THE
ARTIST AS DISTANT EARLY WARNING SYSTEM (2005)
When
multimedia artist Laurie Anderson performed recently in
Vancouver, she mused how life is often like bad art.
Characters come and go and never return. The plot changes
randomly. Entire themes are abandoned halfway through.
Unlike art, life’s point of view is always first person
singular, in the present tense. (And usually a tense
present.)
So one big purpose of art, for both the creator and the
audience, is to give life the form it often lacks. Any
artist worth his or her salt hopes to make a mark, to rise
above mere trends, even if that expectation is something of
a tall order in a culture with the attention span of a
ferret on crystal meth.
Being ahead of your time has its down side, evidenced by
the struggling artist’s steady diet of Kraft dinner and
humble pie. Prophets are rarely welcome in their own age –
partly because of their habit of figuring out something
stinks before the rest of us have even had a whiff. The
creative contributor to culture has been compared to a
“canary in a coal mine,” a reference to miners bringing the
birds down coal shafts because of their sensitivity to
toxic gases such as carbon monoxide. Any signs of distress
from the canaries was a clear sign that conditions were
unsafe and the miners should evacuate.
Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan offered a different
metaphor with a similar point. “I think of art, at its most
significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system
that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what
is beginning to happen to it,” he wrote in the sixties.
McLuhan was as much an oracle as a scholar, and it wasn’t
until fairly recently that his more cryptic utterances
began to make sense. A highly creative writer who refused
to observe the protocols of academic writing, the
University of Toronto prof was on the DEW line himself.
Sometimes it seems as if artists aren’t just registering
seismic trends with their sensitive equipment, they are
remote-viewing the future – or even conjuring it into
being. “It is well known that art will often – for example,
in pictures – precede the perceptible reality by years,”
wrote the philosopher Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. “It was
possible to see streets or rooms (in paintings) that show
all sorts of fiery colors long before technology, by means
of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set
them under such a light. Whoever understands how to read
these semaphores in advance not only knows about currents
in the arts but also about legal codes, wars and
revolutions.”
The stuff of today’s headlines is the content of
yesterday’s canvases, films, novels, and music. Fear over
mutated viruses? Check out either Michael Crichton’s novel
or film The
Andromeda Strain from
three decades earlier. Frankenstein scenarios from
genetically modified organisms? That’s a whole subgenre of
bio-horror, ranging from to Jules Verne’s
The
Island of Doctor Moreau to
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake. Computer
age dystopias, with humans going cyber? The
flesh-made-weird paintings of Hans Giger have combined
machinery with biology for years, decorating rock album
jackets and inspiring director Ridley Scott’s Aliens film
series. Domestic surveillance and virtual worlds run amok?
Pick up any of Philip K. Dick’s novels from decades back
for a possible preview of a reality we’re building with our
technical necromancy. Or go see the relatively recent films
that were based on his books, once the world caught up with
him: Blade
Runner, Total Recall, Minority
Report. All of
these productions still seem like postcards from the
future.
It’s no surprise that some artists seem to have a crystal
ball, if you consider they’re sometimes responsible for
entirely new idioms. These are often jarringly dissonant to
the “cultured” eyes and ears of their time. Igor
Stravinsky’s orchestral composition The
Rite of Spring provoked
riots when it was first performed in prewar Europe. The
music of the Beatles was considered decadent and
destructive by the balding guardians of British high
culture. Today the most shocking piece of art is the
contemporary protest song – shocking only in the sense that
it is now so rarely heard on corporate rock radio. The
music industry prefers to direct its promotional efforts on
the smoothed down, processed Pablum of mega-selling boy
bands and teen Stepford sirens. Programming behemoths like
Clear Channel, which owns 1,200 stations in the US, prefers
to not rock the boat, the vote, or anything else. But
artists like Michael Franti and Green Day still get manage
to get around the media matrix, which is still not
completely monolithic – good stuff still trickles through.
Like the lion in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, who sang the world
into existence, the best artists seem to embody the spirit
of creation itself. Even comedy has its ahead-of-their-time
visionaries, like Lenny Bruce, Australian Barry Humphries
and the late Bill Hicks. The skill of the standup prophet
is to say the unsayable, and put it such a way that
repressed energy is released in laughter.
Geoff Olson
