"When you're healed..."

This week in my Art 111 class we had two readings from our book, Conversations before the End of Time.  We looked at two different conversations.  The first conversation the author, Suzi Gablik, had was with James Hillman.  Now James Hillman is interesting because, first of all, he is a theorist of the archetypal psychology movement.  And second of all, he likes to practice therapy, but he doesn’t believe in it.  When I first read that he didn’t believe in what he studies, it kind of made me feel like it was a little pointless to study it.  Why develop your life around something you don’t believe in?  That seems a little silly.  But the real reason is that he wants to transform the ways of therapists.  He wants to make is less about the individual and more about the “communal environment.”  And Gablik makes the point that this could be related to art in society right now.  Art could be less about the individual and more about the immediate environment.  The thoughts that came up were interesting.  They talked about the idea of healing the individual will ultimately heal the environment.  Hillman says that he rejects that because “when you’re healed, send me a postcard” (p.184).  But really, all that talk about never being healed?  Come on!  People need to grow up and stop complaining!  I get it if you just got shot, or you have a terminal illness, or something in your life is actually wrong.  But if you don’t like the color of your hair or your mom grounded you, or your boyfriend dumped you…  Get over it!  It happens to everyone!  We all go through struggles in our own way, but ultimately, we are all really blessed!  I mean, who gets the opportunity to go to the University of Oregon?  On a large scale, not very many people.  Who all gets to take Art 111?  Not very many people get to.  We all choose where we are going to be, but we choose to be here, and that is very lucky for us.  These thoughts are making me realize that therapy really might be dumb.  I don’t think I really believe in it either.  I think it’s interesting to hear theories about how someone might deal with certain feelings and exploring that is fun.

                This makes me think about our speaker in class on Tuesday.  His name:  Professor Dan Powell.  He is a photographer and was a constructivist in the sense that he compiled his images together and also added to them with his own drawings or markings.  His pictures, at first glance, seemed like a lot of nothing to me.  But when he explained them, you could start to notice that they were telling a story.  It was a kind of stream of consciousness.  It was a way for him to deal with his own thoughts and feelings.  Later in his work he got sick of working the lab and started going out in nature and taking physical pictures of it.

                This relates to the second conversation we read that Gablik has with Carolyn Merchant who is an environmental historian.  Merchant believes that the world will heal itself over time and this is why:  “It will arise out of our attempts to get away from the betrayals of the past, to see what has not worked and to try and make something else work” (p.243).  She continues on to say, “is may draw inspiration from other places, but these ideas will have to work in a context that is uniquely our own” (p.243).  This describes Powell’s work exactly!  He gets inspiration from the most random objects and makes it work in his own way!  I don’t know if it is just because that it’s the way his mind works.  But it seems to me now, that this all connects!

                The images captured in Powell’s work have everything to do with his mind process, which is very much Cartesian!  This process is related to how Hillman feels about therapy and art.  He ignores the idea of what art should do and asks; rather, what art should serve.  This allows the mind to think about it on a larger scale, a less self-serving scale.  Which is how Merchant believes the world will heal itself.  It will create something new from all of the previous states of the world that didn’t work.  People will recognize it and everyone will make a change when necessary.  This kind of change requires the world to be completely in tune with itself.  This deep, underlying behavior comes from the analytical psychology.  It’s recognizing something that you might not have noticed before.  But eventually, the world will get there.  One step at a time.