Just Artists

JUST ART – JUST CAUSE
By Rik Leaf

If the ‘eyes are the window to the soul’ what do your eyes reveal about you? The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. (Marcel Proust)

JUST Artists is an emerging affiliation of socially active performers, producers, writers, musicians, painters and creative individuals committed to improving the world through their artistic contributions.

It is a movement in the making, where we create opportunities to view culture and the arts with new eyes; to inspire one another to become active participants in the events that define who we are and what we are running to, and not just running from. Over the last few years a number of JUST Artists have been sinking their eyes into Canadian culture; into the landscape where emerging Canadians are developing their values and beliefs amidst a constant barrage of highly manipulative sales techniques and campaigns designed to sell them an identity suitable for consumption.
The paintings we hang on our walls and the music we choose for our special events are valuable as personal expressions of who we are and how we feel. The commercial use of music and art involves identifying products as extensions of those pre-existing personal tastes, expressions and emotions.
Pop culture is certainly not the only cause, and maybe not even the primary cause of our growing disillusionment, but where it cannot undermine it overwhelms other voices and cultures. Culture creates the mainstream and the margins, marginalizing an ever increasing number of ideas, individuals, communities and even countries. Along with our loss of faith in our elected leaders and the electoral process, we’ve experienced a significant shift in how we view religion, the promises of capitalism, even optimism, but most importantly, we’ve lost faith in our own talents, ingenuity, and significance. Most of us have been fed the scraps from pop culture’s table so long we’ve forgotten how it feels to sit down and really feast on creativity and originality.

We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality…Western man is creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania. (Leslie Fiedler)

In 1999, the Foreign Affairs Department of Canada sent my band Tribe of One to Kosovo to participate in a United Nations humanitarian festival called ‘The Return’ hosted by Vanessa Redgrave. A group of university students befriended the band and shared that for the previous 10 years, they had not been allowed an education, to speak their own language, walk on the sidewalks, stay out after dark, or be in large groups outdoors. Albanian musicians were not allowed to perform publicly, and they could only be stagehands in the theatre. As we passed rows of tables selling bootleg copies of NSync and Ricky Martin, we commented on how well dressed everyone was, and asked where they had learned to speak English. They told us; from watching Beverly Hills 90210. Pop culture was able to cross into a war zone and sell its look, feel and identity to a generation who weren’t even allowed an opportunity to explore their own.                                         Two years later in the winter of 2000, after driving 15 hours straight north of Winnipeg and crossing over 35 lakes on a winter road, in –30-degree weather, I arrived at the Wasagamak First Nation Community. I was driven across the Reserve to the little radio station where I met three junior high school boys. They were playing Marilyn Manson, Korn and Limp Bizkit over the radio, and dressed like they just stepped out of a Much Music video. Pop culture had successfully sold its look and feel to these youth who were so isolated none of them had never even been to Winnipeg.
But are Aboriginal and Albanian youth allowed a voice in pop culture? They’re certainly paying the price, buying the clothes, the CDs, the magazines and watching the videos, but are they allowed to play the game? Are they empowered with a distinctive voice to share and receive their thoughts and ideas and tell their stories, or are they simply overwhelmed? For that matter is anyone empowered by globalized commercial culture or are we all just overwhelmed?

Culture is the very essence of national identity, the bedrock of national sovereignty and national pride. (Canadian Government)

In her acceptance speech at the Oscars in 2003 Nicole Kidman asked the question many people, (including artists) ask; is art relevant during times of crisis? And if it is, why is it? Is it foolish to believe that artists have a vital role to play in defining our national identity, sovereignty and pride? Maybe the answer is ‘yes’, if by ‘artists’ we mean Britney Spears and Andre 3000. What can the manufactured product pushers offer us but next year’s fashions?
Are we looking to politicians to provide a future for us? Are we looking to religious leaders? Are we looking at all? Or are we really as lazy and uninformed as some of those individuals make us out to be? Maybe the artist’s voice, or the priest’s, or politician’s is disposable because that’s how we’ve come to view our own? If that’s true, who convinced an entire generation their unique talents and abilities were disposable? Especially when our world is caught in an endless cycle of self-defeating behavior and we desperately need someone to help us imagine a better way to a better world.

