Moving and shaking

Many Irish artists are contributing works to an exhibition in aid of Amnesty International. Ciarán Benson explains why

There is an intrinsic and symbiotic relationship between the kinds of freedom which human rights organisations such as Amnesty International vigorously struggle to foster and protect, and the kinds of freedom which are the very lifeblood of the creative arts. This idea underpins the show of Irish artists for Amnesty International.

I took the show's title, In the Time of Shaking, from a phrase I remembered and liked in an old translation of Psalm 27. "Shaking" is a metaphor for "trouble". The question that then occurs is this: in the time of shaking, to what can we turn for support and guidance? And the answer that inspires this show is: to a vision of common humanity such as is asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to the endlessly rich versions of that common humanity in their fullest expression, such as we find in the arts.

The ideas underpinning both human rights and the creative arts are deeply inter-dependent, and so they are the most natural of allies.

Asserting this connection is not fanciful, as the influence of poets in this area reminds us. Towards the last days of the second World War, the urgent need to avoid the difficulties that beset the short-lived League of Nations following the first World War was a dominating concern of President Roosevelt as he planned the establishment of the United Nations. Sadly, he died before delivering his intended opening speech, drafted for him by the poet Archibald McLeish. His immediate successor, President Truman, was similarly committed to the ideal of the United Nations. Truman, it seems, had long carried verses from Tennyson's Locksley Hall in his wallet:

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the

Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

The United Nations was duly established in 1945, in that fragile time when the world drew breath after the bloodiest period in human history and before the tribulations that beset the earth in the latter half of what Isaiah Berlin judged to be "the most terrible century in Western history", the first half of which the historian Eric Hobsbawm unhesitatingly calls "The Age of Catastrophe".

Many of our current hopes and fears originate in those dark times of the mid-20th century, although we may be generally unaware of this from our position in this more materially cocooned year of 2004.

The key value of our show owes much of its intensity to the memories of loss and tainted survival from that time when the foundations of earthly existence were brutally removed from the lives of tens of millions of people.

The fragile idea of a "universal law" based on, and protective of, an ideal of humane justice is one element of this. The related idea of "a universal human right" is another.

How should we think of the common ground between the human activities which we call art, and this idea of a universal human right? If there is a symbiosis between them, what is the nature of their common envelope? The most persuasive answer, in general terms, is that the phenomena of sharing provide the foundations for both.

This common little sparrow of a word, "sharing", is the foundation of what is best in human beings. Sympathy is a species of sharing. Our capacities for sharing have ancestral roots deep in the evolution of our species, and they have biographical roots very early in the psychology of every single human consciousness.

Art is our most ancient technology for vividly sharing meanings, for making permeable and infiltrating the boundaries of selves. Its power lies in the intimacy of its appeal, in its capacity to shape our feelings by the nature and novelty of what it presents for attention and in its ability to capture and retain that attention until the work that is art is done.

That work, at its best, is nothing less than a transformation of some part of self's relation to the world, some reconfiguration of feeling which becomes available for memory, and is then integrated as a valued element into the constantly reconfigured stories that are our lives, and those of our communities. The evidence for this comes from recent work, particularly on the evolutionary and psychological developments of human culture and on the cultural shaping of human consciousness.

It was the Professor of Geology at the Queen's College in Galway, William King, who coined the term Homo neanderthalensis - Neanderthal Man - in 1863. More than 45,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had the icy landscape of today's Europe to themselves. By 35,000 years ago they had vanished from today's France and had been replaced by us, Homo sapiens. The last islands of Neanderthal existence finally disappeared from the Iberian peninsula about 27,000 years ago.

In a fascinating argument about how the roots of artistic making depended upon certain neuropsychological capacities of Homo sapiens, David Lewis-Williams makes this striking assertion: "Neanderthals were congenital atheists."

The point he is making is that, unlike our ancestors, Neanderthals probably could not remember their dreams nor could they talk about them. Dreams, visions, imagined possibilities, therefore, could find no purchase in the world of the Neanderthals, no objective shared existence as possible objects of common attention and discussion.

Neanderthals did not have the capacity for making marks on a wall, for example, which could stand for something such as an animal. Their symbolic capacities were, literally, not up to the mark.

