Art??!! What is it good for??!!!
Two articles in today's Guardian G2 section between which I though there were some resonances about what art should be like/for.
Interview with Wole Soyinka*, whose play 'Death and the King's Horseman' is being produced at the National. About which:
His starting point... was a vivid episode from western Nigeria's colonial period, in which a British district officer intervened to stop the horseman of a dead Yoruba chief committing ritual suicide, as tradition dictated. Stylised and poetic, Soyinka's play explores the gulf in understanding between the horseman, who happily accepts his fate, and the Dickensian district officer, who views this potential suicide as barbaric.
Nonetheless, Soyinka says of the play:
He resists the suggestion that Horseman is an essentially political play. In an introduction he wrote when it was first published, Soyinka issued a stern warning not to interpret it as a "clash of cultures" piece: "I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency." He still stands by this. "At the time," he says, "the tendency - in the theatre, the cinema and the novel - was to present everything that dealt with things outside western culture as being understandable only as a 'clash of cultures'. This covered everything, and it encouraged analytical laziness."
He was not an angry man when he wrote the play, he says, only irritated, in much the same way that he was irritated by that bust of Churchill on a Cambridge staircase. What he hoped to do was find an objective authorial stance and get inside the mind of his characters. More important than depicting cultural oppositions was his desire to create a space where cultures could come to a greater mutual understanding.
This for me resonated with something in this article about female performance artists The Muffia, in which Viv Groskop makes the following to me rather obtuse comment:
[T]heir performance art is not entirely serious: they seem more interested in provoking a reaction than making a defined statement.
which seems to me (ambivalent though I am, a bit, about the work of these artists, even if they do remind me of the dear dead early 70s) to be Missing The Point by a mile at least. Art is supposed to evoke stuff in the audience (emotion or questioning or whatever), not to provide the audience with neat pat slogans.
*I was also somewhat amused at the undercutting of the pernicious 'natural rhythm' trope in his experiences with the Chicago production with an African-American cast, who had to be carefully trained to move 'like Yoruba Nigerians'.