My supervisor, David Garneau, and I have wonderfully intense weekly meetings. I joked just yesterday while we were meeting face-to-face in his office for the first time in weeks (a nice break from Zoom) that I needed a chaise lounge (and he needed a beard and a cigar) as he basically forced me to dive deeper into the real reasons why I’m creating the art I’m creating. Again we talked about nihilism, apocalypse, what got us here (on the brink of planetary life-system collapse), what I am trying to do about it as a mother/activist/artist, what I’m really saying in my work. It was difficult. It was marvelous.

It’s great when the work you’re doing for different university classes coincides in such a way that you’re allowed to spend all your time focused on what you need to focus on at that moment in your degree. I’m lucky that this is happening for me this semester.

For my Group Studio class this term, our prof, Holly Fay, is asking us to give a presentation / facilitate a discussion in the class on a topic that interests us. The assignment description is as follows:

“Determine an art topic relevant to contemporary studio practice to discuss in class. This topic should be something you are interested in for your own practice, but which is timely and relevant to students in the class besides yourself. If you need help deciding on a topic, I can assist you. Form a persuasive ‘thesis’ about your topic and find materials in the form of writing, lectures, video interviews, etc. by artists, critics, curators, or theorists to support your position. Your 20-minute seminar presentation which includes an opening presentation and a facilitated discussion. You will present a 10 min. opening, prepare and provide questions/activities  to facilitated  a 10-minute discussion with your seminar participants.”

The topic I’ve chosen is one from the list that Holly had prepared:

Does art change things? / Can art make a difference in societal thinking?

My thesis statement is: art changes things… for some people, for some things.

From what I’ve been learning, we’re dealing with a spectrum of responses to these questions, and I don’t believe there are definitive answers. Art will not “change things” for all people. Neither can all art “make a difference in societal thinking,” certainly not one that can be measured. I’ll spend some time here looking at these questions from a few different angles.

In the Winter 2020 semester, I took a newly minted MAP course designed and taught by Sarah Abbott titled “Engaging Climate Change: Creativity, Community, Intervention.” For that class’ research paper, I began with the following paragraph:

“Climate change puts each of us in a position that we have no means of fully understanding as there has never been a situation like it in human history. How do we begin to acknowledge that we are potentially devastating not only our own future but also the future of nearly all life forms on the planet? How does this fact disturb our ontological understanding of our place in the world? What agency do any of us have to change this situation? Artists who are aware of the seriousness of climate change may feel the urge to turn their practice into a form of activism. Some would argue that the world “needs artists” more now than ever before for the precise reason that more awareness of, more conversations about, and more action on tackling the problem of climate change is vital. In a video showing an Extinction Rebellion sit-in at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in November 2019, a reporter explains that the ‘main message here is to use your creativity, use your imagination for good and fight the climate crisis. It’s up to people like you and I to share creative work, to support creatives, and if you’re a creative, to produce content and spread awareness’ (Extinction Rebellion 2:13).”

If we look at this video, at the 1:40 mark, you’ll here this message:

I’ve been told by my husband and at least one prof that art which is explicitly (and only) trying to make a point — trying to change people — is either boring or at least simply ineffective. I quickly learned that the word “didactic,” when used as in “that work is didactic,” is a pejorative. However, why do most if not all artists make art if not because they are trying to communicate something — and that “something” is often a type of call: look at this; see what I see; pay attention; maybe even do something.

Case in point: climate change art.

I’ve spent hours looking at artist statements and other writings on how artists perceive the role of art in facing/responding to/advocating action when dealing with climate change. In addition to well-known artists who deal with climate change in their work, such as Edward Burtynsky, Ai Wei Wei, and Marina Abramović, less well-known artists I’ve recently discovered who have done powerful work on environmental issues include Eve S. Mosher, Jason DeCaires Taylor, and Morgan Wedderspoon, just to name three of the dozens I’ve encountered. I was particularly inspired by the words of David Opdyke quoted in a New York Times article from January 18th 2018:

“For years I’ve been feeling the need to do something about the dismal future into which we all seem to be sleepwalking. And yet,” he paused before continuing, “I’m constantly haunted by worry. Can such artistic gestures ever really make any difference, especially given the sheer scale of the challenge?”

