'Crisis and Creativity'/ Ingrid Rzechorzek

Ingrid is a graduate of Geography and Spanish and Latin American Studies whose academic interests rest in the intersectionality between the arts, ecology, and sustainability. Her creative and personal pursuits are characterised by critiquing the frontier between the artistic world and public policy - exploring ideas of ‘belonging’ and ‘place’.

Crisis and Creativity

As a global community that was already teetering on the edge of imminent economic recession and universal social crisis, the recent seismic societal changes engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic have forced us to readjust both individually and collectively, in ways most of us never imagined. The outbreak has given rise to personal and global instability, fear, uncertainty, and physical danger. But what is also evident is that the need for an immediate response to these problems has brought with it a heightened focus on solutions that previously might have been regarded as too costly, too impractical, or simply too difficult. We are witnessing an accelerated application and diffusion of digital technologies, micro-level social and political initiatives and critical reassessments of former resource-intensive societal paradigms. Indeed, the very methodology of science is under revision. The blueprint to navigate from this crisis is largely one of uncharted territory, and many of the interventionist measures that now govern our lives are still yet to provide a satisfactory sense of security in order to ensure a return to normality. Nor can we adequately conceptualise what this ‘normality’ entails as we cautiously, perhaps impatiently, emerge from our bubbles. Covid-19 is not an abstract threat, as some gun-toting citizens around the world seem to imply. It is anything but discriminant and distant: none of us really have the freedom to opt-out or redirect our gaze elsewhere. Although the way we experience isolation, fear, quarantine, and general existential angst differs vastly based on our degrees of privilege and from one individual to the next, it is undeniably happening to every person on the globe right now. Our once frenetic and outward-facing lifestyles have now recoiled inwards and changed our quotidian cycles of consumption and production.

Social isolation has revealed to us the necessity of human connection and its enormous contribution to sustaining individual and communal welfare and purpose. This connection has creatively revealed itself in many forms; via socially (media) distanced music festivals, bedroom concerts, live-streamed quarantines, virtual gallery exhibits, and even in the act of Zooming, where we are situated in grids connected via our metaphoric boundaries. Necessity has provoked the creativity that has connected us in new ways, which will be crucial to our emotional recovery from this pandemic. Many of us, even those not directly connected to the creative industries, have resorted to the consumption of art throughout the long and tedious lockdown. A raft of new or rediscovered activities have taken centre stage; binge-watching, streaming, reading, listening and playing music - our metaphoric compatriots throughout isolation. Our arts and cultural industries have served all of us as vehicles for connection and social cohesion. They are essential to our consumptive preferences, social participation, and the style of life we value so highly. The art that we are bound to consume in the coming months will not solely fill the void of our quarantine, but also, provide us with a sense of meaning.

Though vital, the benefits of our artistic consumption are fragile as they rely on the precarious ‘gig economy’ environment. The role art serves in our lives clearly demonstrates the intrinsic value of the creative sectors and yet, the individuals, organisations, venues, and infrastructures situated to bolster this industry and sustain artistic generation are too often snubbed from policy or deemed ‘non-essential’. The value of the arts in the Australian context remains suspended in limbo; whilst we all directly or indirectly reap its benefits, the omission of the artistic sector and activities of roughly 600,000 creative workers from Australia’s largest $130 billion economic stimulus package evinces a warped political disposition.

Prior to Covid-19, the Australian artistic industry was already on the brink of crisis as a repercussion of compounding austerity measures which changed the ways we mobilise, experience, and consume the arts. Since the global financial crisis, the arts and cultural sector have operated in a landscape fraught with tensions and contradictions, contesting the commercialisation of intellectual property, funding cuts, and the challenge of ‘proving the case’ to justify public expenditure. More recently, the Department of Arts was absorbed into the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications on a federal level, essentially rendering the entity invisible. The consequences associated with relegating Australia’s artistic industry may be protracted and compounded by the possibility that while we might ‘see this virus off’, there is no telling when or where the next will emerge. Merely months into the crisis, the pandemic has already altered how we conceive of art, with many creatives exploring the little acts of charity and cruelty, shortcomings of governance, technology, and ideology.

What can we take from this experience? What’s to be learnt about the relationship between living through crises and creating? The artistic interpretation and expression of ‘crisis’ are integral to understanding its contingent historic milieu, as the creative imagination fundamentally engages in social reflections and debates surrounding historical circumstances that configure discourses on social reality. Historically, ‘crises’ have functioned as referential points that provide a framework of understanding for all artistic works that succeed them. They provide grist for the artistic mill via content, inspiration, personal and philosophical reflection - an abundance of things to communicate from depressing apocalyptic scenarios and uplifting depictions of hope, connection and love to benign and semi-sequitur depictions of everyday life. The conditions of our current Covid-19 epoch reinforce all these elements; the importance of the intellectual and the relevance of cultural critique, the abundance of inspiration for artistic explorations on time, identity, society, and the self-reflexivity of society and its foundations. To envision how art will materialise in a post-Covid-19 world, it is noteworthy to reconsider the legacy of past pandemics. The 1918-1919 Influenza pandemic (otherwise known as the Spanish Flu) dwarfed the death toll of World War I and yet, has since faded from cultural memory and yielded scarce artistic expression. The human inflicted violence of war transmits a glamorised typology of sacrifice and valour, patriotic elements more central to artistic and literary works that characterised the twentieth century. War externalises, whilst disease is internal corruption, we are the contagion. The viral incarnation was ethereal, microscopic, concealed. War, by contrast, unfolds in a domain more accustomed to visibility. It is detectable, palpable, more ‘worthy’ of our grief. Thus, for much of the twentieth century, the afflictions of pandemics past appear to be omitted from the cultural radar.

So, moving forwards, where does this leave our creative and artistic industries? Naturally, art will endure. That is needless to say, as art and the creative spirit is more profound and expansive than the entities that sustain it. Unfortunately for the creative sector, arts legislation in Australia is subject to the whim of cyclical ruling federal governments, and in light of the recent policy changes, reveals a lack of unanimity in the need for a robust cultural policy. As one of my fellow creatives put it: “People assume ‘arts funding’ means, like, a bunch of people with like, berets on, talking about abstract expressionism, and not, like, Australian TV shows and movies”. In spite of ongoing government neglect and increasing funding cuts to the artistic industry, the eccentricity, risk, and resistance innate to the industries’ creative capacity has enabled an almost seamless collective manoeuvre to the virtual interface. Those who originally petitioned for the Arts funding cuts are undoubtedly, in some way or another, benefactors of its value. Funding cuts will impact everyone, but the arts are so incredibly important, particularly in these times of crises. 

Assuming our short term memory does not allow us to completely forget the 2020 pandemic and revert back to ‘business as usual’, I believe that we will diversify our human pursuits to shift the balance away from prevailing material and economic paradigms towards more grounded pursuits that embrace the arts and creative industries. This crisis also gives rise to philosophical questions regarding human purpose and meaning, evoking Nietzsche’s maxim that necessity is the mother of invention. Creativity often emerges out of a crisis; a failed love affair; a death; so rather than retreating from crisis, conflict, struggle, challenge, we should (and do) use them to overcome, not through triumph over adversity but through an energetic confrontation with it. Art plays its part in this; indeed, it is one manifestation of it. Whilst we may draw the conclusion that crises can serve as powerful tools to springboard artistic explorations on social reality, the suffering of all those severely impacted by the crisis should never be backgrounded as we abstractly discuss the role of future art and artists. Yet, this is the situation we find ourselves in and historically, as Nietzsche says, we tend to find ways to overcome and grow. 

Painting by Maya Irving

Instagram: @mayaairving