In truth, neither art nor artists will save the world. Only a new way of being can do that—one that knits people together and inspires a different vision, an ethos of generosity and caring. Only when we dissolve our historical ties to the modern paradigm of materialism and overcome our habits of passivity and consumerism, is there any hope of moving toward a more spiritually informed way of looking at the world.
—Suzi Gablik (2002, 30)
Throughout my career I have grappled with the question, “How can I make art and be of service?” The answer I have received is that the methodology described in this book—intention and witness—can lead us to right action on behalf of the Soul of the World. These simple tools are the technique of noticing; they provide us with the means to listen past what our minds already know, to find a solution that originates in dialogue with the heart of whatever or whomever we are called to serve. Intention and witness are reliable means of raising the marginal ideas to the forefront, of seeing what we are missing. If art is a spiritual path, it must lead outward from the individual listening with the body, mind, heart, and soul into the commons, that place where we are called to serve. To be authentic, this path must be well trod both inward and outward.
What might art in service to the Creative Source look like? Thirty years ago art therapy was one answer to that question. Twenty years ago I thought the right answer was to set up a storefront, fill it with art materials, and invite ordinary people to make art out of their lives. At that time, I willingly subordinated my individual artist self to the ideal of creating a sustainable image-making community. I had a lot of ideas. Mainly, I just wanted to save the world. I believed that once the world was finally saved—and not before—I could make art freely and happily.
I got a different message from the Soul of the World.
SOUL OF THE WORLD: Become spiritually fit for what comes your way. When you are suffering, suffer. When you are rejoicing, rejoice. Don’t avoid the pain you see but also don’t seek it avariciously. Activism can be as materialistic as anything else. Perhaps when you fully and freely make your art the world, or at least you, will be saved.
ME: That’s a pretty self-indulgent view, don’t you think?
SOUL OF THE WORLD: Thinking you can save something besides yourself, that something needs saving, is pretty arrogant. Are you sure you understand what you’ve been writing about?
ME: Well, maybe not entirely. I really get it on the small scale, when it gets into the big picture I fall back on other ideas. I get intimidated by “social responsibility,” “activism,” “community organizing.”
SOUL OF THE WORLD: Your job is to listen, to witness, to attend, not to fit into some fashionable rubric. When its time to act, you’ll know. Don’t forget Dan Berrigan.
When I was in college, still half in the fog I grew up in, just waking up to the fact that there was more going on in the world than my mother dying, I happened to be at Colgate University during an antiwar rally where Daniel Berrigan was one of the speakers. He said a lot of things, but what I remember was a suggestion he made: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” This phrase has stuck with me ever since. I felt I had been standing there watching my mother slowly and painfully die of cancer for years, and it hadn’t helped at all. I didn’t know then how to engage with suffering, my own or hers. I simply absorbed and held all the sadness and rage inside me. Yet here was Berrigan, this man who poured blood on draft records and spent years in jail protesting the war in Vietnam, suggesting that we just stand there.
I believe he was saying, “Bear witness,” and asking us not to be mere bystanders angrily blaming or spouting platitudes. He was advocating an active attending-to, a feeling into, a deep listening, until right action presents itself. I believe he was suggesting we refrain from mindless action and that we consider the effect our actions might have. To stand in witness to what we believe is no small task. To have the patience to wait and the courage to see the correct action and then take it is a discipline. To care for those entrusted to us is no small task. To begin to envision the ways to “knit people together and inspire a different vision” is a task that art is made for, as the stories in this chapter attest.
Attentively noticing the world, we find ourselves particularly attuned to certain issues, problems, situations. As though singled out by our temperament, history, wounds and passions, particular aspects of the world soul call us to them. The path of individuation is in part a fine-tuning to the ways in which we are called and obligated. Both its meandering and its insistent directions reflect the ways in which the world has entered us, insinuating themselves in our histories and stories. (Watkins 2004, 15)
Ten years spent in the public sphere, attempting to involve others in the enterprise of artmaking, led me to contemplate the larger issues of cultural forms, of how we participate in creating culture. For now, I answer the question of how to be of service by following my restless mind into the mishkan that is the studio and engaging with the ideas that I feel called to question: What is community, and how does art build, affect, or sustain it? How does commerce affect art and artmaking? What is the right relationship of personal art practice to work in the world? What are the next ways that intention and witness can engage the world?
We are gradually awakening to the ramifications of envisioning the entire world from the standpoint of commerce and profitability. We inhabit a larger story from which there is no escape and in which we all have a role to play in the rebalancing that must occur. With the marketing of products as our culture’s highest value, even the self comes to be seen as a commodity to be “branded” and sold. What is art in such a world? What is the meaning of a Japanese businessman purchasing a Van Gogh painting for a sum greater than the gross national product of some countries? Is the value enhanced because the painting was not valued in its own time? By privatizing prisons and allowing them to bid for service contracts with corporations, have we covertly reestablished the institution of slavery? If art is to be a spiritual path, a commerce-free zone of creativity must be established in which such ideas can take up residence and be contemplated over time, generating images that instruct us. The studio can provide a temenos, or sacred space, where we can sit with our images and attend to them in dialogue together.
