak worldview that was expressed in it was profoundly against her nature and she didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

… I saw my mother from a critical distance where I scorned her, where I thought, She is a poor bourgeois nothing, an empty woman who doesn’t know anything, who lives a life of convention, who has nothing of her own, who is trapped and will never get out. Trapped by being a mother, being married, being in this kind of conventional lifestyle where show was everything and substance nothing. She didn’t have the capacity for anything else and that’s how I saw her, and of course Paff [her older, bohemian artist boyfriend] and his friends helped with this view and I despised her.”

Decades later she comes to accept that her mother was not to be pitied, but had actually achieved most of what she wanted, with a successful husband and social life. They just had to accept their differences. Since the age of sixteen for many many years,

I had put her under this incredible demand of having to be someone she wasn’t, just as she had always put the same demand on me. I didn’t want to be her perfectly feminine bourgeois daughter marrying a wealthy man. And she could never become a bleak, passionate, despairing intellectual.

I was a child in 50s, raised in an intense religious subculture, and in college from 1967-76. In many ways this was the basic choice I felt society was offering me as I exited from my family’s religious world: bourgeois respectability or bleak, passionate, despair. Neither were appealing, but the despair at least seemed true.

I feel my whole adult life has been a long and much too slow rising out of despair. I need help!

One of Michael Lerner’s points that resonates strongly with me is the idea that a major reason so many working and middle class people have gone to rightwing politics in the last decades is the contempt they have felt coming at them from educated liberals. It’s the same contempt this Italian girl felt for her mother and that still seems to pervade the art world (and that discourages people like me from writing posts like this). A Lerner quote from “After the Fall: Why America Needs a Spiritual Left:”

Instead of asking how to appeal to what’s good in the American people, many on the Left find it far easier to blame the American people. When I first encountered this way of talking in the aftermath of the victory of the Reaganites in the 1980s. I thought that I was simply hearing a defensiveness on the part of the Left, a desire to avoid looking at where they had been ineffective themselves. But I’ve come to recognize that these attitudes are based on two key elements in the liberal world that are deep within the liberal culture: 1. anger or tone-deafness to spiritual and religious concerns; and 2. contempt for those with whom we disagree.

So what’s wrong with the assumptions of the art world? One seems to me to be close to the blame motif in the paragraph above. In the arts generally it seems that for at least a hundred years “realism” has come to stand primarily for depicting the ghastly things humans do to each other. OK, so artists are the canaries in the coal mine: they sense the imminent disasters, they feel the pain of modern life more than you and me. We need them to be and do that, and to express it for us. But realism includes love and transformation in the midst of suffering and cruelty.

In illustrating Tikkun, we find it much, much easier to find images of pain, suffering, anger at same, blame for it, than images of love amidst pain. It seems to be much harder for artists to imagine and depict that convincingly, realistically. We have written here, with illustrations that we have liked, about the kind of art we are looking for.

Blame is easy. Contempt is often a cover for insecurity. Nourishment in full knowledge of pain, suffering and despiar: that is hard.

Yesterday Alana Price and I had a meeting with our two new art interns — Suzanne Sherman, an artist reentering the work world after raising four kids (aged six to seventeen) and Noa Kalpan-Sears, artist just graduated from Yale — and Phil Barcio, an artist and writer who moved to San Francisco from Indiana with his wife, a painter, seeking a more art-focused city, and who is writing the artist profiles for our weekly art gallery exhibits.

I was surprised and exhilarated to find how much these three very different artists resonated with our concerns about finding art that nourishes progressives. They agreed that there are hardly any incentives for artists to create that kind of art. They agreed that deep has come to be equated all too often simply with dark. Phil said that the art world seems to think that is what people want, even though Burning Man or LovEvolution say it’s not nearly so simple. Phil even went so far as to say that much abstract art is intentionally noncommunicative; it may be expressive of the artist’s soul, but not in a way that intends to communicate the content, except in the attached written notes if the artist can be persuaded to write them. Noa countered that abstract art often does communicate nonverbally through feelings imparted, and that the artist may well have a spiritual purpose. Phil conceded it is so but he comes across it so rarely that he hadn’t yet found examples to show on the Tikkun art gallery, and could Noa help? She will. Keep an eye on our gallery.

Another member of our art team who was not present, Lita Kurth, is working up an art competition to encourage and present art for the healing of the world (and of its would-be healers). We will get this going soon and want to work with any and all art departments in colleges and working artists to make this widely known. We envisage a series of such competitions so that young artists have incentive to create art with transformative purpose. I can imagine working with a gallery to hang exhibitions of art that has first made it into the Tikkun gallery, or that has the clear intention of supporting the healing of the world and nourishing the healer in all of us: in fact every city should have one.

I’m excited! All we were missing in generating this art movement, Phil pointed out, was the absinthe. Next time we’ll meet in a cafe.


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