Green Shoots: Art and the emancipation of imagination

Have you ever visited an art gallery or exhibition and come away scratching your head, wondering what the artist was on when they made the piece or painted the canvas. I remember many years ago we gave a departing work colleague a sculpture as a gift. It was abstract and I had no idea what it was, but my colleague’s eyes filled with tears at what he said was the beauty of it.

My home has a few beautiful paintings by our talented local artist Lester C Stone. I know he has a wide range of styles, but I like the ones with people and situations that I can identify and connect with. Abstract work – not so much.

How do you interpret a good piece of art? This question for many years shaped and tainted my experience of art. I would feel insufficient because I didn’t get it. I wasn’t possessed of enough sophistication to understand what the artist was saying, not enough intellectual bandwidth to appreciate talent and beauty. But I think I get it now. This enlightenment was prompted by a long overdue visit to the Market Theatre, that historical landmark that has been a fond part of my experiences of Joburg. We watched Mike van Graan’s play ‘The Good White’, and like all his work it got me thinking about a lot of stuff.

I think art allows us to stretch our minds and our hearts beyond the certainty of fact and evidence. Don’t misunderstand me – I am not advocating for a world of fake news and action based on opinion. There’s enough of that coming out of a certain orange person. We must continue to base our actions in this world on evidence. What art does is to open up our wonderful capacity for imagining beyond what is apparent. It demands that we exercise facilities we are endowed with but that are seldom activated by the material world we inhabit and the daily struggle to survive. It activates our imagination to see beyond the limits of now, to conceive that there can be something more. It jolts our heart, that place we claim is the home of compassion and empathy and love. Art moves us to feel differently, and wakes up the heart to allow all those things to come out. It activates the things in us that are necessary to build relationships, communities, a world that can be so beautiful and so much more than what we have.

I looked it up, and found that artivism is called a portmanteau word – the blending of sound and meaning of two other words to create a new meaning. Artivism is the ‘intersection of art and activism, and harnesses the critical imagination to design events and strategies that provoke new questions and new meaning in pursuit of more respectful ways of being’. How wonderful is that. The Good White looks at the Fees Must Fall time at our universities through the eyes of academics, and takes on so many things we are afraid to interrogate.

The play makes no claims to be the definitive historical record of that time, nor does it seek to valorise or endorse particular political agendas that were being contested. Instead it left me scratching my head and thinking very hard about issues that are often take for granted. It asked me to expand my thinking and analysis about weighty issues. How do we discern the difference between white guilt, liberal charity, and non-racial solidarity? Does the anger borne of 30 years of broken promises render the 1994 moment meaningless? Does black anger justify a violent response to exclusion, or do we need to look beyond what is before us in order to understand and act? Does being feminist / black / working class / migrant / LGBTI mean that your words carry greater authority, or are your ideas open to interrogation and challenge?

I believe art and artivism allows us the space to step out of the certainties created by traditional knowledge systems or social status, those things that lull us into complacency and acceptance that things will always be like this. How exciting is it that we can activate our imagination and compassion to create something different, something new, something beautiful?