Manifesto for the imagination
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Frank Moorhouse
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Frank Moorhouse's biography and other articles by this writer
[T]hese Arts, in their highest province, are addressed ... to the desires of the mind ... impatient of being circumscribed and pent up by the world which is about us
– Joshua Reynolds, Discourse XIII (1723-1792)
Because of the Henson controversy, I decided I should sit down and look at the reasoning we use to defend the faculty of the artistic imagination: why is the artistic imagination treated as a thing of angry suspicion and distaste by some people and with awe by others; from where does the imagination claim its authority to challenge conventions and the law?
The fearful potency of art has been demonstrated by this social clash. At the same time, paradoxically, there has been an extraordinary growth in participation in arts and writing festivals and in the actual practice of the arts – especially the literary and digital arts.
Along with consciousness and ‘the mind', the imagination offers no easy scientific route for investigation (apart from within the limits of neurobiology). Because of the sometimes eccentric characteristics and claims of its practitioners, it consequently tends to be classified as mysterious, or to be described in mystical or semi-spiritual language – even by secularly minded writers and scholars.
Most great thinkers have had a say, including those from the psycho-analytic disciplines – Freud, Jung, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva, Winnicott – who worked mainly with the relationship between the mind and the artist – art as symptom – rather than between the artist and society, although they have all had something to say on that. To a degree they all seem to accept what Freud said in 1928: ‘Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms ...'
Jacques Lacan said that, for Freud, the artist ‘paves the way'.
These are good expressions of the awe in which art is held by even the most tough-minded of the thinkers. Apart from those gripped by moral panic, there are thoughtful and intelligent people who have been unnerved by the Henson images. I have listened to them and this essay is, in part, addressed to them.
In illustration, David Marr in his book The Henson Case (Text, 2008) describes the troubled reaction of Richard Jinman, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald's arts page and other staff at the editorial conference after they first saw the invitation to the Henson exhibition which featured the frontal, naked photograph of a twelve-year-old girl – #30 Untitled 2007-2008 – and which I suspect will become one of the iconic photographic images of Australian life alongside, say, Max Dupain's Sunbaker.
In my thinking I found it useful to retrace in a synoptic way – Imagination 101 – how the imagination became part of our existence, at least as far as I understand it and how it came to assert its authority.
WE ALL USE THE IMAGINATION – THE LIE IS ITS MOST COMMON EVERYDAY USE. We all use it in fantasy, assumption, suspicion, conjecture, hunch, intuition, rumour, imaginary friends, joking, superstition, forward-planning scenarios, predictions and conspiracy theories. In politics, we use imagination to create ideologies and utopias: we work up perfect worlds; we reinvent ourselves in the form of imagined perfection. We understand very little about night dreaming – that involuntary behaviour of the imagination. The imagination can become diseased, negative – nightmares, paranoia, psychosis and its ‘voices in the head', and can be dangerously distorted into mass social prejudices and social hysterias in contradiction of known reality.
The evolution of the imagination in our species probably had to do with the making of primitive everyday scenarios of risk evaluation, which in turn created competing scenarios of action – imagining what might happen next: ‘what if ...' which, it is speculated, gives us our ‘flight or fight' decision-making – known speculatively as the limbic or mammalian mind.
The imagination at some point turned itself to what we know as art, its use for making things not functionally related to the activities of procreation, hunting, gathering, cave-making and defence – the drawings on the cave wall, the songs, dances, carvings, storytelling.
These were something which probably gave our ancestors assurance, caused them to ponder, plan and dream. In my self-designed Imagination 101 course, I came across the work of William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931), an English architect and historian who speculated about the relationship between nature, the built world and the development of symbolism. The known facts of nature, Lethaby argued, which can be seen and physically experienced – trees, mountains, the sky, the rivers and the sea – were at some point turned to mythic and metaphorical use by our ancestors. So the tree became not only firewood but ‘the tree of life'; some caves were not only a dwelling but the place where Pan lived; the river became the underworld River Styx – the river we cross when we die.
The development of the imagination also had to do with our need to create narratives which explain birth, existence and death, and with the evolution of these narratives into theologies and so-called sacred texts. The making of sacred texts is not over. There are now nineteen major theological groups that break down into more than ten thousand religions, denominations, sects and unaffiliated churches, each with its sacred texts and variants. I do quite a bit of trekking, usually alone, off trail and ideally in wilderness country where there is no evidence of previous human presence. It does not take long out there in the dark forest with a campfire and unidentifiable noises and shapes for the mind to spring to superstition and myth-making.
