The power of art in a broken world

Why creativity is vital to 'tikkun olam' - repair of the world.

Dear Readers,

A couple of positive things have happened to me in the last couple of weeks. First, I loaned some of my work to a small art exhibition set up in a local synagogue. It was a mix of amateur and professional work, and it provided welcome entertainment and an opportunity to socialise for many people. It was a pleasure to take part in a joyous community event and to see that one of my friends sold their first ever artwork at their first ever exhibition. Hurrah!

Secondly, I have just received a sizable Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice grant to fund a year of exploration in both my art and writing practices. I’ll write more about this no doubt in due course. Let me just say now how lovely an experience it is to have the worth of your creativity validated in such a way.

These very positive events come, however, in the post-October 7^th era when we cannot live without seeing the terror that destructive dogmatism and war brings to people. It is painful to read the poetry of Palestinian writers killed by bombs in Gaza and to receive news from Jewish-Israeli artist friends struggling with life in the fall out of the Hammas attacks. It is alarming to read the news from America and other areas of the world where division and forms of divisive tribalism is the name of the game.

The good days also follow a period of readjustment after I left a job (I was a Family Court Judge) in which I was tasked with making life changing decisions.  In contrast, I spent yesterday folding bits of paper to see what happened.

As I experimented with different papers and forms, I began to ponder:

Does creative practice have the same worth as working in law or is the art/literary world one of mere frivolity?

Can art really contribute to the modern social justice interpretation of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam ‘repair of the world’?

Or is it a way of avoiding my responsibility to make a difference in this fractured world?

Image by stokopic on Pixabay

Of course, the first danger would be to assume that law is not creative and is diametrically opposed to creativity. Although many lay-people see lawyers as pedantic, rule-bound problem-makers, in fact my job was about finding creative solutions to entrenched positions. It was about taking relationships that had fractured into splinters and constructing acceptable new futures from them. What value however, does making pictures for a wall have in comparison with signing adoption orders and making protective orders for victims of violence?

Art too is about making things – not from nothing – but from fragments of inspiration, memories, feelings, ideas. My work has a through line of piece work – photographic collage and quilting. Lyric essays are formed from braided stories drawn together by underlying themes. My best-selling art series to date was begun when a participant in one of my workshops ‘made a mistake and destroyed it’. Her accidental marks were immediately interesting to me. I took that ‘destruction’, moved it on a few steps and made it the foundation of new successful work.

And that I believe is where the value of creative work lies. Arguing whether something that has already happened – in the studio or in the world - is ‘good or bad’, right or wrong’ ‘proven or unproven’ merely entrenches and nails the feet of the arguers to the ground at their current position. All you can do is repeat more of the same, often to the state of desecration and destruction. Whereas (to borrow the words of artist Anne Hamilton)

 “Art is the process of taking yourself from what you know to what you don’t know.”

When we create, we must first gather. For artists and writers this means collecting ideas, researching new facts, looking at what other creators are doing, getting out in the world and seeing and hearing new things. We must notice and learn to pay attention to small details, to find the common details that link things together. We must get out of our usual way of seeing, must hear unfamiliar voices, learn new points of view. Creating is not about inventing something unique. It’s about bringing opposites together in harmony.

Think of thriller films. How many times have you seen someone jump out of a plane? The first time that would have been shocking. Now it’s merely a trope in many James Bond -type films. But take the unlikely step of combining spies with the Olympics and make the Queen the parachutist, and you have an unforgettable short film.

Creators work with differences. An artwork that is only made up of sameness is boring and uninteresting to most people.  Our eyes naturally want to see variations within patterning, contrast of value and variation of shapes.

In the synagogue exhibition there was a drawing of a pair of old boots in the exhibition made by a woman who is now in her hundredth year and who fled the Nazis on the ill-fated SS St Louis and has since been honoured for her dedication to Holocaust education. Her wall bio said that she makes art ‘to prevent her just sitting in a chair all day’.