Rather than aspiring to success in the mercenary and mostly inaccessible high-end art world, arts professionals of all kinds are increasingly seeking to serve their respective communities as cultural workers. But what is a community? According to Webster’s, the word community encompasses several meanings: “a unified body of individuals”; “people with a common interest living in a particular area”; “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals”; “a group linked by a common policy.” I always look at the words in the dictionary surrounding the one I am considering. I find that words with a similar root often amplify my reflections. There is communion: “mutual participation”; “an act of sharing”; “intimate fellowship.” Implicit in community is communication: “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.” And on the same page we find communism, our onetime national bugaboo, a system of enforced state-regulated sharing. Communism represents the antithesis of our enshrined national value of rugged individualism. As I reflect on the nuances of these words I begin to see what my concerns and issues about community and art might be. How do I learn to share, participate with others, communicate in a way that is satisfying and authentic? How do I accomplish the involvement with others required of community without losing myself, abandoning my desires?
If I expand my field of vision one aperture stop larger, I also ask: How does my work as an artist influence or even serve others? If I have an idea for a project in my community, how do I responsibly include the feelings and ideas of others without giving up my artistic vision? Artists sometimes have about as much sensitivity to the ecology of a community as a Wal-Mart Superstore opening in a small town. Richard Serra’s now-infamous public art sculpture Tilted Arc, which bisected Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, destroyed the common space shared by workers and pedestrians. It was eventually taken down after citizens petitioned to have it removed. Paradoxically, the irritating presence of the imposing steel sculpture may have surfaced a community that was previously unidentified. Serra never professed to have service or even consideration of the community as part of his plan. This is astonishing, considering that his enormous steel sculpture significantly altered not only the urban landscape but also the sightlines and paths taken by ordinary people. In response to the petition to remove his work, he brought a lawsuit against the government. The Federal District Court ruled against him and the work was removed (Gablik 1995, 79–80). While Serra represents an extreme example of some of the values of modernist art, it seems fair to question whether it is time to revisit the prevailing values that guide art experiences for the larger community. Suzanne Lacy asks whether or not art can build community:
Are there viable alternatives to viewing the self in an individualistic manner? And, if so, how does this affect our notion of “success”? Can artists and art institutions redefine themselves in less spectatorially oriented ways in order to regain the experience of interconnectedness—of subject and object intertwining—that was lost in dualistic Enlightenment philosophies, which construed the world as a spectacle to be observed from afar by a disembodied eye? (ibid., 81)
Lately I’ve been trying to let go of my grand schemes for saving the world; instead of making big plans, I want to deepen my trust that the Creative Source will show me how to be of service. It feels wrong to me that today’s service organizations operate so much like businesses. Even friends of mine in the clergy have commented that employing “strategic-planning” approaches to recruitment of members and other aspects of congregational life have attained a disquieting ascendancy within their congregations. Rather than becoming resigned to the hegemony of the business model, I feel compelled to look again, to consider that there is value in approaching problems from more than one angle. I seek the marginal ideas that perhaps hold energy ripe for reinvestment in the commons. Nature tells us that monoculture can’t survive, but how do new forms that challenge established models—or at least provide alternatives—come into being? The archetypal psychologist Mary Watkins tells us:
When perceived through the heart, the imaged presentation of “what is” leads to longings and imaginings of what might be. It is for this reason that cultural work on every continent listens attentively to the images—the poetry, the music, the art—that convey with passion and intensity what is being lived. We know that such listening may with grace bring into being images of the most deeply desired, utopic images toward which a community orients itself in striving. Such intense listening is like the fire that bursts the resistant pod of seeds, yielding a potential otherwise imprisoned. (2004, 17–18)
I wonder what would have happened if the unhappy workers had witnessed the Serra sculpture and appended their witness writings to their petition. Would a wildly expensive court proceeding at public expense have been necessary if Richard Serra could perceive the experience of his work through the eyes of those for whom he, if blindly and inadvertently, created it? Possibly so, considering that he is quoted as having said: “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” But my experience says that hearing open-hearted witness opens the hearts of those who hear as well. Perhaps the continued call and response of Serra’s work might have influenced his view.
To be sustainable, I believe new cultural forms as well as new forms of serving one another must allow for inquiry, engagement, and celebration. I believe that such forms can grow out of a concerted engagement with the Creative Source and a willingness to take direction from the unfolding that the Creative Source continually tells us is our natural birthright. (Do the trees “try really hard” to get their leaves to unfold? an image recently asked me.) There are an infinite number of ways to serve the Creative Source or, as Rumi says, “to kneel and kiss the ground.” I look at the different possibilities as cultural forms whose underlying assumptions must be brought to the surface through continual intentional critique.
We must also realize that each of us is called to different areas to lend our heartfelt engagement. Robert Hinkley employs his twenty years of experience as a corporate lawyer toward the elimination of corporate abuse of the environment, human rights, public health and safety, local communities, and employees (Cooper, 2004, 5). Because Hinkley has witnessed the corporation closely, he has a perspective those of us outside its immediate culture lack. He has worked to surface the underlying assumptions of corporations. The responsibility for the critique of culture falls to all of us; it is the birthright and the responsibility of everyone living in a democratic society. The goal is not consensus but multiplicity—not bland, unchallenging art, but various opportunities for engagement, for call and response, for culture that reflects the awesome differences we share.
In this chapter I examine three cultural forms of art practice that have inspired me. Each embodies art as a uniquely flexible spiritual path—having a clear intention, a different level of complexity, a different relation to commerce and community, and a different scale of meaning and influence. The stories begin to show the way in which the Creative Source works by activating through circumstance the potentials and tendencies in individual artists to come forward and step into the “big picture” with their work.
