Making, Community and the Wish List Project
6. Interconnectivity, Community and Narrative
6.2. Community and Narrative
Arendt underscores her belief in the fundamental importance of narrative when she emphatically states that “no philosophy can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story” (1995:22). She values storytelling over philosophical thinking for its attentiveness to the singular nature of human experience. Arendt is not the only philosopher to emphasise that creative practices can offer valuable insights that philosophy is unable to. In Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993), for example, Paul Crowther, drawing on and extending the vision of his predecessor, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argues that art and aesthetic experiences have the capacity to humanize. In subsequent writing (1997, 2003) Crowther explores this theme in greater detail, arguing that art can bridge the gap between philosophy's traditional striving for generality and completeness and the concreteness and contingency of humanity's basic relation to the world. Importantly, Crowther highlights a “problem” with philosophy because it “denudes the concrete particular” (1993:4).
Through her emphasis on the value of storytelling Arendt challenges “hegemonic and absolute notions of truth” and posits a new way of understanding the relationship between the particular human self, the community in which the self is located, and the wider world (Swift 2009:1). In an essay on Isak Dinesen, Arendt explains that storytelling uncovers meaning without committing the error of defining it (1995:105). This makes narrative a
128 wonderful and open form of communicating. Visual narrative in particular can be read in ways as innumerable as there are viewers, especially when metaphor is employed, as metaphor allows for broader interpretations than literal iterations do. The generative nature of the Wish List Project is something that deeply appeals to me. The domino or ripple effect that resulted from the way the circular format print was enhanced and amplified by a companion surround created by different participants was one of the most exciting features of the project. It also accorded with the character of printmaking in that it is really at its heart never a single author activity – even when working on single authored images in the print studio. The studio itself and the processes (for example, when wetting the paper, running the print through the press, laying the completed print out onto the drying rack) all work much better when two people are involved in printing. Thus, dialogue is encouraged, both through the image and through the processes from which the image is constructed.
Metaphor is an important aspect of storytelling, particularly in regard to this project, and was something the artists and I discussed in relation to visioning their wish in a way that would be apparent to viewers. I introduced this idea with reference to my own use of metaphor in the original paintings. As the prints were destined for a public space where they could be seen by many different people it seemed important that the images allude to rather than dictate an idea. The young artists were sensitive to the idea that use of
metaphor allows the imagery to be open-ended, and can usefully be read in different ways by the viewers of the prints. I refer to two examples in this section, by way of illustration, although it is important to point out that any of the central images could work as an example of polyvalence through visual metaphor.
The image of the sailing ship, in the print pictured on the following page might bring a viewer to think of adventure or freedom (the expansiveness of sail) or reference the ability to harness and take advantage of what resources there are at hand (in this case the wind). Alternatively, the sailing ship might reference discovery and gaining new
knowledge of the world, with its allusion to exploration, or it could be read as a call to an earlier less mechanised age.
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Plate 26. Jade Taylor. Untitled. Wish List Project. 2015. Linocut, hand-colouring on Fabriano. Diameter inset 15 cm.
Likewise, the turtle imaged in the print pictured on the following page, Plate 27, can refer to any one of the following ideas: the tranquillity of swimming in the ocean, a wish for people to conserve an endangered species, a wish for a safe haven (alluded to by the shell).
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Plate 27. Maxine Seethal. Untitled. Wish List Project. 2015. Linocut with hand-colouring on Fabriano. Diameter inset 15 cm.
In addition to the open-endedness of storytelling, the value of which is so well described by Arendt, The Wish List Project intersects with storytelling in other ways too. Arendt describes how storytelling “brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are” (1995:105). “All sorrows”, she emphasises, are made bearable “if you put them into a story, or tell a story about them” (104). I have found solace in storytelling, particularly in my experience of the devastating loss of my triplets. Through the invention of a fictional loss I was able to immerse myself in, reflect on and comment on loss, grief and recovery. As noted earlier, I tried to work through this grief initially through painting and image making but at first found these inadequate containers for the sticky, complex, contradictory, chaotic and even wondrous experiences brought to me by this loss.
