Art as Revolution — Guest Blogger, Jordan Page

Humans have been using art throughout history to define themselves and to describe the condition of existing in this world.  Neanderthals banging on rocks and painting the walls of their caves with blood transforms to symphony orchestras performing Bach while Jackson Pollock drips paint on his canvas. From New York hip-hop to South African kweito; from 60’s British rock to 90’s Seattle grunge, from surrealism to post-modernism, ballet to breakdancing, Beowulf to Bohemian Rhapsody, there is always and everywhere art expressing the human condition.

In the musical arena, songs come to embody the spirit of a people, their fears, their triumphs, their indulgences, their faith, their anger.  In our modern context we are more equipped than ever to express ourselves as musicians, with every technological advancement helping us to create masterpieces out of 3 am hotel room inspirations.  Those advances come with a price which we pay for in quality and substance in much of the art we consume.  Technology has provided us with the safety nets of modern studio recording which transform mediocrity into flash culture sensations.  The touring industry is suffering due to a lack of vision as giant arenas grow cobwebs due to the small number of older artists that can actually fill them; young artist development has all but disappeared.  The recording industry is suffering from denial, having lost the tug-o-war with the digital revolution; they are lying in the mud still holding on to the rope screaming about their own legitimacy in the 21^st century.

We have every kind of instant gratification imaginable at our fingertips, we are connected to the entire planet through an invisible spider web, yet we feel more alone and isolated than ever before. We use a machine as a cold interface between us, our experiences and our neighbors. But let’s just wipe the slate clean for a moment.

Collapse. War. Martial Law. Tribulation. Tyranny. Bondage.

Now where do we stand?  What do we do when the entertainment stops? When our iPods and Androids are gone?  What do we do when the grocery stores are empty?  When we actually have to look at each other and deal with the reality of our lives bereft of the system upon which we have depended since birth…where do we go for identity?

Answer: the Arts.  Music, poetry, painting, dance; the very programs that receive the most cuts in funding in our modern context from lack of priority, are those natural and essential pursuits that make us human.  And it is to those pursuits we will cling in times of calamity; it is in those pursuits that we will take refuge.  It is through art that we define our connection to God and to each other, for art is the projection of the infinite self.  In times of abundance and complacency we tend to ignore great artistic achievements, most people having been carried away by the sheer flood of mindless entertainment.  When those outlets producing numb images of false reality are gone, and our consciousness can take a breath of silence for once, people will come to appreciate a song, a poem, a portrait.

When 500 channels of reality TV are in the distant past, there will be a great cosmic exhale, and then the dust will settle. In the context of a future collapse of western empire, less art will be available for consumption (thereby making its value increase) as there will be fewer artists. A full scale collapse will herald the onset of naked aggression and tyranny through force. Social systems of control will simplify from the farm model in which populations are herded and prodded over larger areas to create productive output for the farm masters, to the slaughterhouse model in which populations will be controlled under authoritarian rules in smaller concentrated areas, unable to resist, and ultimately thinned out to a level more easily manipulated for long term goals of the masters.

Artists then become enemies of the state for the simple fact that they inspire the imagination of the human mind.  Inspired men will not be slaves, and it is the job of the artist to disrupt that enslavement of the mind by daring to insist that men and women are more than their earthly bodies, more than units of productivity, more than numbers on a grid. We are powerful, beautiful, divine animals; conscious of our own existence and we seek to understand our place in the universe. The artist taps into that answer and shows us to ourselves as we wish we could be, as we might be if we dared have the courage to revolt. Art itself will be revolution, as tyranny is the antithesis of evolution.

Arts count in the higher pursuits of man, being spiritual and intellectual. They are practical and yet mysterious means of achieving and propagating enlightenment, the chief reason for us to exist at all.  In desperation, people use entertainment to escape the realities they face every day. Art as entertainment becomes the crux of a culture. As artists we gratefully share our vision and create a landscape in which an audience may intimately connect to us and thus lose themselves. As an audience, we gratefully give ourselves over to that vision in exchange for hope, relief, laughter, and tears. Artists of the future will be less famous, and more appreciated.  Against our current world of unsustainable empire, predatory governments creating police states, and the deliberate assault on the intelligence, rights, and motivations of a people, art is a revolution right now.  In this revolution, music provides the soundtrack, poetry gives it a voice, the painted canvas gives it a face, and the brave souls who place themselves between the violent aggression of soulless men in power and the innocence of our children, provide the muse.