Art for Peace: Barbara’s Story
Following the events of September 11, 2001, classes were cancelled at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, as I am sure they were at many universities, especially those in large cities like Chicago where the fear of additional attacks was palpable. My friend and colleague Barbara Fish invited her students to her home to make art. With the intention simply to bring comfort, connection, and clarity to one another, this small group gathered around Barbara’s dining room table to share their fears and ground themselves in the creative process. Ever since, each week on Friday night, they have repeated the ritual. Lighting a candle and sharing food, they create images together. Their overarching intention has remained the same to make art in community and increase their awareness of their responsibility to the world. If Barbara is out of town, someone else provides the space, and Barbara observes her practice wherever and with whomever she finds herself on a given Friday night.
Anything can be brought into the image space—personal concerns, world events, work-related problems. Barbara says: “By working to regain and maintain a present and clear attitude of peace, we contribute to peaceful solutions . . . we hold the space for each other to respond to challenges creatively instead of reacting out of fear” (Fish 2003, 1). There is no charge for the group, which is called Art for Peace. People find out about Art for Peace by word of mouth. Following the first meeting, Barbara sent a note inviting everyone in her apartment building to join Art for Peace. Group members who have moved went on to establish “peace cells” in their new environments. One of the original members joined the Peace Corps. She stayed in touch with the group and let them know she had established a peace cell in the community in Micronesia where she was assigned. Participants agree it is an act of service to witness one another in this way, as well as a form of self-care. Each week they renew their commitment to living in the paradox of maintaining personal peacefulness while also remaining awake to suffering: their own, each other’s, and the world’s.
The members of Art for Peace have considered and rejected ideas of becoming larger, becoming a nonprofit organization, or moving to a public space. They maintain a simplicity and humble elegance rarely found in present-day cultural forms. At the 2001 American Art Therapy Association annual meeting, they publicly presented their work and encouraged others to create their own Art for Peace groups. Their presentation was not motivated by ambition or designed to earn them accolades, but purely to share something they have found rewarding. Barbara likens the work to the yogic practice of seva, meaning selfless service, performed without attachment to results.
Art for Peace fills a need both for spiritual practice and for public ritual, and does so without imposing any religious doctrines or political ideologies. It allows for inquiry, engagement, and celebration with those present. While new people and random guests are welcome, a few core members are nearly always present. Their commitment to each other extends beyond Art for Peace and includes helping each other out in their lives as well. Both the individual soul and the sense of community among members are nourished. What is unique and defining is that unlike the forms of established religions, which serve to hold in place centuries-old ideas and identities, artmaking—the central act of Art for Peace—allows new ideas and images to enter the culture. For example, Barbara and the other peace artists have found that while it is not always possible to take action in the face of difficult events, artmaking is calming and dissipates anxiety, allowing clarity to arise. In spite of their clear and present consciousness about painful truths, these artists do not become paralyzed or retreat from reality, but accept whatever guidance comes to them in the service of peacefulness.
Barbara’s work with Art for Peace has deepened her understanding of how art can serve as a valid, even life-saving, response to individual experiences, group concerns, and world events. Her research inquiry into “response art,” art made to clarify her work as a therapist and educator of art therapists, led her to formulate the concept of “harm’s touch,” the psychological impact upon therapists and other helpers of moving through difficult work with others. Therapists often find their emotional lives blunted by the stories of trauma, abuse, and neglect they hear day after day. And they witness not only the personal pain of their clients, but also the social injustices and pathological cultural structures that give rise to and exacerbate many of their clients’ problems. Barbara has found that making art about a client’s stories helps to contain them outside her body, allowing her to maintain a heart connection to the experience and to remain an empowered witness to her client.
Working as an art therapist on a high-security inpatient unit for adolescents left Barbara with an accumulation of painful experiences. Not only did she take in the stories of trauma told by her patients, but she also witnessed the deterioration and demise of a once highly regarded milieu treatment setting. When a new conservative political climate swept through the healthcare establishment in Illinois, the children were reclassified as delinquent and the dignity and care that had characterized their treatment was exchanged for an ethic of punishment. This resulted in the unit’s having a volatile atmosphere; on several occasions the Chicago police were called in to quell patient attacks on employees. A hospital policy directive mandated that at least one staff member of a few that the children trusted was to be assigned to the unit at all times to ensure some semblance of order and to subdue uprisings of panicked adolescents who felt unsafe in the turmoil. Barbara was among this group of trusted staff.
Despite her reports of patient abuse as the standard of care was violated, Barbara was ultimately helpless in the face of a changing system. Barbara experienced a soul-deadening malaise as drastic policy changes began to compromise her efficacy as a therapist and child advocate. Nevertheless, she was able to keep her heart open to the children during the demise of the hospital. She continued to meet with the children, create a momentarily safe space for them, and provide art to hold their stories. Sadly, as soon as the bureaucracy could arrange it, the hospital was closed and the children were removed to detention settings. Many of the patients, wards of the state, had lived on the unit for years. Barbara watched in dismay as these children—the most difficult and damaged in the state—lost what once had been a loving home space. Sweeping these children out as if into the gutter was surely an ugly act. James Hillman writes that “the question of evil, like the question of ugliness, refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness” (1992, 64). For years Barbara carried the stories of these children inside her and in the images she made to respond to them. When she began her doctoral work, she found that these images were calling insistently to her, demanding that she tell their stories, that she finish the work she had begun in the hospital with the children. She started to recognize what loss and harm she herself had sustained from the closing of the hospital, and from being the recipient of the children’s stories, images, and grief. In response to this recognition, and knowing that she needed to heal from this pain before moving on, Barbara began to intentionally excavate her soul through painting.