The imagination also enabled the human capacity of empathy – to imagine ourselves in another's place or condition – which in turn aids the construction of safer inter-human relationships expressed in everyday expressions such as ‘I feel for you'. Another way of putting it is Keats' expression ‘negative capability' – the technique of absenting self to a degree and assuming the role of the other, the use of the creative faculty to enter into the minds of those who are radically opposite to one's own personality, which can produce the civic ethic of tolerance.
I would also accept that the imagination draws on the unconscious in the Freudian sense – including what he calls ‘the proscribed' inner sources: the compost of forgotten and suppressed memory upon which the individual personality is constructed. An imaginative work comes from, or is able to tap into, the unconscious and its collections, its archives, its symbolic and metaphoric rearrangement of lost memory. This is not just a personal compost: it is also a social compost. I sometimes think of the unconscious as an archive that cultivates itself, and that broods and thinks about itself in a hidden way until accessed by the artistic imagination (or through psychoanalysis). The unconscious contains social input – from strangers and the news – as well as the input of the home, early childhood and family relationships.
THE ENGLISH POET WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850) SAID THE PRACTICE of the arts was ‘doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before ... widening the sphere of human sensibility, for delight, honour, and benefit ... to produce effects hitherto unknown'. Western art has a taste for the fracturing of artistic conventions built up over time, subverting the ‘contract' of form or genre, and this taste has itself become a form – the avant-garde, the experimental. Art is not ‘done' only by the primary practitioners of the arts, but includes those who engage with the arts, those who participate as audience and readers, and teachers, critics and scholars.
The arts do not remain ‘in context', but are disseminated through the society by riding in other vehicles -– education, media, games, fashions, interior design, advertising, and so on. Who is an artist and what is an artwork is established tentatively and gradually by an intersection of judgements – by the artist's peers, by critical discourse, by the passing of time, by the opinion of readers and audience – through a chain of conviction that comes to establish a work as art.
Some artworks are destined for a short life, speaking to a specific time in a particular way, and then discarded from the stream of wide social discourse; however, they sometimes find a place among scholars who can see in them other secondary meanings. Some of what was banned or hounded comes to be seen as of long-lasting value to society. And sometimes, with a change of power, context or taste, works are revived. Because of this quirkiness in the evaluation of art, society has gradually given special latitude to its practice and special care to the preservation of its relics. The strange nature of the practice of the arts, and the image of the artist, contributes to a sacral, romantic status.
We have all heard fiction writers talking about how their characters ‘take over' the story; how they don't know how the book will end; how writing is an intuitive process; of working in trance-like states. Added to this are the other behavioural characteristics of the artist – some now stereotypical: the need for reclusion, artists' retreats, eccentricities of dress and of behaviour, alcoholism and drug use, depression and other nervous conditions.
The stereotypical and often acommercial characteristics of the arts has led to society often granting an exceptionalist status to the artist, being allowed to live outside conventions. The artistic imagination sometimes draws its authority from the great liberal enterprise of inquiry – scientific, intellectual and artistic – which tries to lead us to be a more knowing society, a society which is in closer touch with reality and therefore safer. The arts contribute to widening perception; they produce what poet and theorist Susan Stewart calls ‘ironic and deliberative knowledge' – those unarticulated, even unconscious, insights that come from aesthetic experiences to both the practitioner and the engaged audience. The audience, the readership, is itself a creative force, a crucial part of the creative equation.
Suppression of information and freedom of expression by law, by filters and by protocols denies us a full acquaintance with reality, and consequently makes our judgements less reliable and our lives unsafe. The suppressed material turns into phantoms crouching in the dark and is transformed into the forbidden; in turn, it becomes an underground commodity with a distorted potency. The literary mission was described by American critic Lionel Trilling as being ‘to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture ... to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgement'.
There is a posture in the arts which claims that artists should avoid consideration of any these justifications for their work, that untrammelled art is more an unformulated and uncategorisable expression, and exploration of, the human condition. This is an instinctive feeling that the artistic mission would be imperilled if it sought to justify itself within the terms (and the limits) offered by political ideologies, by humanism, by literary theory, by psychoanalytic theory, by theology, or if it allowed itself to be circumscribed by ‘ethics'.