Art as the Most Sensitive Seismograph of Humanity’s Crisis

Interview with Hildegard Kurt

We can think about what the future may bring and, what is even more important, we can think back from a future perspective to what should be happening now. And through the way we perceive what has not yet happened and accept it as truth, we help to shape it.

KKA: You advocate expanding the concept of “sustainable development” to include the “cultural dimension”, in addition to the endeavour to find economic, ecological and social solutions for acute problems in society. Why has culture been disregarded up to now?
Kurt: The prevalent definition of “sustainability” derives from the Brundtland Report of the United Nations, published in 1987, and reads: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” At the so-called “Earth Summit” in Rio in 1992, this concept of sustainable development was declared to be a basic principle to be followed on a global basis – even though not much has been perceived in this direction so far. In point of fact, culture and art are scarcely mentioned in the Rio documents. There are probably a variety of reasons for this. In many places, particularly in the West, the prevailing concept of culture is a very narrow one, considering culture to be a sphere detached from the world of real life. On the other side of the coin, the representatives of numerous southern countries at the Earth Summit reacted sceptically with regard to culture-related issues because they feared that the West wanted to use them as an opportunity to expand its cultural supremacy in addition to its economic hegemony.

KKA: What does art have to do with the reduction of emission values?
Kurt: As if that were the only or primary question! The physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker considered art to be the “most sensitive seismograph of humanity’s approaching crisis in over a hundred years”. Artists such as Kandinsky or Klee once tried to fundamentally reform industrial modernism from the basis of art. In agreement with Klee, the important thing is not to view the world from the perspective of finished forms, where the relationships appear to be fully determined, but instead to search for the creative forming powers. Whereas in finished forms we find only the past, the forming powers connect us with the world’s state of becoming.
The concept of sustainability underlines a specific faculty of human beings which today seems to be necessary in order for the human race to survive: Unlike all other creatures, we have the capacity not only to perceive phenomena on the basis of previous experiences and what has gone before, but also to discern their potential – to grasp what they have not yet become. We can think about what the future may bring and, what is even more important, we can think back from a future perspective to what should be happening now. And through the way we perceive what has not yet happened and accept it as truth, we help to shape it. Sustainability therefore means not only orienting ourselves on what actually exists, but also being receptive to the world’s inherent potentialities, which need this kind of awareness.
Incidentally, Klee, like Kandinsky, was a teacher at the Bauhaus, which was founded 90 years ago, in 1919. Today the Bauhaus is considered an icon of modern architecture and modern design. Originally, however, it endeavoured to achieve a synthesis of innovative art and comprehensive human development.
The radicalness that this historical avant-garde inspired has led to seriously disturbing repercussions in our time: to great suffering of countless people and countless animals, to the damage being done to everything alive on this earth. The maltreated world is crying out for us to see it in a new way. To see it with sensitivity. To think about it in a new way. To rethink our thinking. But this also requires a further development of art itself, because only an understanding of art that opens up far enough to recognise the creativity within every single human being can be capable of dealing with the challenges of our time.

KKA: What would you consider to be the characteristics of a sustainable concept of culture?
Kurt: Back in the early 1970s, the economist Ernst F. Schumacher wrote in his legendary book Small is Beautiful that when the culture of the inner person is neglected, egoism is left as the dominating force in people. Not long afterwards, Erich Fromm explained in To Have Or To Be that for the first time in history, humanity’s physical survival depended  on a “radical spiritual change” in human beings, a “change of the human heart”. The prevailing currents in the discourse on sustainability hardly touch on the “culture of the inner person”. Instead, they pursue the priorities of the natural sciences, the social sciences, economics, technology and political systems. All of that, it must be noted, is absolutely important and indispensable. But sustainability also needs a soul. For no matter how active we may be: as long as our consciousness, our inner spirit, does not develop, all our actions will bring nothing new.  

KKA: What image of humankind should education today be based upon?
Kurt: In Latin, the former universal language, humus (earth, soil) is closely associated with humanus, which means “human”, “humane”, “humanitarian” and, finally, “cultured” or “refined”. Astonishingly, we tend to overlook the fact that what is happening to the earth in the modern industrial age is also happening to our humanity.
Despite the anthropocentricity of the modern industrial age, it has led human beings away from themselves. This is because their attention is directed toward what is technologically possible, toward what is useful, what can be sold. Comprehensive humanity cannot be fitted into such compartments. Consequently, almost the only potentials that are truly nurtured in human beings in industrial civilisation are the cognitive, rational and rationalisable ones. Their deficits are compensated, according to the project of modernity, by technical efficiency. For the rest, the prevalent tendency is to degrade human beings to mere consumers, to turn them into measurable objects for the purposes of profit and power. On the other hand, humaneness is ultimately viewed as something that can be taken for granted and is available in unlimited quantities, just like the resources of the natural environment. In the end, humanity is acutely endangered and threatened – just like the soil, it is becoming a scarce commodity.
Lamentably, people also tend to operate with a truncated understanding of anthropos in the context of sustainability. Here, too, human beings are often seen far too one-sidedly as creatures of defects and needs, and much too little in their dimension of becoming: in their capacity for inner growth, their ability to develop and change. But who could possibly – and ultimately, who ought to – overcome the present misguided developments, if not the very people who caused them?

KKA: What are the challenges that educational institutions must meet?
Kurt: Recently there was a major Beuys retrospective in Berlin entitled “We Are the Revolution”. The exhibition attempted to convey Beuys’ anthropologically extended definition of art, which Beuys himself saw as his most important contribution and for which he coined the formula “every human being is an artist”. Taking that as a point of departure, we could say here: We are the evolution.
If we could become “evolutionaries” and help each other in doing so: that would be the appropriate form of “cultured, refined” – the aforementioned fourth meaning of the Latin humanus – that we need today. And the continuous education and self-education that we need in order to become human beings in the full sense of the word always goes beyond the cognitive dimension. It takes hold of the entire person and leads to what Paul Klee once called the “heart of creation”. Therefore, a society that sees itself as a community of evolutionaries will radically enhance the status of human development. It will declare the development of humanity, in a process that begins with the very young child and never ends, to be a top-priority project of society.
Educational institutions should no longer subordinate themselves to the dogma of linear, quantitative economic growth. Instead they should commit themselves to the kind of growth that leads to a capacity for change. For wherever such growth is lacking, deserts and devastation are the result.

www.hildegard-kurt.de
www.und-institut.de

About the author:
Dr. Hildegard Kurt is a cultural studies specialist and co-founder of the und. Institut für Kunst, Kultur und Zukunftsfähigkeit e.V. (and. Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability) and director of its Berlin office.