Mary Watkins writes: “When perceived through the heart, the imaged presentation of ‘what is’ leads to longings and imaginings of what might be” (2005). One of the images Barbara received was a hunchback figure whose face resembles hers (figure 33). She began to recognize the deforming effect that carrying around all the stories was having on her soul. Her image tells her: You hold on to too much. The lesson here is to move through your exploration. You have to let go as you move on. You can’t take everything with you. She held on to her experiences at the hospital in many ways: through her art, through images of the children’s art that she uses to teach art therapy graduate students, and in unresolved feelings in her body.
Barbara has begun to create the images and write the stories of those to whom she had lovingly attended and to see that although she couldn’t save them or the hospital, she offered them clear attention during their work together and provided the gift of a loving mirror of their worth as people. The hunchback image reminds her that her work in supervising students takes her into many dark places, including shelters and prisons.
Figure 33. Hunchback, by Barbara Fish. Watercolor.
You move repeatedly into places that are concrete containers for pain. Human suffering, How can you not be affected? Everyone is affected by the world’s pain. Most will not see it. They will wrap themselves in a paradigm that does not let them see. If you want to know what’s true, you have to see. Then you can decide what to do. You can hold it like I do and let your body twist to contain it, or you can be a conduit. Let it move through you. Become a channel to let these things move toward expression. Let your images become portals. Others can choose to learn what you know by experiencing your images. The only way not to be harmed is to become useful as a way to help these images find expression.
The image then further explains that those whom Barbara sees can’t make themselves visible; they are locked up, out of public view. If she chooses to be of service to them, she must decide what kind of witness to be: Don’t become a witness that is merely a container. You will calcify. The only way to be healthy is to be a vehicle. Witness, reflect, express. These are the three arms of response art. It happens in the process and it happens over time. Let yourself know the in-the-world part. Show your art at every opportunity.
Art for Peace continues as a support of the unfolding discipline of response art for Barbara and her fellow peace artists. As she reclaims her soul, she will perhaps follow in the footsteps of Morihei Ueshiba, one of history’s greatest martial artists and the founder of Aikido, which can be translated as “the art of peace.” Ueshiba says:
The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all that you encounter. (2002, 41)
Making Art, Being of Service: Dayna’s Story at the Open Studio Project
Dayna came into the world with a strong sense of justice and a high sensitivity to the pain of others. The central question she grapples with is how to manage being in the world without despair. As a child she managed by creating a world in her own imagination and not attending to the ordinary dissonance that occupies many young girls. She didn’t care about cliques and their mandates about clothes or activities that were in or out of fashion. Dayna related mostly to her sister, who was close to her in age, and to her own art. When other children were bullied or picked on, however, she would fiercely intervene on their behalf. Now, as executive director of the Open Studio Project in Evanston, Illinois, Dayna has found a way to integrate her imagination with her commitment to social justice.
I first met Dayna in 1989, when she was a graduate student in art therapy at the School of the Art Institute. She organized a show, Women against Violence, and invited me to be one of the speakers at the opening. Dayna was moved to create the show in response to a number of shocking events that year. A young developmentally disabled woman was raped by a group of four boys on the football team while nine others watched in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. These events and the culture that supported the boys and complained that they would be “scarred for life” if they were forced to stand trial were the subject of a 1997 book by Bernard Lefkowitz called Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb. The assault of the woman known then only as the “Central Park Jogger” took place in New York City. The then twenty-nine-year-old investment banker, Trisha Meili, revealed her identity in 2003 with the publication of a book about her experience. At the time of the attack, the public was given a story of five teenagers, boys of color, on a supposed rampage with thirty or so other teenagers that evening in Central Park, an event that led to the coining of the term wilding to describe the acts of April 19, 1989. The boys were convicted of inflicting rape, sodomy, and a beating that left Ms. Meili with permanent brain damage. Subsequently, another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist, came forward and confessed to the crime, asserting that he acted alone. Ms. Meili, who has no memory of the attack, has stated that she will never know exactly what happened. The convictions of the five boys were vacated in 2002. Finally, closer to home, a young woman was abducted at a cash station in Chicago and later murdered. She was to have interned at the same hospital as Dayna that summer; her name was Dana.
Dayna’s focus in the art show was to raise awareness about the prevalence of violence against women in our culture and to point out that it occurs across racial and economic lines, against women in all walks of life. The show was a powerful antidote to the stereotypes that were strengthened in the media following the attacks. The lawyers for the football players tried to portray the disabled girl as a Lolita who had seduced the boys. The media portrayed the young African-American and Hispanic boys in the Central Park incident as a dark force threatening the city. Dayna’s idealism in conceiving the show was impressive. But I was perhaps most struck by her organization and determination in gathering the artists and her success in drawing a large and interested crowd—made even larger by her arrangement for television coverage—to participate in a sophisticated dialogue about the issues. She found donors to cover the printing and framing costs and, at the event itself, raised two thousand dollars for a local women’s shelter. In sum, she created a forum for the idea that art can raise consciousness and change the world.
