Mourning Dress.
Photo by Simon Thorogood.
“And so, on Thursday 24 February 2022, we stand here again, clothed in nothing but the shreds of our lost illusions.”
Not yet out of the woods from the Covid-19 pandemic, and within the midst of a climate emergency, we find ourselves again pugnaciously roused from a commodious existence by the actions of a rogue state. At such critical moments, we are reminded as to both the privileged and fragile nature of our everyday existences.
Damaged Stock.
In such a short time, there has been so much unified castigation of Russia’s cynical and, of course, entirely illegal invasion of Ukraine, a free and sovereign state. This primitive action, belonging as it does to totalitarianism of the 20th Century, can only be denounced and will do nothing to advance any altruistic material or philosophical condition for the world.
Positively speaking, it can be hoped that this absurd and delusional act of aggression will unite peoples and governments around the world in demanding that that no state or figurehead can ever assume such imperious capacity again.
Although we have been at this point in history many times before, there has nonetheless been a dramatic show of solidarity across the world. This gives us fuel to continue to optimistically engineer agendas and enterprises that bind people and nations in progressive and mutually benevolent ways.
However, it may yet to be seen how this present assailment might actuate any forms of regression and recession for us in the years to come, and where any abrogating ramifications of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change may be further convoluted.
Whilst Russia will have to answer for its actions in due course, the West will also need to reflect upon its own point of compass and notion of global stewardship.
Whilst perhaps a simplistic view, it might be argued that the tenets of Western capitalist economies are determined by material production, free market enterprise, re-investment opportunity, and capital acquisition tied to private ownership. Yet, we might now pause to review how such mercantilism may prove temptingly malleable to those who would exploit any ‘moral myopia’ of the contented West. And, it is important to remember that these same tenets can serve both our freedoms and our repressions.
We might concede that a timeworn capitalist world model that many of us have inherited, or in which we reside conveniently, although sometimes uncomfortably so, can seemingly converge on the deification of power, influence and ownership. These are the very same things that Putin or any other autocrat trades in, although to abhorrent excess.
Open To Question.
Therefore, we can ask ourselves if we really want to renew the lease on this type of world. Whilst again simplistic, it may be the evolving domain of the arts, culture and mediums of benevolence tied to the evolving sciences of the mind that will coalesce to enhance and propel human agency.
But if this a condensed view, we can still ask if modern creativity can expedite focus on higher levels of being for humanity, through processes or media common and instructive to everyone, and that has potential to curtain acquisitive proprietorship, consumption, and hostility.
As part of any process of moral review, reflection can require time, and insight can be a by-product of hindsight. However, operations of fortitude, courage and solidarity must always underscore our thoughts and actions, and hence profoundly instruct our futures.
Wherever we each choose to pin our geo-political tail on the donkey of humanity, we would likely all agree that state aggression of any sort represents a wholly defective ideology; a crass system that belongs to precepts and business models of centuries gone by.
So, we might be reminded as to the importance of the arts as progenitor of constructive change and redress. As a purposeful framework to challenge, test, and question our world, the arts have always provided sanctuary and freedom for us to conceive, communicate and connect. Here, we can ‘be’ differently through ourselves, where we are the medium, and where we can proudly declare “today I am this painting, this song, this building, this ideal; today I embody the spirit of this nation, and today I choose not to be represented by this aggressor.”
As such a powerful tool, the arts should be emphatically championed and financed far more than they are, throughout every society, and at every level. We will need to sustain and fortify new places, new personnel, new conditions and new channels that authenticate knowledge differently and the appropriate freedoms required to do this.
The ‘question as instrument’ will remain the principal driver of wisdom and social advancement, so it is surely imperative that we further novel and adaptable ‘rehearsal’ spaces to conduct questioning, even where this may be difficult or uncomfortable to do.
Accordingly places of learning, at all levels and for all ages, will need to consider how they facilitate and apply more, not less, means and settings of questioning, more mechanisms of testing, and more measures of kindness.
But, we all must be complicit in an effort to uphold nurturing and liberated spaces in which to engage positive difference and re-evaluation. Even within places of ‘enlightenment,’ it may require further collective determination to privilege idealism over models of conservatism or reversion. It may be the philosophical (re)occupation of ‘wild’ ideas that will come to (re)determine places of guidance, instruction, information, and networking for us.
Displacement.
Dreaming has always had a direct effect on how humans think and what they do. So, as a political activity, imagination generates or evokes novel situations, ideas and experiences in the mind – variously discussed in philosophy as qualia, meaning ‘what kind’ or ‘what sort’ of subjective, conscious experience.
Imagining, then, is not just passive apprehension or act, but rather a subjective form of activism and advocacy.
For those fleeing a besieged Ukraine, as well as many others around the world escaping persecution, clothes promptly shift their status from fashionable or stylistic garments to urgent and utilitarian forms of ‘livery.’ These clothes quickly speak a different language from that we routinely understand in our own day-to-day lives. They alter a conventional narrative and convey a situation ‘there’ that the wearers wish were not true, against a situation ‘here’ in which we wear clothes to tell stories that we wish were true.
This theme is reflected in Hussein Chalayan’s ‘After Words’ Autumn Winter collection of 2000, which dealt with concepts of human displacement through regional conflict. As part of the show’s finale, models re-appropriated chair covers and a wooden coffee table, as both garments to walk away in and sole earthly possessions. This performance is being played out again as reality, as the past occupies and violates the present once more.
If we understand creativity as advancing insight, awareness and expertise, we may correspondingly experience products, outcomes and forms of ‘mobilisation’ as amalgamations of theory, analysis, process, responsibility, activism and storytelling.
Here, we might become philosophical conductors of compassionate ‘connected affordances,’ rather than as any physical manifestation of materiel, incursion and violation, that we currently witness in Ukraine. This perceptivity is not always determined through geographical locale, but always cultivated and communicated through belief and consciousness.
And, as we find ourselves, again, at a very peculiar point in history, not only must we all become more kindhearted, respectful and supportive, but cultural and learning institutions may need to become far more politically charged, energised and overtly radical. By doing so, they must learn to vigorously wrestle back agendas of ‘risky crusades’ that successive episodes of mental and financial recession may have expedited.
Indeed, this may prove necessary to tenaciously write themselves back into the conceptual and humanitarian blueprints of the future, essential to the (re)construction of all our tomorrows.
