Art As a 'Helpful Fiction'

It's noble to be an activist artist, but both activism and politics and the art itself can cancel each other out. An artist who had been popular in another time, and subsequently became an activist later in life, cancels out their body of work. New work that they create, which might not be political at all, can diminish the activism. 

If one decides to be an artist activist, the art should not overshadow the activism and vice versa. The latter is crucial if the artist wants their legacy to be as an artist. It's a delicate balance and can be powerful if done successfully. 

As Andy Clark wrote in The Experience Machine, art can be a "helpful fiction": 

"Fictional worlds provide one small, much more easily manipulated, lever for change. We humans do much of our learning in media, advertising, and entertainment.  We read books and see movies, we play video games, some of which may involve immersive virtual realities combining passive perception and real-world action." 

But what if creative activity arises spontaneously because we've gotten a clever idea we want to explore, tangential to what we believe is "helpful", or the art we should be making as "activist". For me, creativity is more free-spirited and its meaning is more emergent from the random elements that accumulate during its making. What might have been a random idea can become "helpful" or didactic over time. Or it can arise naturally from the times in which the artist lives, such as the Dada Movement during World War I, which wasn't a situation where artists were in an aesthetic mindset as they were in the 1960s. There was just as much angst in 1968  as there was in 1918. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol weren't activist artists. 

It may have to do with an artist's constellation of archetypes. 

If someone has the artist archetype, they won't necessarily be effective activist artists. Think Ai Weiwei versus Anish Kapoor or Jaume Plensa. In music, Bruce Springsteen can easily be both activist and aesthetic because he might have a warrior archetype, but others might not, and their activism might not be effective. In the 1980s Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Paul Simon became activists with varying results. U2 were activists with very varied results because their focus was most clearly on art. For me, it's always the latter because I work in series. If I'm in the middle of a series (such as the current Songdays, I'm not going to go into activist mode because I feel I should in the moment--although it could emerge inadvertently. 

"Advertence" is a good word because it defines what your primary intentions are. Working in series seals intentions and defines the arena for creativity, and anything beyond that is just inadvertent, or a one-off. If the one-offs start to form their own series, then that's more effective. An inadvertent use of a certain kind of imagery or visual vibe for purely aesthetic purposes can be a cunning way to suggest activism. It's  not that you've said something, but rather what you might seem to be saying. 

Excerpt Library (Psychology): "Discuss the role of the artist as activist"