Art
Pictures, statues, poetry, stories, music and dance have always been methods for perceiving reality, expressing thought and creating meaning. Although our views of art are historical and cultural, certain key elements, like connections to the senses and emotions, expressivity, creativity and collectivity, have typically accompanied artistic world-making. In art, humans investigate themselves, their society and their environment. Art has expressed and interpreted intra- and inter-community conflicts and ideals, social upheavals and relationships with the non-human.
Artistic expression has a reciprocal relationship with concurrent views of humanity, nature and the world, as well as its material conditions. Futuristic art and its experimentality were inspired by the noise and speed of the rapidly industrialising world, propelled by the possibilities of the steam engine, motor car and electric devices. The modernisation of the Western world was reflected in the development of new forms of expression in literature, visual arts and music. The power of art in portraying and communicating ideas and experiences has had a decisive influence on the development of societies – Finnish national romanticism is a good example.
Furthermore, the relationship between humans and nature, questions of protecting nature and environmental problems have been addressed in the visual arts, literature, music and the performing arts. Famous literary examples are the fictional story ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ about the disappearance of birds, which US biologist Rachel Carson placed at the beginning of her book Silent Spring (1962), and the book Laulujoutsen – Ultima Thulen lintu (Whooper Swan – Bird of Ultima Thule, 1950) by Finnish writer Yrjö Kokko, relating the impressions of a photographic journey to a nesting area of a then nearly extinct species. Both books succeeded in raising interest and alarm in their contemporaries. To a great extent, due to Carson’s book, a critical discussion on pesticides emerged, and Kokko’s book helped in ending the persecution of the whooping swan.
However, the main or only task of art is by no means to directly influence a particular topic. At the most fundamental level, art deals with human existence and the meaning of life. Art cares for meaningfulness by holding a constant inner and interpersonal dialogue on what is important in individual and common life. In art, the dependence of one human on other humans and nature becomes recognisable, acceptable and even enjoyable. Art expresses the fragility, finiteness and mortality of all life and the necessity of change.
Art has a specific relationship with truth. Among drastic changes, art can help us understand why facts are hard to deal with and provide the capability for accepting the truth. The importance of truthfulness is heightened in societies where there is a strong contradiction between the scientific, lived and experienced truth and the so-called official truth. In artistic work and in experiencing works of art, facing facts and truthfulness happen as collective processes, giving space also to the emotional reactions that new facts and knowledge may trigger.
Traditionally, art has been seen as connected to the senses and emotions: different visual, rhythmic, melodic, gestural and verbal expressions arouse feelings, experiences and insights. In this way, art can also portray phenomena that are otherwise hard to grasp. In this context, several humanists and art researchers have noted that climate change is a phenomenon whose spatio-temporal scale and planetary effects may be beyond human comprehension. Instead of scientific graphs, the matter may be easier to grasp via artistic means.
Artists have freedom of material, expressive and conceptual experimentation and freedom of imagination. They can propose new ways of being human and of forming collectives. Environmental philosophy has, for a long time, investigated how non-humans should be acknowledged as actors influencing human societies and cultures. The role of animals in scientific research, economic production and everyday life demands ethical scrutiny. As wild animals become ever more uncommon, the conditions and modes of co-existence of humans and non-humans must be reviewed.