David Opdyke in “To Get This Artist’s Message, You Have to Look Really Closely”

So, where would he fall on the spectrum of answers to the question of “does art change anything”? This next citation holds his response:

Reminded of Auden’s line to the effect that “Art makes nothing happen,” Mr. Opdyke seemed to rally, countering, “Yeah, but Eudora Welty says that ‘Making reality real is art’s responsibility,’ and maybe that’s what most needs doing now: making the stakes involved in our current crisis real and tangibly visible for people. One ends up hoping that pieces like this might propel the urgent changes in vision, one person at a time, necessary to provoke an appropriate mass response.” (emphasis mine)

David Opdyke in “To Get This Artist’s Message, You Have to Look Really Closely”

There are so many artists out there with similar stances. There are academic articles and critical theory books on this topic. There are even artist organizations specifically devoted to activism on different social causes; one that interests me is The Center for Artistic Activism. The Center has created this primer to help answer “why artistic activism?”

1. Artistic activism mobilizes affect and effect
2. Artistic activism thrives in the contemporary landscape
3. Artistic activism has been used throughout history
4. Artistic activism creates openings
5. Artistic activism is accessible
6. Artistic activism stimulates a culture of creativity
7. Artistic activism energizes people and organizations
8. Artistic activism is about the long game
9. Artistic activism is peaceful and persuasive

It appears there are many supporting points proving the thesis that art can change things. In fact, there is likely a group supporting artists doing work on any societal issue. (Another group supporting artists who want to “make a difference” with their work is Artists and Climate Change.)

But does this mean that art actually makes a difference? Can art actually change things?

My husband, Michael Trussler, is an English prof here and a creative writer, and one of his areas of interest is ekphrasis (the literary device of describing works of visual art in words). In what he calls his “best article ever,” he discusses this “particularly thorny dilemma” of “what communicates ‘meaning’ better, image or text?”:

“More than any other single painting this century [20th], Guernica has focused discussion on the relationships between art and politics, aesthetic form versus ideological content. To Peter Weiss, ‘the paining scream[s] out in memory of every past period of oppression’ (220), providing a narrative of revolution […]. Equally convinced of the painting’s power, but wary that aesthetic grandeur might seduce us from the anguish experienced by those who suffered the event itself, Norbert Lynton warns that Picasso ‘is so successful that we have to discipline ourselves lest the bombing itself should be diminished by his picture into little more than a… prerequisite for it’ (qtd. in Masheck 217). Although Guernica points to history for its authority, the relationship between aesthetic transformation and praxis is indeterminate. Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to the painting in ‘What is Writing?’ is blunt: ‘[D]oes anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express’ (28). Sartre’s diffidence regarding Guernica accentuates his questions regarding representation in the essay as a whole — what communicates ‘meaning’ better, image or text?” (Trussler 266-67)

In other words, for all it has done, Guernica didn’t prevent any future deaths. No art does. Art on the subject of climate change will not either.

Needless to say, we have intense dinner conversations at our place. (Our 11 year-old is already proficient in keeping up with such conversations). We sometimes talk about art and what it can/cannot do. I have the great advantage (sometimes disadvantage: he always wins arguments on art or philosophy) of Mike’s enormous library.

One of the many books he’s brought to my attention when we’ve talked about what art can and cannot do is Jean Améry’s, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.

Near the beginning of his book, Améry describes something that occurred to him while walking back to his bunker one evening at Auschwitz after a day of grueling labour. It was winter, and he noticed a flag waving as he passed by an unfinished building. A stanza came to him from a Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin poem: “The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind” (7). Améry recited the line out loud a couple of times, “But nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars ‘left,’ and the soup was watery, and the flags clanking in the wind” (7). He goes on to say that maybe this line of poetry (art) would have had another meaning in this place and at that moment had he had a comrade with whom to share it. But he did not. Even when he recalled at that moment the Parisian philosopher he had “searched out, not without effort and risk,” (7) he remembers that the philosopher was silent: “We trudged through the camp streets with our tin ration can under our arm, and, to no avail, I attempted to get an intellectual conversation underway. The philosopher gave monosyllabic, mechanical answers and finally grew silent entirely” (7). What, speculated Améry, was the cause for his silence?: “He simply no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind, and he rejected an intellectual word game that here no longer had any social relevance” (7-8).

Skipping ahead a few pages, Améry tells us that what he learned in Auschwitz is that “for the greatest part the intellect is a ludus and that we are nothing more—or, better said, before we entered the camp we were nothing more—than homines ludentes” (20). Homines ludentes translates from Latin to English as basically a species (homines – our species) that plays. And this, Mike tells me, is how he (Mike) views art—and us: we play. Everything we do is play. Nothing is transcendental.

