By Alex Robson, Senior News Editor
Prior to the Labour Party’s success in the latest UK General Election, recent political agendas strived to diminish the arts and creatives alike. Through the medium of culture wars and a lack of funding, Conservative Cabinets of late have managed to destabilise and disestablish the society of the arts. Both creativity and counterculture have been rendered unattainable. But what effect does this have on our society? How can societal truth be found within the arts and, more crucially, counterculture?
At the steps of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, I stood, with this exact question, with the hope that, perhaps, I could find a suitable answer. Neo Rauch was, at the time, an unfamiliar name to me, however, his paintings quickly became revolutionary in my mind’s eye. It seemed that understanding and appreciating his work is seldom realising that countercultural ideology and the desire to challenge the status quo are but distant memories. Perhaps, we are in a time where this truth is lost on us, slowly decaying into dust, eager to be swept away by a passing politician. Nevertheless, my focus, at the time, were the powerful and complex scenes that Rauch was serving me, one after the other, forcing a feeling of somewhat artistic gluttony within me. One painting stood out in particular; ‘Konnen Wir Zum Wachsten’, (Let’s Move on to The Next One). The piece, done solely in oil, presents a colourful depiction of a public execution, within a desolate and decaying town. Its characters in sorrow, illustrating both the chaos, through colour, and the futility of life. His work, most notably here, intertwines both Renaissance and Neo-Classical art. Though a complex and elegant piece, its beauty,lies in its anonymity. This painting, being the centre of my cornea, is not an ode to a time passed by any means. It serves as a reminder that there is always more beneath the surface, more to question, more to understand, so why now, because of the desecration of the once noble arts industry, do we no longer search for what lurks outside the box?
Rauch, for hours, had been practically clamouring at me to question the disingenuous mainstream narrative that I, like many of you have been forced to obey. Perhaps then, the real power of Rauch’s work is that it does not just depict the world as it is- or the harnessing of our collective chaos. It quite simply implores you to think critically about rejecting indifference, and the beautiful truth that follows. Moreover, in the crippled dominion of culture, Rauch, like many of his contemporaries before him, goes largely unnoticed, yet he is a figurehead of the counterculture movement in art. He himself is a representation of the dying quality of uniqueness.
The beauty of creativity is finding balance, indeed consulting the status quo but also having the guts to challenge it. We find that the multifaceted meaning of truth lies within this sector of living- in Rauch’s work, in Dylan’s lyrics, or in Kerouac’s prose- it ignites the passion for truth, however unjust it is or how unwilling we are to hear it. What defines creativity more than one’s passion? Indeed, we creatives can find solitude in that notion, perhaps counterculture and the arts are not a vessel for obtaining truth, but, what is the harm in finding out?
Image: Neo Rauch, ‘Kommen Wir Zum Wachsten’ (2005)