A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.nationalpost.com/story.asp?f=000323/239555.html
Why we need art
Adrienne Clarkson
National Post
Thursday, March 23, 2000
This is the speech the governor-general will give today at the first Governor-General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts.
What a pleasure it is for me to inaugurate these prizes for the visual and media arts! I know how much we owe their establishment to the tenacity of [West Coast artist] Tak Tanabe, the co-operation and organization skills of the Canada Council, which funds and administers them, and the desire of my predecessor Romeo LeBlanc.
These prizes now join the others honouring the diverse results of the creative imagination - that is, literature and the performing arts. Canada is a better place when such selective prizes, properly juried, duly deliberated, take their place in our national life. It goes without saying that they are about excellence. Anything in our country that rewards effort, striving and excellence is a triumph over laziness, banality and mediocrity. They add lustre to Canadian civilization.
All art is a magical activity, because even though its subject matter can be representational or abstract, it is meant to propel us to a level of consciousness that's not purely intellectual. In this context, I am reminded of what the philosopher R.G. Collingwood said 60 years ago:
"Magical activity, such as art, is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. So art is a necessity for every sort and condition of man and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own does, that it has outlived this need is wrong, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance."
In the profoundest sense, art burnishes and sacralizes our ordinary lives and gives qualitative value to each passing moment. Brushing your hair or getting into a car recalls Renoir or Colville, noticing a sunset reflecting on a wall recalls Rothko or Pratt, once you have seen their paintings and colours of these moments.
Consciously or subconsciously, you are part of that process, by which you enter the heightened world, and you see.
That is what artists do for us. That is why art is so deeply disturbing because it transforms looking, which we do from the moment we are born, into seeing.
We all need to see rather than look. That's why there is no validity to the idea that art is a frivolous frill for an elegant elite.
We need art. Those who deny this need deny society as a whole, its right to live and experience with every fibre as sentient beings. They deny the evolving humanity which makes society aspire to heights of perception. They deny the deep community that comes from sharing a vision.
We need art to learn about ourselves as we react and interpret. We need art to know ourselves. And knowing ourselves is the sound foundation of all life that develops beyond the purely physical.
Artists help us to know ourselves. You, the first winners of these visual arts prizes, are helping us. You are helping us become sophisticated in the way that Northrop Frye defined it. Sophistication, he said, is the ability to approach culture with the minimum amount of anxiety. A society that has the minimum amount of anxiety is a living, dynamic society.
For most of us who appreciate art, but do not create it, art is, in the words of Baudelaire, infinitely precious, a nectar that is at once refreshing and warming, bringing both the physical and spiritual into a natural, ideal balance.
Those who would deny us the right to spiritual nourishment by alluding to an ill-defined and, to be sure, contemptible "elite" do not understand what it is to see, to be enlightened by a vision that transforms from within. All of us can be changed, can be transformed, at any time, by a painting, a sculpture, or a film.
And whenever someone seeks to penetrate the work of the artist, that person faces a challenge. As Diderot said, when one paints, is it really necessary to paint everything? Please leave something for my imagination to contribute!
By drawing us along with them, artists make us aware that we all create art, in every action and every word. We must therefore all strive to express human emotion, to vanquish that which corrupts the conscience in the eternal struggle to be human.
We are pushed by artistic vision to a different level of experience, using the emotions we have. It is an effort that has to be made by everyone, not just specialists.
Everyone must be given the opportunity to experience the best art we produce. And the opportunities should be everywhere - in public spaces, in city halls, schools, airport lounges - and not only relegated to museums, wonderful as they are. We welcome 190,000 visitors a year at Rideau Hall, and we feel they should have the chance to see the greatest and most challenging of Canadian art.
Thanks to the brilliant initiative and generosity of Pierre Theberge, director of the National Gallery, and to the curatorial skills of Charles Hill, our public corridors and rooms are now adorned by 19 works of major artists on loan - from Morrice to Borduas, from Lawren Harris to Alex Colville. This adds to a permanent collection of Carr, Milne, Riopelle and others. The Art Bank of the Canada Council is the source for many of our contemporary works.
This is what the public deserves to see when it comes to visit this public official residence. I said in my installation speech that Rideau Hall would be open during my mandate. By that, I meant not only physically open, to more and more visitors, but imaginatively open to the spirit of every person coming through these doors. Every one of us becomes conscious of ourselves as part of this country because we are exposed to and absorb from, the work of our artists.
This is what makes life worthwhile, what makes it passionate, what makes it livable. To all of you who have given us the ability to see, to feel alive, to be more human, thank you
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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