A few years later, Dayna, Deborah Gadiel, and I founded the Open Studio Project. Our intention was to make art and be of service in the world. None of us was satisfied with the art therapy approach that seeks to treat problems in individuals without addressing the social and cultural contexts in which those problems arise. The six years of the original Open Studio Project served as the laboratory in which the process described in this book was received and refined through our work together and with others. During that time, Dayna developed a style of painting highly detailed miniatures that combine meticulous realistic details with poetic narrative elements.
I and many others learned from Dayna that artmaking can be a means of staying awake to the messiness of life without going mad, and that it can help us to take compassionate right action. An important example of this comes from the experiences Dayna had with Helen, her elderly unmarried aunt. Dayna was a primary support person of Helen’s—accompanying her to medical appointments, taking her shopping for clothes, and running other errands with her. Helen, like many elderly women, was slow moving and set in her ways. Dayna, who also had a young child to care for, would at times become impatient with Helen and found it stressful to remain compassionate. When Helen eventually had to move into a nursing home, Dayna helped to choose one that was well regarded and faithfully visited her there. Witnessing the smells, depressing surroundings, and lonely residents of even this high-quality nursing home proved exhausting for Dayna. She turned to her art to hold the sadness, fatigue, and frustration that make so many people distance themselves from elderly relatives. Dayna came to the studio and poured her energy into detailed renderings of the nursing home and of Helen and the other old ladies (figure 34).
In witness writings, these women spoke both as individuals and as manifestations of the Crone, a powerful archetype:
Do not cover me up! Dag nam it! I’ve been swept into the dark corners of despair and death for centuries. I am not to be feared. I have a lot of power. I am not feeble and useless. The world needs my energy. Every time you turn your face from Helen’s fingers jabbing her dentures to get the tuna fish out, every time you try not to leave your lips on her wrinkled cheek too long, every time you avoid the rotting smell in her breath you avoid me and you can’t avoid me, no one can. Release me from this black charred heart of ash. I have something to contribute. I am in all your hearts. I lurk in your basements. I rummage in your attics. I creep into your dreams and sleep beneath your beds. I watch while you fuck and sleep and eat and live. I watch and rot and wait for you to catch up to me. You in your endless tasks, busyness, movement, avoiding me, avoiding what you can’t avoid. You better fucking embrace me and my stench and my brittle bones and my sagging skin and my reckless whiskers! Because I am your destiny. You better figure out my worth while yours seeps away with each passing breath.
Figure 34. Crone, by Dayna Block. Watercolor.
The power of these women is evident in their words. They were thus dignified by being fully seen and held, neither sentimentalized nor transmogrified, but simply witnessed in their truth.
Dayna’s witnesses challenged all of us to consider how we treat the old and to reflect on the inevitability of our own aging. These tiny images had a great impact on me as a teaching of both truth and compassion. In a witness writing I was given this practice: Whenever you see an old woman, look at her and silently bless her for her contribution to the world. You don’t know what or where it was. Notice your judgments, release them. I found this practice liberating. I began to see beauty in old faces and could imagine the spark within the soul of each old woman as a mirror of the Divine.
During our time together at Open Studio Project, we learned how important it is to the survival of a community studio program to have a connection to a local community. In Chicago, Open Studio Project was a storefront curiosity passed daily by busy young professionals who flocked into Chicago’s Near West Side to occupy new lofts and condominiums renovated during the gentrification boom of the mid 1990s. Our dream was to create a “public home space” (Timm-Bottos, personal communication, 2004) where these young professionals would work together with less financially advantaged local residents to create a vision of a community that could accommodate a diverse population. Regrettably, this never came to pass. None of us were rooted in that community, and at the end of the day we were eager to get home to our own families. We didn’t grocery-shop there, or use the library, or worry if the schools were good enough for our children.
Dayna transplanted Open Studio Project from its original location to Evanston, the community where she and her family live. Along with Sarah Laing, Ted Harris, and a host of other dedicated artists, Dayna has created a vibrant nonprofit arts and social service agency that is embraced and supported by the Evanston community. Open Studio Project now has a life of its own, providing art with intention and witness to all interested individuals. They have free and scholarship-supported programs in place for people of all ages and serve youth after school in affiliation with violence prevention agencies from around Evanston; programs are also available for women who have experienced violence. OSP is a public home space that brings people from many backgrounds together in a safe environment where they can speak and hear each other’s truth. The process of intention and witness supports individuals doing work to understand their own lives through art and writing. In addition, it supports OSP the agency. OSP’s board of directors uses the process to define the organization’s goals for growth and development as a nonprofit in tumultuous economic times. Ideas such as a universal ethic of care are implemented in planning and fund-raising as well as in the classes and workshops.
Dayna believes strongly in the power of intentional group process as a guide to creating community. A nonprofit agency is a democracy, and an art studio is a unique environment in which to practice and enlarge our understanding of democratic principles. Sharing power is a challenge in any enterprise; but, as Dayna says, when difficult decisions present themselves, OSP board members and staff can return to the studio process to reconnect to the guidance of the Creative Source and clarify their feelings and thoughts before taking action. The studio is a place where one can “just stand there” and make art until clarity arises. Making art is a process of discernment that keeps egos in check and participants grounded in their ideals. By noticing discomfort and creating an image to understand it in the safety of nonjudgment, a culture of transparency develops in which the struggle toward authentic and compassionate action is supported by all as an intrinsic value. The parameters of the culture throughout OSP are that respect for people and relationships come first. The studio process fosters an inherent belief that the Creative Source never guides us to harm one another. People involved with OSP are expected to use the process first and foremost for themselves, with the faith that doing so will allow them to participate in the community at their highest level and lead them to raise funds and manage programs in the right way.
