60 years ago a Canadian academic published, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The content is kaleidoscopic and collaged, not jargon impenetrable like Judith Butler, but laced with interesting and prescient ideas and a hope still unfulfilled. Yeah, yeah, we all know the ‘medium is the message’ of Marshall McLuhan but I’m more interested in a short passage about art…
No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.
In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah's arks for facing the change that is at hand.
The ark never arrived. We are drowning in the dumb and the terrible and how does an artist lifeguard this maelstrom today? Art in the 1960’s was focused on another of Marshall McLuhan’s idée fixe, the figure/ground relationship. Abstraction steamrolled the ’figure’ as it became the content of the medium and the ground as the medium itself. This parallels McLuhan’s aphorism and his emphasis on the ground/medium as preeminent rather than the mistaken value given to the figure/message.
In drawing over the past 3 weeks we have been addressing the flatness and depth of the ground in relationship to the figure. But what we have really been doing is trying to pick up the thread of McLuhan’s 60 year old words on a page… figure/ground. The primacy of drawing the figure instead of the apparatus of space, even when the task is defining the space is the narcissism of extending ourselves into the world like the sun circling the earth.
"The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.” Wyndham Lewis
These are words we need to live up to, because we can’t know the ‘nature of the present’ if we are blind to the world we live in, if the patterns we see are the emanations of effects flitting across screens masquerading as meaning.
“If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.” Marshall McLuhan
I think McLuhan’s ‘last best hope’ view of art is right, ofcourse I do, I have a dog in this race, but I hope you do too.