can art speak for itself?

This is the first very rough draft of an article I am working on. Feedaback is welcome. Its not finished

The Roaring Silence: Does the work of Art speak for itself?

A number of years ago I went to an artist talk at the Gold Coast Art Gallery. Fiona Foley an indigenous artist of international standing was speaking. I was confronted with a paradox. From the beginning my impression was of warm, highly intelligent women with a great sense of humour. At the same time she was presenting slides of her art -work that was often referencing the most disturbing aspects of white-black relationship. In my mind she had stepped into the unenviable position of being both artist and cultural therapist or healer.
One piece of work had large rectangular open boxes placed on the gallery floor with a base of black charcoal. She told the story of a massacre that occurred in West Australia less than a century ago and how the problem that confronted the murdering white men was how to dispose of the multitude of bodies. Men, women and children. They were heaped together and burnt. Later investigation found bullet shells with remnants of human remains, teeth and pieces of bone amidst the black charcoal left by the fire. It was a shocking, disturbing and confronting image.
I later saw this installation in an exhibition in Sydney. Strangely enough I recall being struck by its beauty whilst simultaneously recoiling from the horror. For me it was great art, beautiful and horrible at the same time.
Fiona then went on to comment on how when she originally presented this work it was met with a silence that she interpreted as denial.
And here again her words seemed to echo amidst a great wall of silence in the room. The silence around me felt like a great weight. I sat quietly with a whole spectrum of emotions and thoughts stirring inside me. I knew from my therapy practice that silence could mean a whole range of things and that to interpret it too quickly ran the risk of alienating the client or in this case the audience. Fiona was trained as an artist and I assume like most artists had only rudimentary knowledge of therapeutic communication. Believe me many psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers have only a rudimentary knowledge of therapeutic communication so that’s not meant as a put down to artists. It is a skill and an art in itself that is best learnt experientially not from a textbook. And technically speaking denial is what is called one of the most primitive defences in that it’s usually unconscious and kicks in to protect the ego from a sense of unbearable pain. It’s a last ditch survival mechanism. As a reaction to a piece of art it was perhaps the last possible option of many. Immediately I was reacting on a number of levels. My guess is that Fiona was speaking about the immediate reaction to her work and also speaking to a cultural and historical process where the voice of indigenous peoples had *****been silenced and the reality of denied basic human rights. In that sense she was both profoundly right and yet at the same time off the mark.
It’s impossible to speak for the audience but as for myself I found myself in a state of shocked dumbfounded-ness, a complete loss of words. What words could bridge this gaping wound. I felt that I was being asked to respond on multiple levels at once. This too sometimes happens in the therapeutic setting and can be incredibly difficult and complex juggling act. In that setting I would have slowed down the process and attempted to slowly unravel the multiple layers of communication, here the talk just continued as was to be expected. This was an art gallery not a consulting room.
So now at a very cool and safe distance let me see if I can unravel the experience that stole my words. Perhaps most easy of all was my aesthetic response. As I mentioned before the beauty of the work struck me. The materiality of the charcoal, its blackness, its smell, its texture being contained in the large coffin like boxes resonated inside me. Dare I say it there was a feeling of reverence or profound respect, as I knew I was staring at death? Remember in American Beauty when the young man tells how he looked into the eyes of a dead person and he saw “Beauty”. And beauty has a power inherent in it. Was it Plato who said something like beauty ceases motion? Whatever horror had occurred for whatever reason death is the great leveller Death does not discriminate. And at the same time the horror, the utter horror was present too. And as many of us know this horror had been (and still is in certain ways) perpetuated and justified all across the planet on the basis of the colour of ones skin. In its most elemental form “White against Black”. This long historical, cultural and spiritual process is still unravelling and by being white as was 98% of the audience I was inadvertently a part of the horror. At some level it was hard not to feel accused and rightly so. Again from my training in therapy and conflict facilitation I have learnt that there is always a partial and usually painful truth in every accusation. The best way to defuse a conflict is to honestly find where the accusation fits even if it only 1% true. That said the usual human reaction is to want to defend. Let me see if I can say it another way. On the one hand yes it’s true that I as a white man have not committed atrocities to indigenous people and as far as I know neither has anyone in my family background. In fact I can muster counter-stories of acts of compassion and understanding from my parents and grandparents. In that sense the accusation isn’t true. And yet on the other hand by the very fact of being a white man growing up with the privileges that brings me I am as implicated as the men who pulled the triggers and lit the fires. That’s a very difficult truth to swallow and yet it paradoxically free’s me from the legacy of the past.
To understand this I have to take what seems like a detour through psychotherapy. In reality the two fields need each other for both to operate effectively. In an ironic twist cutting edge approaches to psychotherapy can often draw as much inspiration from indigenous healing methods as from the latest discovery in quantum physics. What they both say in different ways is that trauma and its consequent suffering is a phenomenon that has a field-like nature. What that means is that it not only lives inside the individual psyche/body which it does but also seems to live across time and space. In this view everyone in Australia is both implicated and affected at some level. Healing is both individual and collective some times simultaneously.
So if I can return t o the silence in the art gallery it comes as no surprise that I was dumbfounded! Freud used the term “the unthought known” to describe experiences that are often carried or felt in our body yet are very difficult if not impossible to put into words. If they can be articulated then by oneself or by an empathic other then there’s often a sense of relief and an uncanny feeling of having always “known” this. The more pressure that is applied t o articulate the less likely it will happen. So for me as I sat there I had a great sense of the inadequacy of words. This being amidst the darkest days of the Howard regime even to utter a heartfelt “Sorry” felt to me like a feeble attempt at wallpapering over a large crack. I wonder if the only adequate response is aesthetic. Like a homeopathic cure, only like can cure like. If I had been able t o sing a song, or recite a poem or better still perform a movement piece maybe my body would have found the “words”. Experience articulated into words is the basis of conversation, the base of civilisation and yet the spoken word is radically intertwined with and emerges out of the multiple voices in the body and its ecology. It’s ironic that artists who perhaps more then anyone know that gestation comes before communication are disappointed when audiences don’t have conversations about art.
I raised this issue with an indigenous curator recently and her response was somewhat clichéd; the art can speak for itself. Again this is a partial truth. A one –sided truth. Carl Jung was fond of stating that all neurosis is one-sidedness. In this sense much art and many artists are trapped in a neurotic bubble unable to release the healing energies unable t o allow the voices in art to be effectively heard. Don’t get me wrong I do not want t o return to the romantic notion of isolated mad artist’s. This observation is a lament as I feel passionately that it’s the voices of art that are needed desperately in the one-sidedness of contemporary culture.***This is an affliction we all suffer with and must move forward from.