THE CAUSE OF ART IS THE CAUSE OF THE PEOPLE

"The Cause of Art is the Cause of the People" This is the inscription in almost foot high letters found over the entrance of the Allen Memorial Museum of Art of Oberlin College in Ohio. Patricia Monaghan and I had traveled to nearby Lorain to see my terminally ill father a few days before he died and had gone to Oberlin to take care of some family business. The person we were to see was not available and, knowing that the museum had a good reputation and collection, we walked down the block to visit.

Reading the inscription as we approached the museum building, we were immediately inspired. We had just left the 2006 meeting of the Fellows of the Black Earth Institute days before with thoughts of art and society whirling in our hearts and heads. Our meeting had been a great success. We found with the Fellows a deep sense of commitment to the cause of using art to link Earth, Spirit and Society, and now we found this bold statement spelled out over our heads calling us to this task. Was this serendipity, the work of Spirit, our increased sensitivity to our path and our ancestors or another voice calling out from the past? Who could have made such a statement? Was the person an artist? What conditions led the author to the statement? What came of the author's work?

The director of the Museum provided us with the source of the quote, an address entitled "Art and Socialism," by William Morris.

We had known William Morris as a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, where he valued the role of craftwork over mass production and nature as inspiration and form. The spirit and thoughts of the address and subsequent readings opened up new paths and challenges.

William Morris was involved all his life with issues of art, nature, society and spirit. He was a poet, a designer and producer of crafts, a political acitvist and writer who embraced revolutionary socialism, and a founder of an influential press. In everything he looked to nature with reverence. In our work in launching the Black Earth Institute we look for ancestors who have taken the path of the oracle or artist speakings from different place to those who have unbalanced the land. Willaim Morris spoke as such. We had found another ancestor.

Morris's circle included the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters who challenged post enlightenment industrial society in art and life. The Pre-Raphaelites looked to an earlier, almost mystical time before the grip of commerce and faith in human reason grew so strong. Religion and spiritual thought in the period ran from High Church Anglicanism to dissenters and even John Ruskin-inspired Christian Socialism. Increasing faith in human logic and science and the role of organized religion in supporting the status quo strengthened the embrace of secularism by many reform and revolutionary movements. Morris reflected a yearning for a closeness to nature and an abhorance of the state of art and work under the control of commerce.

Morris characterized art as having been despoiled by commerce. He felt that the art of an earlier period served a loftier goal than simply profit, and whatever material and intelectual gains that commerce had brought about were either false or not worth the price. The gains were false for the working classes of England and even less true for the colonies near and far. The gains had corrupted and stultified those middle classes who did benefit.

He said in Art and Socialism,

"The poet, the artist, the man of science, is it not true that in their and glorious days, when they are in the heyday of their faith and enthusiasm, they are thwarted in every turn by Commercial war, with its sneering question, 'Will it pay?' Is it not true that when they begin to win wordly success, when they become comparatively rich, in spite of ourselves they seem to us tainted by the contact with the commercial world?"

As Patricia and I read the speech to each other later that evening we were struck again and again by the timeliness of Morris's comments. Art in our day has been degraded to serve the cause of commerce. Commerce has come to dominate our lives with the boldness of its lies and its claims of inevitability. Commerce has poisoned our lands and waters while claiming to raise the quality of life for all. Morris spoke to all of this passionately.

Morris was raised in a religious family, studied theology at Oxford and was to be a clergyman. Instead he embraced socialism and abandoned formal religious beliefs. Although a declared atheist he was said to be not as aggresive in this as some of his contemporaries. Yet in the declaration of the Socialist League he co-founded he wrote that "Socialism was his only religion."

In all his work his concern and dedication to nature in art and its protection from commerce remained uppermost. He valued the role of the craftsman who drew inspiration and art from nature rather than mass production influenced by abstractions. He exhibited what we might call today an eco-ethos. This does not necessarily mean a spiritual connection to the earth, but it certainly goes against the view that art or fruits of the earth are there mainly to serve the cause of profit and gain, whether personal or commercial. Perhaps Morris held to his anti-religious beliefs as a response to the role of organized religion in the service of profit and what he saw as the reformist nature of Christian socialists. In Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, he traced the change of religion in the transition from feudalism to early capitalism. In the article "Socialism from the Root Up," he wrote,

"On the one hand like Early Christianity, it [Protestantism] ...bade the poor pay no heed to the passing oppression of the day, which could not deprive them of their true reward in another world; but unlike Early Christianity, on the other hand it shared in the possession of privelege, and actively helped in the oppression which it counselled the oppressed not to rebel against. But, as a truely and distinct power beside the State, the Church was extinct; it was merely a salaried adjunct of the State."

He was certainly not alone in those times as a secularist and perhaps had more justification than the strict secularists of our times. Though he longed for earlier values not caught up in false enlightenment he was in many ways a creature of the mechanical materialism that characterized much of the progressive ideology of the late 19th century.

What can we learn from Morris? His dedication to radical social change, his scope of interests and publications remain an inspiration. His critique of art in the service of commerce remains as true as ever. Art has become more vulger in its slavishness with each passing decade. It has become a commodity focused on the individual with no external or social reference. But we should also see the limitations of Morris's times. Logic and calls for immediate revolution cannot supplant the part that spirit plays in valuing and changing the world. We do not know the answers to how all this fits together, but we know we must touch the spirit in our world and art more deeply. The Black Earth Institute will work with others to create a space to address these issues. We can only hope that we can do so with Morris's brilliance, dedication and passion.