PEACEFUL PONDERINGS
“The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desired alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose B Y E R I C VA U G H N H O L O WA C Z of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into ey, we’re putting together shared meaning.” an issue of Imagine magaSince those two senzine focusing on art, peace, tences sum up about 50,000 and social justice—would you like to years of human creativity share your thoughts?” asked my friend and consciousness, I could Jane Perini. It sounded fascinating, so I just stop there. But Jane agreed right away (not really knowing asked me to ponder art, what I’d write about). I am a wordsmith, peace, and social justice in an art historian, and I love thinking a magazine-length musing. about how people create and advance And I promised her that culture. So yes, challenge accepted. I would etch something A few weeks later, Jane and her meaningful on the cave infectious smile resurfaced, with a The Cave of Altamira in Cantabria, Spain, features charcoal wall that is this magazine. deadline bearing down. I sat at my keydrawings and polychrome paintings of local fauna, created What follows is a sampling board that weekend to think up a few between 18,500 and 14,000 years ago. of works of art—old and examples of art and peace, and figure new—that stand as monuments to our Around that prehistoric campfire, out how we use artistic expression to humanity, that cry out for peace, that we find the original reality television address humanity’s need for social move us with their message of justice. show, the first instructional videos, justice. Here goes... Light your torches, and look... the original media format intended for Let’s start in our cave dwelling Our first case study is about love, rites of passage and collective human days. I’m talking hominids and auspoetic expression, and a human peace. identity. Look closely enough, and we tralopithecus and primates gathering The Song of Songs goes back 2500 might also imagine and discover hutogether around the fire—to share their years, and appears in the final section manity’s earliest expressions of peace pre-historical half-simian selves. This is and happiness. Surely they wanted the of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the fifth where our own stories begin, with the Book of Wisdom in the Christian Old cave wall to show us love, peace, and ability to communicate and represent a Testament. Yet when we read it in Engright from wrong. shared world, and collective experience, lish today, it is undeniable poetry. The In the tens of thousands of years with nothing more than abstract marks. language is rich, playful, dreamy, and since, we humans have made our Our pre-Ice Age cousins burned “drunk with love.” Metaphorical and marks in pencil, paint, bronze, song, their scenes upon the cave wall—anipassionate, the Song of Songs immerses dance, and film. We remain driven by a mals and journeys and crops remain us in an intimate, romantic, beautiful need, born in the fire of the cave, to tell etched into the rock to this day. Once relationship—filled with desire and stories that define our collective tribe, marked in ochre and illuminated by satisfaction and wanting more. It is fire, human history and rituals began to and express the shared identity we a primer on the frenzy and ultimate call culture. In the late 20th century, emerge. Even today, we see ourselves peace to be found in human love. art critic and historian Robert Hughes in their hunt, their dance, the shaman From sacred and allegorical love made his own mark and described the trance, the age-old agrarian blueprint between two, we move to perhaps the role of artistic expression this way: etched into the earth.
Humanity’s search for peace, justice and meaning through the ages
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most hilarious study of male-female relationships ever acted out, Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The play first hit the stage in war-torn Athens way back in 411 BC. It begins with women from across the Greek city-states hatching their own plan to end the Peloponnesian War, and usurp a foolish maledominated world. They all decide by oath (and a lot of ancient Cabernet) to withhold sex and forsake the need for pleasure, until all the war-hungry men give up their arms in favour of peace and pleasure and good times. The fearless heroine Lysistrata and her band of Grecian riot girls seize control of the Acropolis and the purse strings. A chorus of old men try to burn them down, but are defeated by a greater chorus of old women with lots of water. A magistrate and bumbling group of chauvinist police try to restore order, but the women prevail. Lysistrata declares that men at war make stupid decisions, and declares the reconciliation to be women’s business now. After bouts of timeless comedy, many unrequited erections, and erotic machinations, the men have no choice but to begin peace talks and conclude their warring ways. At the Acropolis, the old men and old women merge into one chorus, and down-home celebrations begin across Greece. The play is bawdy, fierce, and unapologetic. And it literally ends with the idea and manifestation of peace. Fast forward to the 20th century, and all the wars, bombings, and genocide now detailed in our history textbooks. Pablo Picasso is gazing at the cave wall and sees reflections of the horrible destruction of a town, Guernica, during the Spanish Civil 20 IMAGINE l SPRING 2017
War. From a position of exile in Paris, and in response to the rise of fascism, he creates perhaps the most famous anti-war picture ever, “Guernica.” It is massive, symbolic, modernist, cryptic, but undeniably wrought with terror. Women and children are slaughtered, bombed by Nazi blitzkrieg as they gather in the market square. It took him five weeks to finish, and then went on to tour the world and speak of the need for peace—by depicting a modern version of its opposite. My final illustration is cinematic. I rank the beginning ten minutes of Terrence Malick’s 1998 war film, The Thin Red Line, to be among the most beautiful expression of peace in the history of moving pictures. A soldier goes AWOL before the Battle of Guadalcanal, and decides to live among a small Melanesian island community. Private Witt, the film’s narrator, is at peace in this montage—innocent and happy, and fed by the humanity of a small South Pacific village. “I’ve seen another world,” he says, “Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.” But we know it is real, or can be. While the horrors of war follow, we keep Private Witt’s dream-like and beautiful existence so carefully crafted by Malick. The joyous singing, the happiness of children, and the pure humanity of the island village— these memories stay with us, and almost defeat the death and destruction of nations at war. And like Private Witt—who is sacrificed in the end—we keep searching for a return to that paradise. We hope to live through the hell in order to find the pure, simple, and good in this world. All of these examples of artistry and peace and justice lead us to one profound question: what can art do to
make humanity better and bring us a sense of peace? For an answer we return to our shamanic art historian, Robert Hughes: “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning.” Come closer to the fire, he seems to say—words echoing through the cave. He holds a torch to figures dancing across the rock face. “It’s not something that committees can do,” he whispers. “It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” Only you can be Lysistrata, the passionate lover, the muralist fighting the fascist, the anti-hero finding humanity on a remote island beach. “Art is a lie that makes us see the truth,” said Picasso. Theatre, film, painting, poetry are gifts that can bring us the truth. As we return to the cave wall and the timeless rituals of human existence, I look at Jane, and the flickering torch burns on. Eric Vaughn Holowacz is a cultural engineer who has worked in art management in New Zealand, established an artists colony in Key West, directed Cairns Festival at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and is currently Executive Director of Sedona Arts Center. He also studied poetry with James Dickey, lived in a Trappist monastery, managed an alternative rock band, and became a convinced Quaker. His favorite life event was marrying an adventurous woman called Mo, and having three wonderful daughters together.