OSP is a subtle force for good in the Evanston community. Its workers do not seek to actively change anything, but rather to lead by embodying the intrinsic values of the commonweal. Their teen participants often struggle with verbal skills, making writing and reading a witness a challenge. Dayna says: “On a person-by-person basis, we develop ways to encourage them to use language . . . access their own voices and to learn from their own artmaking process . . . there is an inherent respect for every person who participates at OSP, respect as a co-creator/artist and as a human being with something of great value to offer the world; respect as a source of genuine wisdom.” The writing and reading aloud of witnesses allows each person to tap into a place of eloquence that might eventually become accessible in school or everyday discourse or when the opportunity arises to advocate for justice. People who appear quite ordinary and even at times unappealing reveal their divine spark in their artwork and witness writing.
When I left OSP for my own community, I knew that the intensity of the day-to-day rigors of a nonprofit setting, even with the support of the process, was not my path. I am deeply grateful to Dayna for nurturing OSP into its full potential. She has, with the help of many others, taken the process into the practical realm of raising money, working with other agencies, and cultivating a viable community home space unique to Evanston. Because she is not only an “arts professional” but also a mother, wife, and active citizen, fully engaged in the life of community, Dayna is constantly able to be a witness for her deeply held values and ideals. The balanced growth depicted in the OSP annual report supports this experiment in intentional democracy. Tapping into the Creative Source for guidance makes the difficult work of living our ideals bearable, even joyous. Ever mindful that they are serving a higher value than mere self-interest, the artists of Open Studio Project, under Dayna’s leadership, thrive personally and shine a beacon of hope to all who enter their simple art space.
Amazwi Abesifazane: “Voices of Women”
I enter the Betty Rymer Gallery at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to view an exhibit of “memory cloths” created by women in post-apartheid South Africa. One hundred and fifty pieces are being showed, and all share the same elegant format of presentation. Each colorful ten-by twelve-inch cloth cloth is matted within a simple frame and contains three major elements: a visual depiction of the artist’s story, a color photo of the artist, and two paragraphs of the text of her story—one in English and one in her native language. The cloths are rendered in a combination of embroidery, appliqué, and beading. As I view the first piece and read the text of its story, my eyes fill with tears. I try to move to the second cloth but find I can’t take in any more information—my heart is brimming. The combination of the simple stitched form, the photo of the woman’s face, and the stark facts of the violence of her story simply stop me in my tracks. I wasn’t expecting to be so completely overwhelmed or to find that the project was guided by an application of intention and witness on a scale greater than any I had seen before. The gallery director, noticing my response, invites me to join a class session that is about to begin. The creator of the project and two of the women involved with it were addressing a class on African popular culture.
That was how I came to hear Lindiwe Baloyi, a longtime social activist who serves as chairperson of the Amazwi Abesifazane Committee and head of South Africa’s Women’s National Coalition in KwaZulu-Natal, and Promise Tholakele Zuma, an artist/stitcher in the project who works as an area coordinator and stitching-group facilitator for the project. When Promise speaks in her native Zulu, Lindiwe translates for us into English. A slightly built and animated woman, Promise tells us how intimidated she was when she first began to participate in the program; she did not have sewing skills and certainly did not consider herself an artist. She leans into Lindiwe, putting her hand on the larger woman’s shoulder as she expresses how amazed she is to now be helping other women and to be traveling to the United States to talk about the project. When it becomes clear that the art students attending the class are at a loss for questions to ask, Andries Botha, founder of Create Africa South and originator of the memory cloth project, explains to us his passionate commitment to the recovery of the soul of South Africa.
A well-known contemporary South African sculptor and an Afrikaner, Botha “moved away from mainstream sculptural production” in 1984, when he began to work with thatching, wattle, and wax—materials drawn from “the South African landscape” (MacKenny 2000). Tires and telephone wire found their way into his work as explicit references to the barbarity and squalor of the apartheid era. That same year, he founded a community arts workshop for disadvantaged South Africans and personally sponsored several artists. In the early 1990s, Botha served as visual arts chairperson for the newly elected democratic government, to which he submitted a proposal for the creation of a national cultural policy for the arts. In 1994 Botha founded a women’s textile collective. Home, an installation created in 1997, appears at first glance to be a generic house surrounded by a white picket fence. Inside, inscribed on the walls, are quotations from statements given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by perpetrators of violence.
Botha says: “I would like to see myself as operating in many domains as a creative person: One domain is the manufacture of objects, the other is responding as creatively as I possibly can to the emotional and societal context in which I live” (MacKenny 2000). In his quest to understand “cultural citizenship,” he has consistently examined his own identity as a white Afrikaans male. In 1998 he created South African Skin, a series of photographs that features—among other things—images of white South African men’s tattoos. The men “are defeated, but their skin carries the map of optimism or arrogant history” (ibid.).
Apartheid was instituted in 1948 and maintained until 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected the first president of the South African democracy. According to Botha, those decades of brutal oppression completely devastated the traditional lifestyle and psychic infrastructure of South Africa’s indigenous people. In the ten years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has made many strides forward, and in spite of a growing black middle class, much of the black population remains poor. The decision to forgo Nuremberg-type trials in favor of the Truth and Reconciliation model had many complex reasons. Desmond Tutu, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says: “We had to balance the requirements of justice, accountability, stability, peace and reconciliation. We could very well have had justice, retributive justice, and had a South Africa lying in ashes—a truly Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. Our country had to decide very carefully where it would spend its limited resources to the best possible advantage” (Tutu 1999, 23).
