Art As Political Manifestation

Art as political manifestation. Volker Herre continues from where the previous post left off.

By VOLKER HERRE 
(Written for Omaimon Paradosis Blog)

True, primordial art was all-encompassing, because it stemmed from a longing for a life that is wholesome, for an individual who lives in a state of eudaimonia, integrated in the greater cosmic order, close to the gods and divinities responsible for inspiring the production of art in the first place (and to whom its authorship was attributed, like the Muses in the Greek poetry of the Bronze Age). Art, in this sense, is inescapably political, like the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, because homoiosis theo, the path to a god-like man, requires the laws by which this individual man lives his life and the laws by which his community is organized to mirror the laws of the gods, the laws of nature and the laws of the cosmos. The mimetic aspect of art stems from the necessity of reciprocity between the microcosmos of human life and the larger macrocosmos that encompasses, beyond the domain of the polis, the whole of the biosphere and all the physis outside its boundaries, the sun, the moon and the lawful stars. 

We can intuitively grasp the purity of artistic expressions such as Arno Breker's sculptures and Helmut Reiche's poetry because they stem from this longing for integration. It's the political and spiritual commitment of these artists to a higher order that made their art sublime. They were retrieving art in its primordial sense, and it inspires awe and reverence in us.