Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to a gathering of arts leaders from around the Midwest, hosted by the Alliant Energy Foundation and intended to build partnerships and connections in the arts across state lines. I went on a bit about my usual problems with the myths and metaphors of ”partnerships,” which strike me as both widely accepted, and essentially flawed.
Partnership, I suggested, reinforces a false idea…that we are somehow separate to begin with, and that connection only comes in conscious effort and initiative. Instead, I believe arts organizations and initiatives are fundamentally connected already — whether or not we take action to connect ourselves.
As I was preparing for this conversation, Googling for a metaphor, I found (again) the glorious story of the Armillaria ostoyae, or the ”honey mushroom.” And now I can’t get it out of my head.
The particular mushroom in question lives and grows in the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon. Upon inspecting the ecosystem to determine why so many trees were dying, scientists discovered that the outcroppings of mushrooms around the forest were actually all part of one, single organism. About three feet underground lived the root network for this fungus, which turned out to be the largest living organism ever discovered on earth: 3.5 miles across, taking up the equivalent of over 1600 football fields, and likely over 2400 years old (perhaps even 7200 years).
So, you say, arts organizations are like a humungous fungus? Well…yes.
Consider any profound moment you’ve experienced in the arts. As an artist or an audience member, that moment likely seemed like a single moment, but was in fact an outcropping of a much deeper and more ancient root. That moment was likely built on a lifetime of experiences in the arts and in your life — lessons, school, relationships, family events, books, values, passions, fears — all brought to the surface by the resonance of a creative or cultural experience.
And since that powerful moment was the product of all moments that came before it, no single arts organization can lay claim as its producer.
Which brings me back to ”partnership.” To my mind, especially in the world of creative expression, our separateness is only a convenient myth to help us do our work. We certainly have different corporate structures, different boards, different budgets, different buildings. But these are functional fictions hiding a deeper truth.
Our collective work in the arts is connected in both practical and profound ways. ‘We can either pretend to ”partner” as separate entities, or inform the connections that already course between us.
There are always unconscious amd mythical connections between persons and between similar fields of study, just as there are within persons. In fact we artists rely heavily on the knowledge of their existence and it is only due to the loss of our society’s awareness of the underground worlds that bind us all, that we are prodded to try to resurrect our own culture through pre-concert talks and other educational desperations.
Carl Jung said that our materialistic, super rational society was in big trouble because it was no longer able to be nourished by the underground life of myth and symbol which is there in the unconscious of Everyman but which needs to be related to. Our focus has been so rational — even in our religious expressions — that we have literally blocked that underground “fungus” from our experience as it no longer fits our Value systems.
Rilke believed that actually building bridges in us to this rich inheritence which presents itself first as nature’s music, is the only way we can make art. Audience and artist alike. If we lose this, the reference point of art, then art becomes sport.