The TRC amnesty process had as its foundation the policy that if a perpetrator of political violence came forward to tell their part in crimes against their fellow citizens, whether at the behest of the government or in some other context, the crime was then completely expunged. The victims gave up their rights to pursue criminal charges or civil damages—a tremendous sacrifice. It would have been very difficult to make charges stick in many cases in criminal proceedings because most of the violence was carried out by the state, which also had the means to cover it up. In addition, unlike in Nuremberg, where Nazi criminals were tried by an international court made up of the victorious Allies, the TRC, the victims, and the perpetrators were all South African citizens who somehow had to learn to move beyond the past and live together in a new way.
This enterprise required a profound exercise of the human imagination, and South Africa met the challenge. Many models for retributive justice exist, but South Africa gave the world its first secular model of restorative justice. Such an imaginative leap was made possible by the African philosophy of ubuntu, which underlay all the TRC’s activities.
In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense. (Tutu 1999, 54–55)
When I read about ubuntu, I felt I was being given a puzzle piece I had searched for all my life. Adversarial justice never made sense to me; simply placing a wronged party in opposition to an innocent party ignores the complexity of human relationships. One party is expected to shoulder blame while the other assumes the disempowering role of victim. Neither emerges from the process whole.
A powerful underlying factor in ubuntu is the sense of how the “religious other” is regarded. Dirk Louw calls for an ideal that is a “decolonized assessment of the religious other,” and by implication of those who are racially or culturally “other” as well. Ubuntu requires that while acknowledging differences, one should fall into neither absolutism nor relativism when regarding those differences. Instead, we are called to privilege the concept that we are all, whatever our beliefs, part of a larger spiritual whole (1998). Through our relationships within this rich intersubjective matrix, we become who we are and what we can be. A related traditional African idea is seriti, an energy, power, or source that makes us ourselves and unites us in personal interactions with others (ibid.). I compare this to my use of the concept of the Creative Source, of which each of us is a part and from which we all partake of the same source energy.
Ubuntu directly contradicts the Cartesian conception of individuality in terms of which the individual self can be conceived without thereby necessarily conceiving of the other. . . . Thus understood, the word “individual” signifies a plurality of personalities corresponding to the multiplicity of relationships in which the individual in question stands.” (ibid., 3)
In my experience of reading and hearing witness writings read aloud in the studio, I have no doubt that a larger force is speaking to us and through us to each other. Additionally, through the infinite variety of images, we come to know intimately the multiple elements that make up our personalities. It is far more difficult to cast the world in reductive dichotomies—black and white, good and evil, sacred and profane—when one has witnessed apparently irreconcilable potentials, for example a commitment to peace and the ability to perpetrate violence, coexisting in oneself. It is astonishing and thrilling to discover language and concepts that have existed for centuries in Africa that support the studio discoveries. Through apartheid, the South African government tried to negate the existence of multiple realities and enforce a culture of black-and-white thinking. I feel deep gratitude for the South African struggle for liberation from this system. South Africans, black and white, have fought with their bodies and hearts to resolve conflicts with which most of us in the Western world have grappled only symbolically. We have an enormous amount to learn from the literalized version of the archetypal forces of dark and light that has played out in South Africa.
Deeply moved by witnessing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work, Andries Botha in 2000 founded a nongovernmental organization called Create Africa South. The organization’s first project was the crafting of the memory cloths of Amazwi Abesifazane (Voices of Women). Botha’s realization that “the body is the primary site of all creativity” and that a “woman’s body is the fundamental site for the recovery of a society” led him to consult with SEWU, the Self-Employed Women’s Union (Botha 2004a), about how to realize his vision. Botha believes that all people are endowed with the energy of the Creative Source. Creativity transcends the “power-drenched” assumption that people with specialized training create art that is more valid than that of people without it. Botha asks:
Why do cultural practitioners accept that the museum, gallery, curatorial triumvirate exclusively negotiates their complex thoughts and emotions as creative commodification? Why do these particularly Western definitions for cultural practice become our desired role model, purpose and value within an increasingly complex and diverse cultural world defined by unique and contested cultural realities? (2004b, 16)
Indeed, why do we unquestioningly accept the version of reality fed to us by professionals and so-called experts? Is the world not less interesting, less free, and more homogenized when all of us do not exercise our right to add our imaginative contribution to the whole? Botha recognized that the TRC retrieved accounts from a relatively narrow stratum of society and that those accounts would become South Africa’s history. This was especially true since presentations were limited to accounts in which a political motive is present or the “gross violation of human rights”—defined as killing, kidnapping, or torture—occurred (Tutu 1999, 45). This limitation was ostensibly necessary to make the TRC’s task a practicable one. But its effect was to exclude from the process of national healing those people, primarily women, who had been the most silenced and marginalized during the years of apartheid. “Images of the past commonly legitimate the present social order through shared memory” (McEwan 2003, 743).
