Topic: The Relationship Between Art & Morality
When: Sunday, Nov. 10 at 5pm-7pm
Where: at Lavonne’s in Kalispell. She plans to make a pot of chili. Sabine is bringing guac and chips. Feel welcome to bring drinks or dessert to share as you like.
"The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later [...]."
- DH Lawrence
Prep materials (try to glance over each of these ahead of time so we can all pull from overlapping materials & go deeper in the convo):
Here is an introductory overview that may be helpful to conceptualize the long conversation thread about art and morality: https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art/Mixed-positions
Nia's contributions (this was her topic suggestion):
This piece by Anna Brones on art and resistance (the meat of it starts way down, and it's always worth reading that Le Guin speech in full!): https://creativefuel.substack.com/p/resistance-and-change-often-begin
Lavonne's contributions:
The Blue Riders (Der Blaue Reiter) in Germany: https://www.artelino.com/articles/the_blue_rider.asp
The Bridge artists (Die Brücke) in Germany: https://www.carredartistes.com/en-us/blog/die-brucke-the-emotional-bridge
Mitch's contribution:
When I first read the topic title I went, immediately, to sculpture and painting. Reading the Britannica article, I saw that it focused more on literature, which would be easier to discuss (along w/ music lyrics). I imagine that spoken and written art is where the most robust discussion will come from but, regardless, I am curious about the earliest indigenous visual art and it’s ties to morality…to start at the ‘beginning’. I did not find many materials on that. If I find some good references to site at banter I will reference them but, below, is a short synapsis of my meandering thoughts and opinions.
The first carvings, paintings and sculptures seemed to be made, largely, to venerate leaders, hunts, battles and gods, or, to associate and identify with a particular tribe, family or custom. With no photography or written language, visual art may have been, largely, a way to keep people, stories and the historical record alive. With those visual depictions, there must have been moral stories told over them that dealt with messages on good (and bad) leadership, ethical hunting and harvesting, stories of encouragement and admonitions from the gods, fables and stories for children and adults to conform to the moral standards of the tribe etc…but the earliest examples of these stories have not been recorded in writing.
Pre-historic visual art was also used to understand the world, astronomical events, weather and climate patterns, growing seasons, the location of water and food sources etc. Science and religion were more intertwined so, inherently, there were likely moral stories associated with most visual art that depicted natural events. That said, early peoples may not have even viewed ‘morality’ with the same individualistic lens as we do today, putting that in the hands of the gods or the customs of the group. Lastly, I wonder if the earliest human visual art, at least that on public display, was allowed to be ‘in the eye of the beholder’, or, if elders and spiritual leaders were responsible for interpreting any moral messages contained within them to the people.
The moral stories associated with visual art of the distant past has been lost to time, but I would imagine that much of that art was also just 'art for arts sake', following an innate human need to express creativity, arouse emotions and to show pride and belonging to a community. Like today, a lot of early primitive visual art may have just been for pleasure, decoration, and to express identity. Wherever early visual art, alone, lies on the spectrum between conveying pure aesthetics to moral stories, our ability to write to it, or about it, probably changed how we view both art, and morality, dramatically.
That was a lot of ‘fluff’ but, hopefully, some fodder for discussion. To wrap my head around the topic I fall back on the earliest forms of visual art and how it may have changed or evolved to convey moral messages. The earliest writing dealt with accounting, politics, laws and religion…all of which contain ‘morality messages’. From that time, since, I feel like, as modern humans, we can ‘read morality’ into almost any form of written art. Visual arts, like painting, instrumental music and sculpture, may simply be art forms that can be more purely aesthetic, and less tainted by moral messages than the written or spoken word?
Blase's contributions:
I'd like to offer the following conversations to our conversation:
Lyrics, in case anyone can't make it through the 1:30 of the (above) song.
And this poem.
They might be more alike than not.
Sabine's contributions:
Six minute video of two photographers' works side by side:
- Calls into question whose morality? or the overall problematic nature of morality in general to be, at times, directly tied to oppression even in the hands of artists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFBh2tTWc5A&t=286s
Short, corresponding article that will help situate the context and problematic moralism of Edward Curtis' photography of early 1900s' Natives: https://www.cascadepbs.org/2018/06/viewing-edward-curtis-photos-through-todays-lens