The symbolic powers of our ancestors, on the other hand, were spectacularly more powerful in their creative potential.

One profound consequence of this was that the ways in which we, Homo sapiens, came to organise our social groups, and particularly the criteria by which we stratified them, were directly related to the ways in which we came to make and to understand our worlds. According to Lewis-Williams, "Because image-making was related, at least initially, to the fixing of visions, art (to revert to the broad term) and religion were simultaneously born in a process of social stratification. Art and religion were therefore socially divisive." Some people came to be recognised as the adepts of that fixing, and the rest were not. That inherent divisiveness in the labour of art and religion had, and continues to have, beneficial and malign consequences.

The point of this for the present discussion is straightforward: it is upon these ancestral capacities for sharing meaning that our extraordinarily complex human worlds, with all their potential for cross-fertilisation and antagonism, have come to be as they are today and - of particular significance for arguing the connections between art and the freedoms protected by the idea of universal human rights - as they will be tomorrow. This is far from being a theoretical abstraction; it is such a concrete part of our everyday lives that it tends to be invisible, so taken for granted is it.

A major finding of contemporary developmental psychology confirms this. It concerns the origins in every human life of the capacity to share attention. In psychology it is now known as the "nine-month revolution" because it is at around nine-months of age that the capacity begins to become apparent in normally developing human infants. Without this extraordinary ability there would be no symbolic worlds and no symbolic sharing.

The phenomenon is called "triadic exchange" but the idea is simply grasped. If you see me gazing at something, and if you then turn to see what I am looking at, then we two have effected a triadic exchange: we are both looking at a third, common object of attention. (Try getting your cat to see where you put its dish by pointing at it!).

Sharing attention in this way is an extremely complex, distinctively human and fabulously fertile ability. It, and all that it entails, is the foundation of human cultures and of art.

The arts work to structure attention, and they work to influence how we feel about what they present for our attention.

What we currently call "the Arts" are our most powerful and most ancient technologies for vividly sharing subjectivity, for enabling one person to feel what it is like to be another person, or another kind of person. Good art brings great inventiveness to the ways in which it attends to the subtleties of individual and social consciousness and to their objects of attention. This creativity extends to the ways that it uses media of all kinds to embody shared meanings and to constitute new ones. It is driven by an endless curiosity about the ways in which human beings create their lives. Those ingredients need the sorts of freedom which human rights organisations like Amnesty International seek to protect.

What is important is not that artists focus in some programmatic way on human rights themes, although some will find themselves doing so. Of more profound and general significance is that artists exemplify in their practice the benefits which follow from the exercise of these freedoms.

What is called the oppositional nature of art is sometimes tritely misunderstood to mean that art thrives best in adversity; that it attains its heights because of, and not in spite of, the sufferings caused by oppression and its denials of freedom.

Joseph Brodsky's impatience with this view is worth repeating: "It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills."

That said, art that emerges in spite of suffering is sometimes the most potent means of combating and transcending suffering's impulse to diminish and lessen its victims.

What are these contemporary artists working in Ireland presenting for our attention? What are they asking us to notice and to value? It would be invidious to refer to any particular work in the context of a show where each work is deliberately being allowed to speak for itself. But some themes are discernible.

Noticeable is a love of land, our presence in it and things we do with it. The extraordinarily rich play of Irish light and spaciousness is also evident as is a preoccupation with the structure of things organic. A rich body of figurative work balances a range of striking abstraction and a disciplined modernist concern with the dynamics of pictorial surface, often suffused with a lyrical tone.

Narrative and memory find many footholds here, as does respect for the written word and for writers of the word. In much work and especially in the photographic there are debts to the theatrical. And across painting, photograph or sculpture there is a full spectrum of feelings animating artists' stances to their work.

Anger, respect, longing, serenity, homage, humour, grief, surprise at the strange, all this and more can be found here. Although an island, Ireland has long been drawn to outside influences both intellectually and artistically. In the Time of Shaking offers abundant evidence of that rich permeability of Ireland's psychic boundaries.

Professor Ciarán Benson is former Arts Council chairman and curator of the show. This is an edited version of his introductory essay in the book, In the Time of Shaking, published by Art for Amnesty, which accompanies the show of the same name at IMMA from May 7th to 23rd