The Role of the Artist

by Richard Reeve on July 15, 2009

in AziMuth

A Black Beret.
Image via Wikipedia

I often joked when visiting a certain southeastern Connecticut city that the arts community there was made up of “posers.” I never really developed my position, though it was an intuition that I was certain of.  Then today I stumbled upon some clarity in the following passage:

“The normal man can follow the general trend without risk of injury to himself; but the man who takes to the back streets and alleys because he cannot endure the broad highway will be the first to discover the psychic elements that are waiting to  play their part in the life of the collective.  Here the artist’s relative lack of adaptation turns out to be his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age.  Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.” Carl Jung, “The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature,” in The Portable Jung, pg. 322.

These distinctions speak to my use of the label “posers.”   What I was witnessing in that community was a posse of folks that were clearly traveling the broad highway, but wearing berets while doing it.  In Jungian terms, they had crafted personas around a role which demands what can reasonably be called a vocation.


Blog Widget by LinkWithin

  • Lately I find myself.. an artist desperate in his search for the broad highways... I've spent so much time on the back ways that I've never really had a good look at the broad highways!

    I must say its the oddest of feelings.. For one thing I don't know if I can even function on the broad highway.. while at the same time, possessed by an insecurity, I wonder if I need to take the highway.. and I'm insecure about.. what value the stuff I found in the back ways might find on the highways.. will my gold turn to ash?

    I understand Jung received a lot of criticism for his thoughts on the Arts.. that he wasn't real good in this area.. But I think that perhaps the critics might not have understood Jung deeply enough..

    I have this experience often as well.. of the posers in Art.. or sometimes its not so much a thing of the poser as feeling.. sorry for there small spirits.. wondering if they even bother to really work at it.. I don't have an issue with an artist seeing a market.. and being like "ok, I need to paint pretty flowers and like.. light houses.. cause that's what the tourists are buying.." Where I do find the problem is when you don't take that as an opportunity for something more.. or.. when you get to a place where it's all nice and safe.. and for the sake of safety don't venture further out.
  • Great contribution here Matt. In the end it's a bit paradoxical, as
    the greatest work tends to be pretty accessible to the masses, or we

    find that the masses catch up to it in a generation or two. I think

    your call for depth hits it square on. The broad byways are designed

    in many ways to keep the masses from the depth, and Jung in his

    religious studies on this same issue makes it quite explicit that this

    is appropriate and absolutely necessary...
  • Psychologist, Guy says artist you say artwork, The value of a Rubens may depend on the artist, but an observer can find it beautiful with no knowledge of who Rubens was, The role of the artist is a question asked by a society who values money and acheivement over beauty. Yeats may want us to bekieve we cannt "tell the dancer from the dance," but if in fact we can. Yeats and othe rmoderns tried to create an art that required you know something of the artist to appreciate it. In large measure they fail. "When you are old and Grey and full of sleep," is a beautiful poen and you need not have any knowledge of Maude Gonne to appreciate it.
  • I think the point I am trying to bring out is that the artist finds his work in the back alleys as Jung noted, not along the broad highways.
  • Just Some Guy
    True, but another facet of what Jung alludes to is the dual nature of this beast sometimes called "Art": In isolation, the artist is irrelevant. To an utterly external observer (say, an alien!) what we think of as what an artist "does" might well appear to be little other than dirty cloth, bent and ruined metal, clay, paper. Striving so to find a voice, we can't help but overlook the fact that the *language* we will speak with it is in fact already defined. Perhaps it's a function of this language (as an organism) that it is often tossed about frivolously. Perhaps we could think of all the pomp, posture and self-indulgence that is the "Art Scene" as a sort of small talk.

    It's difficult to resist a quote from Goth pioneers Bauhaus: "Small talk stinks." :)
  • Hmm...where I beg to differ is that the artwork in isolation is irrelevant, which is why the work continues to persist after the artist passes away...

    The tell tale sign of the group I'm lampooning a bit is that the work did not back up all the posturing.
blog comments powered by Disqus