What is striking about the memory cloths is that in response to the originating prompt—“Tell about a day you will never forget”—women relate stories not only of political violence, but also of everyday tragedies that beset the lives of people trying to survive under adverse conditions—natural disasters, family members killed by AIDS, animal attacks, local disputes, and drunk driving. Also portrayed on the memory cloths are accounts of violence inflicted by security police and, perhaps most disturbingly, at the hands of comrades in the struggle for liberation. Creating an archive that isn’t only spoken and transcribed, but also recorded through imagery and women’s craft, allows these women’s accounts to be both heard and dignified.
The memory cloth represents a melding of two traditions: the Zulu love letter (http://minotaur.marques.co.za/clients/zulu/bead.htm) and the European sampler. The former is a kind of beaded broach, usually given as a gift by a young girl to a young man, that carries an encoded message; the latter is a needlework picture traditionally made by women, embroidered with a homily or Bible verse, and hung in the home. Botha insisted that the women sign their work and that their photos be included in the presentation. In this way they become neither faceless victims to be shielded from view nor anonymous crafters from the Third World, but individual artists bearing witness to the complexity of their life circumstances.
Voices of Women has multiple intentions: to provide a forum for women to come together and tell their stories in peer groups and be witnessed by others; to alleviate the stress of life in post-apartheid South Africa, which materially has changed little for the citizens of the rural areas; and to remotivate people to move on from the past. In addition, the women learn or re-learn traditional skills of cloth work and bead work, form artists’ collectives and begin to sell their artistic products to the world market. The most significant intention of Voice of Women, however, is to create an archive to augment and complement the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite having suffered acts of violence that were often extreme, indigenous women from rural South Africa were not widely included in the TRC process.
These personal testimonies of how apartheid directly affected the lives of individual women, when amassed, become a collective indictment of the malfeasance of the system. And because they are visual and handmade, they are able to move viewers’ emotions, juxtaposing the almost childlike images created by these women against the devastating seriousness of what they depict. (Becker 2004, 3)
The history of apartheid compounded by the present HIV/AIDS epidemic has devastated the black male population of South Africa: “Women are left alone to secure the future.” But women, although physically intact, have experienced, along with the entire population, a “devastation of the soul” (Botha 2004a).
Botha hoped to respond to questions from the students and engage in a dialogue, but it seemed that they were as stunned as I was by the work that filled the gallery. He told us that in addition to sheltering Voices of Women, which he calls “a solution of the imagination,” Create Africa South is collating the poetry of Mazisi Kunene, a major contemporary black South African poet. A women’s health education class has also grown out of the work. As women sat together and sewed, it became clear through discussions that many did not have information about their bodies, their rights to self-determination, or facts about the AIDS crisis. At present the death rate in KwaZulu-Natal, the province where Voices of Women originated, is greater than the birth rate (Botha 2004b, 13). Create Africa South is committed to exploring and expressing the relationship between society and creativity by responding imaginatively to the needs of the people as they emerge.
A profound theme that comes through in reading accounts of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the spiritual nature of the work. In addition to TRC Chair Desmond Tutu, three other members of the clergy were appointed to the TRC, which consisted mostly of lawyers but also included physicians and psychologists. Archbishop Tutu recalls that they began the process with a spiritual retreat: “We sought to enhance our spiritual resources and sharpen our sensitivities. We sat at the feet of a spiritual guru, who happened to be my own spiritual counselor, while we kept silence for most of the day, seeking to open ourselves to the movement and guidance of the transcendent Spirit” (Tutu 1999, 81).
The Commission’s work ended with a retreat at Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years. Each day of the TRC began with a prayer, and the atmosphere created for the victims to testify included prayer, hymns, and ritual candlelighting in honor of those who had died. Archbishop Tutu wore his purple cassock and so stood as the archetype of spiritual leader. Called upon by journalists to justify the spiritual nature of the hearings, Desmond Tutu explained that it was crucial to the TRC process to recognize the inherent spiritual context of the task of reconciliation and healing.
The point is that, if perpetrators were to be despaired of as monsters and demons, then we were thereby letting accountability go out the window because we were declaring that they were not moral agents to be held responsible for the deeds that they had committed. More importantly, it meant that we abandoned all hope of their being able to change for the better. (ibid., 85)
The work of Amazwi Abesifazane convinces me that in the studio process we are recovering the wisdom of ordinary life, of the indigenous soul. It has been alive and flourishing in Africa, where we are privileged to see the enactment of the Soul of the World in the clash of two peoples. We are given extraordinary models of art in service to the world, not only to the individuals who have become liberated in South Africa, but to all of us. We are offered new models of justice, of politics, of creating culture and writing history. All is not gilt-edged; much is still guilt-edged. Desmond Tutu describes the disappointment of many South Africans that more white citizens do not grasp that they have much to gain spiritually from owning up to their role in apartheid. That gain cannot be claimed, however, as long as the material conditions of blacks and whites remain so stunningly disparate. Confession, forgiveness, and reparation are all necessary for true reconciliation.
Each of us must realize that whatever form our privilege takes, it is not our own; it was created through the efforts of those who came before us. In many cases, it was created at the expense of others as well. We will never grasp the gift and promise of the wonderful concept of the interconnectedness of all beings until we also accept the interconnectedness of our responsibility to one another and the world. It is my fervent belief that with the intention to open to these truths, we will be given images to instruct us in how to proceed. “If we are going to move on and build a new kind of world community there must be a way in which we can deal with a sordid past” (Tutu 1999, 278). Andries Botha gives us a remarkable model of an artist willing to engage with what is, and the women of Amazwi Abesifazane give us a model of how that that engagement can create a vibrant community that discovers its own needs and how to meet them.