Art's value includes some pain

Since cavemen painted on rock, art has been essential to mankind. As common as man’s challenges, joys, and inclinations is his persistent need to express himself.

That need is not mere chronicling. It is to visually dream and explore. To merge fantasy, fear, and imagination. To push boundaries.

Even cave dwellers did this, depicting not only their daily lives, but also the stars, figures in the stars (early gods?), and as centuries passed, more elaborate imaginings.

This is art. Art is not meant to reflect reality so much as to explore meaning. To tell a broader story and make concrete our wildest thoughts, fears and hopes in ways mere words could never accomplish.

Sometimes, artists do that by confrontation. Because sometimes, only shock and awe make us explore every corner of the mind.

That instinct to express drives mankind’s creative side. That creative side is what leads to invention, better problem-solving. It is part of who we are, because creativity is necessary to survive. If we functioned only on what we directly experience, we would accomplish less, overcome less, live not as long.

What good is evocative art? Is it meant merely to offend or upset? No, and yes. A landscape painting is nice; a Madonna and child, beautiful. It’s true most of us only want the peaceful stuff in our homes.

But if all art evoked only good feelings, how would we grow? Think of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (often misattributed to Van Gogh). Even non-art fanatics recognize the haunting image of raw fear. Or is it despair? That depends on who’s viewing it. Art can help us explore, confront, and yes, even cope with our innermost depths thanks to the emotional process it arouses.

So I come to the hammer-and-sickle image on the controversial art installation recently removed from a Riverstone park (reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s hammer-and-sickle series of the 1970s).

Does a sculpture in a public park mean locals approve of communism? That answer is as obvious as its irony; this is the hardly the “red” normally associated with North Idaho.

And like the appropriated swastika, for most a symbol of hatred and atrocities in WWII but with an ancient history light years away in meaning, this symbol didn’t begin with Soviets. Freemasonry, Hinduism, and ancient Aryan and Slavic mythology are all part of these crossed implements.

Before it was chosen to illustrate the unity of rural peasants and common laborers, a crossed hammer and sickle, hammer and rake, or a hammer and pitchfork, plow or other agricultural tool had been associated with workers all over Europe. Innocuous enough, and not ideologically suppressive. Meant in fact to be empowering against upper-class oppression.

Yet, when symbols become an emblem of harm, to shield or incite injury, we must also resist using free speech as an excuse to implicitly allow it to continue.

But the sculpture that spent three years at Riverstone was not a political exercise of speech. It was art. Unlike political emblems, art is rarely directly representative. Its message, if it has one and if it can be divined by anyone but the artist, is unlikely simple. Nor does that matter, because its meaning changes from viewer to viewer; we see in art partly some reflection of ourselves.

That’s part of art’s value. It does different things for each who experiences it. It’s never 2+2=4.

Art asks, is 4 enough? Is it too much? Why do you need 4, and why don’t I? Has that changed? Sometimes, it’s not even four. Two and two may combine and combust and chemically alter so that two and two become one wholly new, indescribable thing.

If that sounds ridiculous to you but obvious to me, we’re both right and we’re both wrong and that, too, is art’s value. The exercise of thought is the point, more than the result.

Beyond feeling offended at that which makes us uncomfortable (which is itself valuable if we scrape the subconscious bottom of the “why” barrel), this has become an opportunity to publicly explore the depths of our feelings, not just individually as one might in a gallery, but together as a community.

To reject and defend. To embrace, compare, and analyze anew our viewpoints, interpretations, history, current events.

As well as, perhaps, compassion. After all, an evocative symbol should remind us not only of a philosophy or politics, but those who live under it. Of how any political ideology which begins morally — such as the rise of the laboring underclass the hammer and sickle first represented, a revolution and rebellion against elite, upper class oppression — can also be taken too far. Of how an extreme or rigid approach can harm people with an “our way or the highway” mentality.

Taking such explorations further, there is a useful lesson in this controversy. Intolerance of alternate viewpoints, especially when espoused in law and concentrated power, is one of the worst things that man can do to himself. However right it may feel, or innocently it begins.

So while this particular sculpture no longer greets park visitors, its impact looms as large as our offense, contemplations, and imaginations take even those of us who never saw it.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who is grateful to artists who stretch the muscles of imagination, emotion, and perspective, as much as artists who evoke the inner peace we all crave. Email: Sholeh@cdapress.com