Art and Identity

Ok, so this semester I'm going through a book called "The Artist's Way" with a small group of selected students, each of whom responded to an invitation and each of whom shows some artistic promise, or creative impulse, and I thought it a good idea to nurture that, or to have some project close to home at my job. Now, there've beeen some challenges. I scheduled it in the morning during home room. Some students have test prep in their home rooms and couldn't make it. Another student was out. Another was depressed, talking to his counselor. So that left two for the first meeting. We'll see how this week turns out. But there was an underlying issue that day as I prepared an introduction for the group. What's the point? Why engage in art and foster a creative sensibility? Do I do that because it's my personality type? Some pre-disposition? Without coffee and with quizzes to write that day I couldn't come up with a satisfying answer. But a student read me one of their poems and my response to him hinted at an answer. If you engage in this process, art can both destabilize and solodify. It can subvert and convert. For us Westerners, this means becoming rooted more deeply in an integrated vision. By this I mean the default world we live in, call it a technocracy, corporatocracy, advertocracy, what have you, is prone to tell you who you are by what you want, and it sets the framework for your choices, telling you what you want, and then setting up a profit system around it. Identity lies at the heart of marketing. And for us, identity is mostly framed by desire, by what we want. And what do kids want, right now? Not much. That is, it falls along a fairly narrow range of choices, as it usually does: something Hello Kitty related. Tom's shoes. The latest smartphone. etc. What does it mean that something is "in" right now? It means a certain set of objects and products are widely desireable right now. And that desire is cultivated by advertising. It is a parasitic force that seeks to channel your thoughts and energy. And with the shifts from phone to laptop, to car radio, to three shots-per-second TV shows, our attention spans are so short, the information we absorb in a single day so great, what we lose is memory, rootedness. Art provides a way of recovering memory, of recovering identity, a process of genuine self-discovery, rather than the vapid "extreme makeover" offered by advertising culture. I was struck earlier in the year that one of my students, who lives apart from his two younger brothers in Guatemala, who undertook a long and arduous journey at the age of ten with his mother to come to America, struggled to learn the language, battled a serious disease, lives in a crime infested area, and manages to pull in A's and B's in honors classes describes himself as "basically an average American teenager." This extraordinary kid sees himself as anything but. He seems to have no sense of context, of awareness, of identity. Now this could have a lot of causes, but at least part of it is that he knows he wants the same things as other American teenagers - a good education, a good job, a nice car, a nice house, a nice cell phone - material prosperity. Which is fine, but when that becomes the totality of a person's identity, as it seems to have become for some, there's a problem. Now with the population I work with, this could also be a case of just wanting to fit in, to not be seen as outsiders, of being accepted as equals, of wanting to be "basically an average American teenager," instead of, say, an average Guatemalan teenager. It could also stem from lack of exposure to the lives of "average American suburban teenagers." But art can step in here and solidify the sense of identity, of connecting to richness of cultural roots, of family, through preserving memory. How do you cultivate a desire for this kind of awareness, to become more rooted, less prone to the Sturm and Drang of advertising culture, which tells you what to want by telling you who you are? I think by letting someone taste that kind of water, or at least leading them to the well. Of course there are a million other directions to take this - art allows you to process your relationship to the world, art preserves cultural values, art questions and comments on culture, art deepens the soul, gives access to the sublime, art allows us to participate in the divine through exercising our creative impulse, or for some people, serves no practical purpose whatsoever. I'm trying to come to grips as to why I'm forming this group n a communicable way. The route of paideia, of forming personhood, identity, in a culture that wants to form it for you. That seems good to me.