image by damian entwistle via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Apr 29, 2017
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses the role of the artist with Enrique Martinez Celaya. The sculptor, painter, physicist and philosopher’s work focuses on the struggle of individuals to navigate the inner and outer realms of darkness that negate our individuality. RT correspondent Anya Parampil looks at Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, one of the most controversial paintings of the 20th century.
From the archives:
The Omnipresent Pressure to Conform by Graham Peebles
Chris Hedges: Prophets of Social Justice
Chris Hedges: The Corporate State’s Assault on the Arts
Chris Hedges: The Power of Political Cartoons
Chris Hedges and Mr. Fish: Art As A Language and A Form of Truth-Telling
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excellent . the impatience of the artist becomes prophetic is so true .
we need the arts always . more now than ever? I don’t know . I think that to have art as protest when it’s NOT popular to protest is more important .
the late 70s was in malaise . the arts were not hip because there was not much to protest . and yet a few carried it on just BECAUSE .
it is that just because that plants the seeds of the prophetic so that can be recalled to mind when things get rough .
Thanks, Rocket, thought you’d like this one.
Fantastic interview. Wow thank you for this. Celaya is wonderful. Add shaman and healer to artist as prophet. Thank you, Chris Hedges for your always incredible work. I am a raging fan of yours and immediately watch and read whatever you post.
So glad you enjoyed the interview, Cecelia.
Thanks Lo, for posting this.
A substantial element of this powerfully expressive response, especially in the Americas, is also as a compensation for the sterility of a militarized settler society that is so fearful, superstitious & alienated from itself, that it is cut off from authentic spiritual roots and cultural foundations inspired by Nature….
….but also arguably & critically, this ‘New World’ experience may carry forward the epigenetic memory & heritable shadows of prior atrocity, past horrors, persecution, clerical and capital abuses and so on, that get perpetually recycled, through symbolic externalizations of those grave existential wounds, still festering from the lingering pain of the ‘old world.’ Some have characterized this as the victim/perpetrator cycle.
Humanity’s susceptibility to collective psychosis is deeply ingrained; it is so often great art that reprocesses and releases this pent-up, violent energy, in ways that allows it to be processed subconsciously, collectively, constructively and creatively.
It is therefore really a type of therapeutic, social and spiritual alchemy; pure medicine for the soul that can furnish shape and structure to inchoate formless potential, which may otherwise find socially destructive ways of manifesting its repressed dynamism and anguish.
Society is, or should be, a coherent creative community ~ a thriving, convivial, diverse ‘ecosystem.’
This means facing our true condition by valuing reciprocity & embedded originality; but in unique ways that encourage and nourish integrity, free expression and respectful inter-relationship.
Thanks, David.