Doing an exercise from my Social Sculpture creative strategies work called , Hidden Ignored Denied, what comes up is the unspoken pain of many people’s lives because they are not doing what they want to do at work. As a person engaged in artistic work the experience of meeting blocked artists over and over again in the most unlikely places has taught me not to make assumptions about what people really are despite what they are calling themselves.
Recently I spoke with a man who was working with people engaged in trying to help the parents and children who had had to be referred to children’s services in the state of Victoria, Australia. Many devoted and committed people were working in this field and feeling utterly miserable because the forms of the institutions were what Joseph Beuys called ‘senile’ – in other words they didn’t help the various professions involved to achieve their purpose. Working with Reos Partners, they had begun to address this problem and to meet to create new forms where they were more able to work effectively.
I have met people in every profession and none who are suffering from knowing that something isn’t working and feeling helpless because they do not know how to address that problem. Not enjoying their work and knowing that it is even worse than useless, they suffer from a continual unnamed misery and anxiety.
Enter distraction! Television , comfort eating , the Internet, shopping, keeping busy otherwise I will stop and think…. My interest in creativity is to do with this problem. Creativity isn’t tied to product…pictures , songs , plays….it is tied to being near one’s core, one’s well spring and remembering what one lives for. It is tied to being able to manifest one’s potential.
Even more amazing the writer and artist Suzi Gablik says that we are discovering something as huge as was discovered during the Renaissance. The birth of reason and the beginning of the search for the meaning of what it means to be a free individual can potentially liberate us from being prey to outer authorities and superstition. However the interdependence of human beings and the cultivation of empathy both for each other and for nature means that we must be not only free but responsibly free. What Gablik states in her book, The Re- Enchantment of Art, is that in terms of being free we actually have discovered that our freedom doesn’t make us happy unless it is used in the service of something greater than ourselves. Therefore all this pain about unfulfilled working lives is the sign , the thing I want to attend to, because it is the messenger of someone wanting more.If that pain is beheld and given space perhaps it will lead to the naming of what is hidden, ignored and denied and in naming it will be possible to reimagine new forms. Then individuals may be enabled to use their potential to help and transform rather than just earn their living, only to go home at the end of the day knowing that at best it made no difference that they went to work, or even worse, that it caused actual harm.
The Peckham Experiment and its agenda to study health discovered this…not that we need more medicine but that health has a lot to do with doing something one finds worthwhile and meaningful – see the quotation below:
Axolotls are dull, stupid animals. They look like enormous tadpoles, six inches long. People used to keep them in tanks in their sitting rooms. There the axolotls blundered about, not looking, not caring, not even wondering.
Yet because they grew up, had children and grew old, people said, `Well, that’s how axolotls are and always will be.’
Salamanders are quite different. They are lively lizards, who love sun and light. They see clearly where they are going, and run wherever they please, relishing life.
One day a scientist discovered that if an axolotl is given the right food and right kind of help, it changes and turns into what it was always meant to be — a SALAMANDER!
Being Me and Also Us Lessons from the Peckham Experiment Alison Stallibrass
