In suddenly darkening times like these, when it appears that our country is slipping into fascism, as our president fires tens of thousands of civil servants for disagreeing with him, halts foreign aid that includes funds to treat victims of starvation and Ebola, demands loyalty oaths to him rather than the Constitution, pardons violent henchmen, kisses up to Putin, throws Ukraine under the bus, mandates the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, defunds everything from DEI programs to the national parks, then declares himself King, all while taking direction from the richest man in the world, art can seem trivial by comparison, a highbrow distraction from the collapse of America.
But art is not trivial. Forms of government come and go, for better or worse, but the impulse to make art endures. Art is born of ideas, freedom, a love of truth and beauty. Artistic free expression is a basic human impulse, not to mention a right protected under the Constitution, which when exercised elevates the spirit and challenges the intellect. Art is the freest thing there is. Even when it’s suppressed, it survives, though funding for it may not. That will harm a lot of artists, but you can’t stop us from making art, not really, not all of us. You cannot banish us from the earth. You can’t even fire us. Most of us already work for very little; freedom wins out over profit. We are the little creatures that will hide in the woodwork and survive after the marauders pass through. The only thing art insists on is an open mind.
A recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, where the text of a 130-year-old speech has been transformed into a light installation, reminded me of all this. It was pretty comforting.
In 1893, soon after the museum opened, the first World’s Parliament of Religions convened in Chicago. Its main event site was the city’s new art museum, which was romantically named The Permanent Memorial Art Palace. The gathering assembled religious leaders from around the world for a global interfaith dialogue. There, in the museum’s assembly hall, two sets of high ideals, religious and aesthetic, married and produced a fragile offspring named optimism. A young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, delivered the conference’s opening address. He called for an end to all religious bigotry.
The text of that short speech now forms the content of “Public Notice 3,” a site-specific light installation by Indian artist Jitish Kallat. The work, now on view for a second time in Chicago, debuted at the AIC on September 11, 2010, commemorating not only the 9/11 terrorist attacks but the occasion of the original speech, which also took place on a different September 11. Kallat renders Vivekananda’s 456 words in glowing LED text on the risers of the museum’s grand staircase, in the colors of the post-9/11 terror alert system — green, yellow, orange, red — a subtle nod to the persistent climate of fear.
Swami Vivekananda’s speech was brilliantly simple, as many great ideas are. Some might call it naïve, but radical ideas are often dismissed as such. I prefer to think of it as radically hopeful. Vivekanandea makes his startling assertion about one third into the speech: all religions are true. He doesn’t explain or try to reconcile the apparent contradiction. He goes on to quote from a Hindu hymn he learned in childhood: “As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.” What this means in practice is a mystery, but his greater point is stunningly clear: All spiritual beliefs lead ultimately to truth. I would add that art, as a form of spiritual pursuit, does too.
Now is the right time to revisit these ideas. More than ever we live in a time of divisiveness and hate. It’s even worse than 2001. We hate not only “foreign” “enemies,” we loathe our neighbors. We discount each other’s beliefs, be they religious or secular ideologies, and because we believe we are what we believe, we despise each other. And when we feel hated we hate back harder with a retaliatory intolerance that is at least as vicious. Political ideology has replaced religion for many, but the fierce loyalty it inspires, the complacency it permits, and the wrath it condones are no different than religious fanaticism. To quote Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French scientist and philosopher, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Vivekananda warned: “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendent, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth, drenched it often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.” He ends with the audacious hope that the gathering he addresses will usher in “the death of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”
Well, that didn’t happen. How we on planet Earth, and by we I mean all of us because it doesn’t work unless it’s all of us, get to such a state of high mindedness I have no idea. The world seems much meaner than it did even six months ago. But even to consider the possibility is to take a step closer. Art helps. Maybe some truth-telling humor would too. Check out this classic video by Monte Python’s John Cleese from 1987.
Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.