Arendt’s contention is that storytelling is an important mechanism through which to comprehend the world; and comprehension, Arendt (1967:x) stresses, “means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality – whatever it may be or might have been”. This is supported by my own experience, achieved through the act of
131 writing and also through the act of translating my loss into images which reflect on this experience. Although the Wish List Series did not ultimately succeed in helping me deal with maternal trauma and loss, the project embraced and came to embody an alternate cohesive function in that it developed into a gift for a particular public space. The Wish List Project came to involve a number of participants (18 in all) from the local
Pietermaritzburg community. Their involvement in the project was a way to give
something back to an organization that serves the community on many fronts (quite aside from the institution’s religious Christian message – to which I do not myself subscribe).
The hostel serves to provide accommodation to students in a city in which student housing is in crisis: students are crying out for improved facilities (Naile 2014)
.
Further, the facility accommodates the needs of the wider community. It is utilised, for example, as a venue for Pietermaritzburg’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) group, and initiates and hosts a number of programmes for the homeless adults and streetchildren of the city.
Cultural anthropology has long accepted the telling of stories as a mechanism through which cultures order their understanding of themselves. As noted by Swift, through its transformation into narrative a series of events can be understood, communicated to a wider audience and remembered by the community (2009:7). The idea that stories assist in making the world intelligible presupposes the idea of a community inherent in the act of telling. An artwork (in my view a mechanism through which narrative is told) without a viewer or a story without a listener, audience or reader is a voiceless or shapeless thing – an emptiness and a non-performance. As Swift notes, “storytelling” (and following that art-making if, as in my conception, visual arts is included in the idea of narrative)
“presupposes a community inherent in the act of telling” (7). The community
immediately “involves the teller of the story, the hero of the action, and the listener or reader who stands back, judges and responds to it” (7). This formulation of community suggests another key Arendtian idea – that free thinking is an activity that can really only take place in the presence of others, in a community rather than in the withdrawal and meditation required by theory. I subscribe to the idea that free-thinking is borne of
132 action/making in the world. It is this that drives my Office Politics Series as well, and the Indian Yellow and Wish List projects.
7. Chapter Conclusion
In this chapter I have centred my inquiry on the origins and development of the Wish List Project. I have shown how the project highlights connections and shifts between
painting and printing practice. My scrutiny of the project has revealed connections between my visual arts practice and teaching. In this chapter, I have charted the
relationship between a privately made collection of paintings and a body of prints made by a number of participants and, in so doing, have illustrated the fluid and organic way in which artistic works can develop. My involvement with this project has again emphasised the value of story-telling. I have referred to thinking about narrative and community by philosophers such as Arendt and Crowther. Referencing Gablik’s thinking on
reconstructive postmodernism as support I have presented my ideas in relation to this project as an effort at reenchantment and considered how, in its manifestation as a gift from the artists (myself and my co-creators), it serves to resist the idea of the artwork as commodity.
While the Wish List Project prints were not made by me as such but by a collective of participants, each bringing their own narratives into play, each telling (or contributing to the telling) of their personal wish, the project itself, through its development from a single author project into a multiple participant work for a public space, also speaks on one level of my story, for it speaks of my effort to locate creative production
meaningfully – to find a space where it does something positive for others and not only serves as an assuager of private intimate griefs. The value of the Wish List Project, I believe, lies in how it speaks of an effort to include many participants in the creation of a gift, of something that seeks to enhance a public space and takes up the call for what Gablik describes as a “new, connective, participatory aesthetics”. In so doing, it rejects both the subjective individuality of modernism and the nihilism of deconstructive postmodern art practice in favour of “an expanded context” that values connection with and service to others (1991:19-22).
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