To Améry, this perspective brings with it both freedom from unjustified pretense as well as a loss of one’s sense of self: “With that [awareness of being homines ludentes] we lost a good deal of arrogance, of metaphysical conceit, but also quite a bit of our naive joy in the intellect and what we falsely imagined was the sense of life” (20).

What does this mean to one making art? Basically, it means that nothing we do matters. It’s all just part of the game.

At least, this is one perspective. To continue with another example from a concentration camp survivor, Tzvetan Todorov writes in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps that people in the camps were desperate for books (for art). As books were banned (with the threat of death for being caught with them), prisoners resorted to their memory of books they’d read. A fellow inmate, Ginzburg, “knew by heart the works of countless writers from Pushkin to Pasternak,” and “never missed a chance to recite from them, much to the enjoyment of those around her” (92). On one occasion, she was overheard reciting a book and threatened that if she could not prove she’d recited it from memory (not read from a hidden physical book) by doing so for half an hour, it would “the irons for you” (93). She won the “bet,” reciting from this book she’d memorized (Eugene Onegin) for well over half an hour. Ginzburg “continued to believe in this kind of resistance throughout her incarceration: ‘I felt instinctively,’ she wrote, ‘that as long as I could be stirred to emotion by the sea breeze, by the brilliance of the stars, and by poetry, I would still be alive, however much my legs tremble and my back bend under the load of burning stones'” (93).

Primo Levi, also a survivor, writes from a similar perspective in Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assult on Humanity. He recounts a moment when he had a few lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy stop him as he worked:

‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance

Your mettle was not made; you were made men,

To follow after knowledge and excellence’

qtd. in Levi 113

And Levi writes about this memory: “As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am” (113).

I think about these remarks of Todorov and Levi when I think about David’s question to me of what my work really means or what I am really trying to say. Do I think my art will “make a difference”? No, I’m quite certain it won’t. I’m certain that at this point, all the climate activism going on around the world may slow our fate somewhat, but it’s not going to be enough to save us. And my art projects, certainly, are not going to give us any extra second worth of time, keep but one glacier any more frozen, save but one insect species from extinction, etc, etc. But I’m compelled to make these objects — these statements — nonetheless.

I reflected on this topic at the end of a personal essay I wrote last semester, “on clay.” I ended the essay this way:

I cannot do much to change the course of climate change beyond the time and money I give to environmental organizations. In fact, I feel like the busyness of participating in activism amid a day job, art-making, and parenting is proving to be too much. With the urgency I know this crisis demands, and my urgency to raise as much awareness of the situation as I can, I’ve been missing something important – that sustainability must also involve the personal as well as the global. I need to be able to sustain myself, and recently, I’ve become attuned to a major lack in my life: joy. Without it, it’s hard to keep fighting for the future, for “[i]f we kill all pleasure in the actual processes of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?” (Orwell qtd in. Scranton 324).

Does art change things? Does art make a difference in societal thinking? In other words, does it matter? These questions have different answers depending on who you ask, their personalities, what they know, and what their circumstances in life are at the time of the question. (For one thing, there’s usually some amount of privilege that allows one to make art, and often times, privilege involved in being able to view it).

I’m learning that art matters to me (and learning to recognize my own privilege). It may bring me joy at times, such as the tactile joy it brings me of sinking my hand into a pail of terracotta slip, or intellectual joy of discovering a solution to a technical problem. However, at other times, working with this subject matter, researching the Dirty Thirties and what drought is in store for us now, for instance, art-making doesn’t bring me any joy at all. Neither do I get joy from seeing other people’s art, however brilliant or well-executed, that is dealing with climate change. I think we make this type of art because we feel the personal need to — perhaps it’s about feeling alive, or about feeling human, or about not forgetting who we are. In other words, we do it for ourselves, and at the very least, it changes us.

This is as far as I’m able to get (for now) in answering your question, David. Hey! I just remembered that you told the class last semester that every MFA student ends up making art that’s about them self. I guess I’m no exception.

Now, to get this into a ten-minute presentation for my class!

Works Cited

Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Indiana: Indiana UP, 1980.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assult on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Scranton, Roy. We’re Doomed. Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change. New York: Soho Press Inc., 2018. 

Trussler, Michael. “Literary Artifacts: Ekphrasis in the Short Fiction of Donald Barthelme, Salman Rushdie, and John Edgar Wideman.” Contemporary Literature 41, no 2 (2000): 252-90.

Tzvetan Todorov writes in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.