The meaning of art in the context of our murderous humanity.

The meaning of art. Artifice. The human making power that enables self expression and a complex dialogue between mind and material, self and other. The eternal, pretentious, burning, intolerable question. What is the meaning of life, of art. Life the Universe and EVERYTHING, as Douglas Adams had it. What is the meaning of all this art we make?

One finds that people do have answers. They say they are showing us the dark side of humanity, or didacticising for posterity. Celebrating beauty. Exploring the human condition. Looking for soul. Artist as self improvement guru. Sometimes it’s for joy sometimes it’s for sadness. Whatever inspires it, we humans love our art and we prefer it meaningful. Wildlife art captures the grace and power of animals with whom we share the Earth. Honours it, romanticises it. Heroicises it. Performance pieces explore the poignancy of the human body or its weakness. Or the psychology of any number of permutations of spaces, human and inhuman. We acknowledge our own frailty, we praise our strengths. But nowhere do we stop the bus on all this murder. On the exploitation of the other. Anything that is not one of us and even many homo sapiens we also exclude from the privileged ‘us’ can be exploited. Preyed upon for the mined minerals beneath their feet or the labour their backs can bear. We have always known of the evil potential of the human condition. Particularly artists have been perceptive and warned us of ourselves.

My artwork is a homage to the other beings we should have shared the Earth with. The few thousand remaining Lycaon Pictus we cannot share space with. The Baobabs. The diversity of life generally. I am simply saying goodbye. I acknowledge my powerlessness over the inevitable langolier like action of the culture that birthed us all. Global capitalism. The reason that the only way to find sufficient funds to preserve land for wildlife is to sell the lives of the animals to the highest bidding killers. We kill to maintain our total spatial dominance of the planet.

Art must be appreciated. The appreciation of art is a refined pursuit that becomes a part of the development of the person doing the appreciating. Immersion in culture allows understanding of that culture. Ask yourself the following question: ‘ What is the total impact of my culture, of all culture, of all humanity and our collective endeavour?’ What have we done? What is our net effect?

In a bygone era one had the luxury of answering the above question in a more nebulous fashion. The world seemed larger and had more facets to it. It was harder to see what the totality of our condition on this planet was. Now, in this era of ubiquitous cameras and continuous data streams we have begun to piece together a confusing and patchy experience of the total picture of huimankind’s activities on our home planet and the picture is not pretty.

We are killing everything, and are arguably well on the way to rendering life next door to impossibly challenging for ourselves. Every day more information is uncovered about the remarkable interactions required to support the living biomes that support us and every day since the corruption of the American Petroleum Association, and of Big Tobacco, and of the necessities of commerce that drive such disingenuous and dishonest practices as those of the above mentioned industries, has driven us nearer to the irrevocable destruction of those precious biomes and the diversity of life in which our species and all the art it has ever made evolved.

Without the whole history of life on Earth and the way that created our consciousness and drove us to think and make art, we would not be as we are. Our art and our consciousness has been formed out of our interplay with all life.

Hundreds of Thousands of years ago it seems that there were other human like primates on the planet with us according to Harari and others. It seems they died and that for many of them like the Neanderthals, the number one suspect in their deaths is none other than ourselves. Homo sapiens. The great artists. The great mass murderers. We may never know what art Neanderthals made beyond the little that remains. Their daubings on cave walls the only window we have into an intelligence different to our own but communicable. Surely a powerful raison d’etre for art, to be able to express ourselves to other intelligences as well as our own. What grand new dimension in communication was squandered the day the last Neanderthal or Denisovan passed from Earth into the realm of forgotten memories.  Homo Sapiens is the last remaining human like species. We outcompeted the others. Just like we did with all the non human life on the planet.

These issues trouble me enormously since I have come to realise that in this context, in light of all this death and destruction wrought by our own artifice…and however ably criticised by our arts that murderous nature may be…our art is meaningless and without merit or force of any kind. In the context of all this murder our art is a failed thing. The broken conscience of a planet scale murderer. The very beast we have romanticised for so long is us. Our art the mouthings of a devil. Were we to save ourselves we needed a way to undo the unforgiveable. To reforge the anvil of our own creation and bring back to life all that we have killed. We cannot, and the suffering we have made is real.

The one hope is to embrace the unpopular idea that every action is our art. That is to say, that all actions require of us the mature and passionate and energetic and complete consideration that art is felt to be owed. All actions, everywhere. All life is art and all of what we do is an element of the tapestry of life. Which is not just an art. It is the art. All of our artifice, everything we make must be considered. Never again can we create such monstrous artifice that it kills almost everything and perhaps one day absolutely everything. Ourselves even. No planet scale production of disposable cups and straws and phones and jackets and dolls and rugs and rags that we (it’s a fact) discard six months later. George Monbiot reported that we throw away ninety nine percent of our manufactured items within six months after the date of manufacture. The makings of humankind have become meaningless and have required the total exploitation of the Earth. It is morally untenable and intellectually unmissable.

Some people like to say art is dead because they enjoy shock tactics. I say art is dead to the extent that the planetary biome and diversity is dead. It is devalued to the extent that the ecology is homogenised and animals murdered to extinction. Our art has failed to lead the making power of humanity away from the brink. Our artifice has embraced the ourobouros and is consuming itself and as the snakes head finally consumes the whole of the snake we complete the journey we have begun into darkness by ceasing to have meaning. Once our murder of all life is complete, our art is meaningless, even if we do manage to persist, as the only living being, a monstrous creature who incoherently and unreasoning, murdered all the others.

So I say goodbye. I am broken and I know I cannot stop you all, or even really myself. A sad, angry, greedy ape am I who has learned the trick of a paintbrush and a turn of phrase and does penance with it to an unfeeling God of my own creation. A flattery that my scribbles have any value in the face of the unforgiveable sin of my kind against our own very existence.