What Are The New Mythologies?
LEDA AND THE SWAN
Acrylic, oil stick, pen, string, and safety pins on canvas 36’ X 48’.
Until recently, we still wanted to believe in individualism, in the story of the hero who defeats overwhelming odds to bring home the prize. We could see—and maybe we still can—the modern re-tellings of the ancient myths. Orpheus and Eurydice: the lover who will give up everything for his beloved, but still he is helpless to change Fate; Herakles and the twelve labours, doing the impossible as voluntary suffering and conscious labour.
Meanwhile we look around and see what the content of our lives is. narratives of journey and survival and visual metaphors of healing. Victims of zombie-like changes in everyday life, cultural genocide, personal trauma and abuse, rapid acceleration of technologies that threaten habitat and take away the quality of life from many people, new ways of controlling people and keeping them asleep through advertising, propaganda, popular music, and television. Meanwhile poverty, illness, fear, and anxiety do not lessen.
How do people cope? What are the narratives of struggle, resistance, and discovery? How do people heal from all the violence and loss? Too many questions.
Traditional myths and fairy tales provided us with stories of people who relied on their basic goodness and help from magical sources, like fairies, gods, enchanted animals. Such stories do not work any more as sources for art, except in a dream context. We need myths that help us cope with the real threats we face.
But we can learn something from ancient mythology that is relevant to contemporary life. In all ancient myths, individuals are connected to much wider systems and family groups that were used to in modern life. For a hundred years or so, we have been all about alienation. But in the Greek myths, for example, what one individual does or suffers affects generations still to come in complex ways. The god Zeus, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda, , and suffers no consequences because he is a god. Generations later the ten-year Trojan War begins as a result. The lines of causality are complex and sometimes unclear on first sight but they are definitely there, and the epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey are created to tell their story.
What does this have to do with art? Sometimes we need to change the way we seeing order to see something new. Mythology in a modern context has to do with the governing ideas that control our thinking and feeling from their perch in the Unconscious. We have to open it up to get away from the Us and Them scenario, or from the Nature is our playground scenario, or from the let’s kick the crap out of the viruses scenario. Our human domain extends far beyond our skin, and therefore our responsibility too. So all these things—violence, cruelty, heedlessness, stupidity, viruses—are all a part of us. In the greatest cycle of plays in the ancient Greek world, Oedipus has to suffer the terrible realization that the plagues affecting his kingdom come from his “innocent” but unspeakable crime of having murdered his father and married his mother. The set of plays is not just about incest; the incest represents a core blindness and arrogance.
By pushing the boundaries of what we call art from just copying Nature to exploring the inner tributaries of personal narrative and imagery, we can discover what our new communal myths are and what healing they offer. A visual language will be created that speaks to all of us trying to cope now.
