Art for Art’s Sake

It would be ludicrous to suggest politics doesn't have a place in art. The question for me is whether artists also have the right and integrity to make art that reaches beyond the overtly political.

The first time I went to Lake Mungo in New South Wales I felt the earth hold me. It is an ancient place. It is home to the oldest human skeletons ever found in Australia.

Mungo Man and Mungo Woman are estimated to be around forty thousand years old. They are evidence of among the earliest ritual, sacred burials on earth. The burial was a piece of art. What secrets were buried with them.

I spent several days there with traditional owners. They took me to a place most never see. I saw a bone-dead tree with one stark branch I curled up in it and I slept like I have never slept.

There are some places that penetrate the soul. I felt the same in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The first time I entered I felt myself drawn into Michelangelo’s majestic painted ceiling.

Here is the story of humanity and in the centre Adam reaching for the hand of God. What is striking is that the hands never touch. That space between us and God is where we live.

That space holds all our love, our hate, our fear, our sadness, our joy. In that space God allows us to live. Michelangelo knew that if the hands touched there would be nothing left for us.

Lake Mungo, the Sistine Chapel, they touch the part of us that the world cannot crush. This for me is the source of all art. Art springs from wonder. Art is drawn from the earth and from the imagination.

We are story. That’s all we are. We are a never-ending story.

But what story are we telling today? Where do we find our rest? Where do we reach for God?