Most of the visitors would just pull off their battered footwear and, ignore them. Gisela, however, honoured them with her attention. She spent a long time observing the lights and darks, the curves against the straight lines, the hard leather against the soft laces. She spent time with her subject learning to ‘feel’ it and to really notice what it had to offer. I watched many people stand and admire her work and declare these humble boots a thing of beauty. She enabled people to see and think differently – to relate differently - and that is the power of art. it doesn’t seem different to me to her education work.

Having gathered up our different inspirations and raw materials creators combine them into something new. A composer in the western tradition of music only has the same eight note octaves to work with, yet new music arrives all the time, not only from new combinations of the black and white piano keys but by adding in new instruments, new tempos, new arrangements. Some of the great, lasting music comes not from sticking with one own tradition but by combining with the traditions of other cultures.

Paul Simon’s classic Graceland, for example draws heavily on a collaboration with African music traditions. Notably at the time, this was not just daring it was highly controversial as South Africa was still an apartheid state and Simon was accused of breaking UN Resolution 35/206 which created a boycott of such cultural interactions.  Simon’s response to the criticism was to tour with the great trumpeter Hugh Masekela, vocalist Miriam Makeba and vocal group Ladysmith Black Mamboza. Masekela said,

“If we’d been free and together all these years, who knows what we could have done?”

There are people who still argue that Simon was in the wrong, yet decades later many black South African musicians have benefitted from his support and apartheid no longer exists. Being brave enough to do something different, motivated by good values, can create powerful change even if others disagree with your actions and do not share the vision yet. In 2006 the Graceland album was added to the US National Recording Registry as  being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important.” 

Whether creativity is by one woman in old age accommodation or by rock stars on the international stage, it allows people to stretch beyond their existing blinkered viewpoints.  I run an adult education programme, and a recent speaker was talking about the tradition of Jewish story telling. He said that to tell stories is to create a fantasy world into which people can come and discuss uncomfortable and unfamiliar things. There they can work out what their true values are, then return to their world with that knowledge, able to put it into practice. Story telling in this way changes people. If, however, we live in an echo chamber only repeating fervently what we believe we already know, nothing changes. In fact, it’s worse – the repetition of what we want to believe can convince us that reality doesn’t exist.

In a recent article in Jewish Currents, shared by Longreads, a journalist Maya Rosen joined several ‘death tours’ to the Gaza Envelope kibbutzim. She noticed how the story telling was repeatedly worded to anchor the story of Jewish victimhood, to reassure the visitors and to aid what she called their ‘willed incomprehension’ of the destruction of the war happening close by. As bombs dropped just over the border, the ground shook under them so hard that the vibrations travelled up their spines. Plumes of smoke rose. One participant was heard to audibly repeat, to reassure himself,

“It’s just like thunder. It’s just thunder in the distance”.

Whilst self-soothing is a natural human reaction to fear and challenging facts, denial of reality prevents solution finding.

Creativity is the act of offering to people a safe place to practice looking at uncomfortable or unusual juxtapositions, different viewpoints and unheard voices. It allows them to practice looking through different lenses, to see the possibility of making beauty out of broken pieces and combined differences. Its shows the power of taking risks and of accepting failure and mistakes as part of the process rather than seeking to justify past behaviour.

It is a space where the messages ‘You can’t’ or “You must” or “It’s always been this way” hold no power, a space where you can scare yourself a little and learn that you will survive that bravery. A place where you sometimes must give up a part of what you love in the present state of your work in sacrifice to a better end result. Creativity is a crucible for possibility. It involves the accretion of many small steps. It facilitates the moving to the unknown. 

In fact, creativity is not just the process by which we make adornments for the wall, or novels for entertainment. It is the very process by which we repair the world.

Assuming of course that we acknowledge in the first place that the world needs repairing and that we, not always others, are responsible for making as many stitches in that repair as we can, however small.

Shalom,

Helen.