The worse things get, the more vital Art becomes. Art can overcome. Art can lead the way to hope from despair.(Counterpunch Magazine)

As commercial interests have been allowed to triumph over all other interests, we have begun to lose our cultural sovereignty and certain structures necessary for a successful society. We’re losing the framework for engaging new ideas and new ways of looking at the world, along with meaningful opportunities for informative dialogue. This is where JUST Artists and our leaders need to connect if we hope to positively affect change.
We need authentic, honest, passionate individuals who have a voice and are willing to use it. It doesn’t have to be political, or philosophical, or even deep, just something honest and real and the willingness to share a moment of the journey. While there is no unanimous agreement on what art is, or what makes some art authentic, we are able to sense the difference authenticity makes in both art and individuals. JUST Artists crack the door to the emotions and thoughts we all share, and give us new eyes to see ourselves and the world around us.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is, “Stop. Look. Receive.” (C.S. Lewis)

Aldous Huxley described a process of cultural control in Brave New World Revisited, ‘it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior.’
Has nearly perfect control been achieved by corporate interests manufacturing celebrities whose sole purpose is to sell us their values and products? The fans buy the image and values pawned off by the celebrities they’re trying to emulate by replicating the look, the feel, and the sound, thereby providing the corporation with unlimited resources to perpetuate the cycle. The artists are handsomely rewarded, shit moves off the shelves, and one day you wake up and the little girl that used to be Sporty Spice, is now Britney Spears.
“Lenin takes responsibility for creating the first truly modern propaganda machine, from postage stamps and Mayday parades to monumental sculptures. Perhaps its most colorful, dramatic and original form was the poster. Through it, the greatest artists of the time proclaimed government policies, asked for support, and demanded greater efforts — all with the goal of building Soviet power. The Russian Revolution offered a clear example of how art affects social circumstances, and social circumstances affect what kind of art will be made. Artists were fully involved in the Revolution, both inspired by and helping to elucidate and convey the new ideals that this new
society was meant to be organized around. These works were meant as public education, speaking directly to the citizens, and were produced as a central part of the process of creating a new society. In this way, artists were a critical part and architect of this society, not seen as standing outside of it, as in Western traditions.” (Russian Revolution, The University of the Poor)
JUST Artists are learning to see the cultural landscape with new eyes, learning to differentiate between novelty and originality, between self-indulgence and freedom, and champion the voices in our midst whose work truly engages our imagination.
John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn – their work shaped and solidified the values and opinions of their generations on everything from war and peace to sex, drugs, freedom of speech and sexuality. Cockburn said, ‘Part of my job is to keep people awake. To remind people that there are things they need to pay attention to. Everything around us, especially here in North America, is designed to kill our senses and awareness of what’s going on.’
It was a culture of artistic relevancy banging on the door of social revolution. Compare that to the Dixie Chix sharing a personal political opinion in a concert, and having some of their fans actually drive their tractors into town to drive over their CDs. The backlash was in response to an artist daring to have and share an opinion on real life! Were their opponents overreacting, or recognizing the influence artists actually have?

We live in an age when people want to reinvent a whole bunch of demarcation lines and say, ‘if you’re a rock band don’t step across the line into news coverage, we reporters do that! I think that all creative activity, in fact, is a process of destroying frontiers. (Salman Rushdie)

Many people assume that art is nothing more than window dressing, or icing on the cake, a belief happily perpetuated by the very organizations that use its infinite worth to modify and control behavior. We have to consider that things are not going to get better unless ‘we the people’ make them better, and to do that we’re going to have to cross the line where art and artists provide the creativity that inspires innovation, and the cooperative partnerships with politicians, policy makers, industry, humanitarian organizations, service groups and communities of faith that can develop sustainable programs and procedures to implement vision. It’s not about pretending we have the answers; it’s about the willingness to learn to ask the right questions and being humble enough to have a humble beginning.

How fortunate for leaders that men do not think. (Adolf Hitler)

People invest in what they value. For individuals to invest in creative self-expression they have to appreciate the value of doing so. To be an inspired generation actively pursuing unique and innovative solutions to the problems we face we cannot afford to be passive observers sitting on the sidelines. At this point, discovering the right questions is a great beginning, a huge first step toward starting a conversation that can continue throughout our lives. Art matters when it empowers the people.
The arts enhance our lives, stimulate our creativity, and allow us to express our emotions, thoughts and aspirations through countless forms of artistic expression…people of all ages convey their values and their beliefs through artistic and intellectual works. These creative efforts communicate the ideas that shape lives. As we face the challenges of a new era, the arts and humanities will be vital to a future of innovation, opportunity and hope. (George W. Bush)
JUST ART - JUST CAUSE