Marianne Marplondon
Artist, Art Director and Photographer
London/Copenhagen
What is the purpose of art in today’s world?
For the last 150 years or so, we have been inside this long cross-culture-pollination period, that began with every culture broke with their own conditionings, which created huge existential crisis, loss of identities, purposes and meaning which needed to be rebuild. A process that was subjected to just how disruptive, aggressive, fast or complex the breaks were with the past within the different cultures, as some recovered quickly whereas others are still struggling, regardless the pace, over time these spaces transform into exciting spaces of new imaginations, re-inventions, re-configurations and re-culturations.
The purpose of art today is to use its magic touch of knowing how to turn the invisible visible, through beauty, wonder and ponder. Out from which clarity emerges, and confusions, anger and pains dissipate as new vital and vibrant imaginations rise up over the somewhat depressed and stagnated old imaginations, which automatically descend into the horizon of what once was great and new.
What is rising?
A new grand cosmology rooted in a union of science and spirituality that will shape our next mythologies. Artists of all kinds will begin to create these new narratives and their iconology, based upon from the current understanding of the universe. They will defy order and logic, as they are made of psycho-spiritual truths, not historical, which is exactly why myths have this immense magical power to transcend whole cultures, and simultaneously produce new value system of ethical, moral and ideological integrity.
Any themes?
Space Age 2.0, both physical and virtual space, in which whole new universes await to be discovered and fashions us with ‘cosmological perspectivism’ that in principle that can be any position, any orientation (identity). In the virtual world we can design anything we want, from any vantage point. Then there are the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, where the dominant economic focus will be nature, that will be eroticised, idealised, romanticised, feared and exploited as our next object of desire, for better and worse. In terms of Ego, one way to perceive it, then it has expanded beyond the physical, whether we can love this wide, love all of our “self” - only time can tell.
Bumi Thomas by MarpLondon