Art as a Cultural Deed Continued

I recently heard a talk about Joseph Beuys, a German post-WWII artist, extremely influential, who wrote, drew, painted, and created displays and action installations. One of these installations, or social sculptures as he called them—“Honey Pump in the Workplace”—had a system of transparent tubes conveying honey around a room, as people shared their ideas in 100 days of conversation. Bueys made the case that we are all artists, that we can moment-to-moment enliven the world with our thinking, our warmth of heart, our commitment to the deep rhythms of the world, to each other as striving human beings, to stewardship of the earth. He used the oddest of materials—beeswax, honey, felt, fat (like butter and lard)—to encourage people to extend themselves and become whole in their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

I think this is the direction Dennis Klocek aims toward when he talks about art as a cultural deed. I quoted him in the December blog linking art to his way of accessing the spiritual world, in particular those who have died: “I practice until they see on the other side that I am in it for the sacredness of it—then they come. I pray and work, and after a time they become interested in my need to contact sacred wisdom. This practice is a deep cultural requirement, not incidental. It involves the need to take up art, not as a career, but as a cultural deed.”

What is it about art, in the Beuys sense—as I move beyond my “I’m not an artist” fears—that furthers connection with the spirit, with the elementals? First, it asks me to just jump in and do the artistic exercise, staying in my own feeling life, refraining from comparison or doubt. Once I do that, it becomes my personal journey; it lures me into my right brain and teaches me how to live there. On its own, it helps me develop new intuitive muscles. In the way I do these “can’t go wrong” ways of art (soul collage, devotional painting, Barbara’s ink stick drawings or “Little Drawings”) I don’t talk to anyone or allow myself to become distracted while working. So it’s also a way of finding inner, deep stillness—the still point of the turning world, as T.S. Eliot puts it.

Barbara has somehow known since her youth about these artistic access points to spirit. She painted her striking burned woman images long before she received the story they illustrate. And these Council of Gnomes blogs are permeated with her artistic creations and sensibility. Each month’s blog, for example, begins with one of Barbara’s paintings. With the encouragement of the gnomes, and responding to their directions, she came up with ink stick drawings (see December 2014 blog), Little Drawings (see July 2014 and February 2016 blogs), and kerfuffle painting (see January 2015 blog). When I do the ink stick drawings I find myself contacting the energy of plants and elementals and letting that energy flow through me (using ink and a found stick to draw on white paper). The Little Drawings (the scribble, squiggle technique Barbara described in last month’s blog) are, for me, a way of connecting unseen spiritual forces with something I’m experiencing on the physical level—nagging worry about a morning news article, for example, or some problem I’m trying to work out. These quick, energetic drawings invite the elementals to speak through us. The gnomes and plant devas are always trying to figure out, it seems, how to share their wisdom with humans, how to fulfill their critical role in waking us up. They keenly feel the urgency of helping us shift perspectives from short-term, chopped-up vision to long-term interdependency.

The particular medium for the artistic effort is not so important as the energetic engagement—the doing. In Barbara’s “Healing Burned Woman” dvd, she uses storytelling, dance, singing, divination, and conversation to suggest creative ways of healing deep fears and trauma. “Simplicity is the key,” Barbara says, “and simplicity comes from within. It’s not necessarily what you do but the energy you bring to what you do. With each step you can move totally into the new, leaving the old behind. This is walking in grace. You begin to live with faerie consciousness, and time no longer controls your thinking.”

Is there anything, I wonder, that I cannot transform into artistic expression, of the cultural deed kind? Sitting in traffic, chopping vegetables, walking out my door each morning to greet the world of nature—if I remember, I can thin my density to feel the living molecules of my body meeting living molecules of the car or the carrot or the Japanese maple. Yet in addition to the artistic sensibility or gesture, this practice also seems to ask for some formal, consciously formed response. The learning sticks better and can become a surer part of me if I somehow recreate it in another form—write it, draw it, dance it. And it sinks even deeper if I reflect on it with others.

Elyse Pomeranz (whom I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent blogs) wanting to show her gratitude to the tree she was communicating with, asked, “What gift can I give you?” The tree responded, “I want you to make art.” When she probed for specifics, the tree told her to figure it out herself. Her true process evolved after she worked with an international group called Lifenet, initiated by the Slovenian artists Marko and Anna Pogacnik. Members of the group work individually with an aspect of nature (a tree, boulder, river) and then they share their experiences with one another. Through this method of trusting her own perception and then comparing notes to get an enlarged picture, Pomeranz was “nudged” toward her own process: begin with a centering meditation, sit with her back to the tree, and then ask the tree what it would like her to draw. By now she has done hundreds of drawings in several countries, which you can see on her website: www.thetreeconversations.com.

Susan Raven, a Welsh singer, biodynamics practitioner, and presenter at the Guardians of Nature telesummit, says, “The task of the troubadour has always been to listen to the wind and anticipate the future, to discern the fine nuances of a spiritual age and to play the dual roles of receiver and transmitter.” We can all become artist-troubadours in our own ways and places. These artistic practices keep me tuned, so that I will know what to do next, so that I will have trusted forces to guide me when uncertainty and confusion are rampant.