The Arts as Crisis-Engaged vs. Crisis-Shielded Work, Part 1: Shielding vs. Engagement

I have been wondering what art and music can/should do in crisis times, especially my niche imagistic abstract ambient acoustic psych songwriter music and the DIY/punk-descended music scenes it exists within. This has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine for many years, but the intensity spiked in February 2022, never let up, and spiked again last week during the Hamas massacres in southern Israel and subsequent ongoing Geneva Protocol-violating IDF bombing and siege of Gaza. None of this looks like it’s going to get better any time soon, either. It is time to try to address this question: Do artists and art communities bear a responsibility to engage with crises like the above?

Messiaen seemed to think so. He wrote and staged Quatuor pour la fin du temps in a Görlitz concentration camp. But was this his responsibility as an artist? He might he might have written something more cheerful to lift his fellow prisoners’ spirits, but he chose this very grave work instead. What would Messiaen do in 2023?

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When global geopolitical conditions change, some people are forced to directly respond by the nature of their work: aid workers and emergency first-responders, politicians, members of the military, etc. Not responding directly would be a failure to accomplish their job. We can call the work of this group of people crisis-engaged work.

Other people might have work that obligates them to do the opposite, creating a bubble shielding their work from the chaos as much as possible: doctors, kindergarten teachers, transit system workers, etc. Not shielding their work would be a failure to accomplish their job. We can call the work of this group of people crisis-shielded work.

An extreme example of crisis-shielded work might clarify the question. Imagine a farmer in a small self-sustaining agricultural village on a state border shared by a hostile power. She sees enemy troops approaching her land. She could set her crops on fire and try to delay their invasion by forcing them to find another route, but if she did so she would jeopardize the village’s food supply. She has a primary responsibility to provide food to the village normally for as long as possible, especially in times of crisis. Otherwise, the village starves. Delaying the invasion a accomplishes little if they have no food. In absence of a phone call from the local unit commander instructing her to burn her crops, it’s sensible to conclude that the nature of her work obligates her to focus on agricultural concerns, to stay out of the crisis as much as possible, and to protect her fields rather than burn them. (Even granting that some might contest this, few would find a decision to burn her crops obviously right.)

In contrast, crisis-engaged work must change and directly address chaos. In our example above, the soldiers guarding the town our farmer lives in, and the village’s mayor, hospital workers, and manufacturing planners, would by many accounts be obligated to directly respond to the pending invasion in a way that drastically impacts their day-to-day functions. A construction company building a road, for example, might immediately pivot to building defensive structures with the same construction equipment. The mayor might cancel a fundraising trip to the capital. The hospital might activate a triage ward and begin a public blood drive. No bubble separates this work from the crisis. It proceeds in direct response to it.

As with many categories, most real-world examples are somewhere in the middle, partly crisis-engaged and partly crisis-shielded. History teachers must still show up for work and guide students through their studies, but they might teach lessons that illuminate the crisis. Journalists must still do their work with unflinching neutrality, but they might be particularly on guard against propaganda and fog-of-war misinformation. Truckers must still drive, but they might need to drive inconvenient unfamiliar routes or work longer hours to deliver crucial supplies.

(It bears mention that work’s crisis attachment is moderated by distance from the crisis arena; a usually crisis-shielded olive farmer or daycare worker under artillery fire in Gaza is more affected by clashes there than a usually crisis-engaged soldier or trauma surgeon in Japan is. But the increasingly-global scale of contemporary geopolitics ethically entangles many more people than geopolitical events in the past. This is especially true in conflicts like Palestine-Israel, as antisemitism and Islamophobia are deep problems everywhere, and in the Russo-Ukrainian War as the violent encroachment of a nuclear-armed kleptocratic mafia state into a European-facing regional power would imperil liberal civilization. Because of this diminishing role of distance and the increasing moral entanglement of every human being, I disregard in this discussion the moderating effect of distance from crisis, and focus instead on the nature of a task.)

But my focus is less general. I have three questions that I can’t let go of. To what extent are working musicians like me, the communities we interact with, and the cultural artifacts they make crisis-engaged vs. crisis-shielded? To what extent should they be? And how, precisely? I’m not sure yet. But I think I’m groping towards something that resembles an answer, and I’ll share more about it from Ternopil tomorrow.

Background reading to get us thinking in the mean time (download them here):

  1. Michaelson, C. (2011). Whose responsibility is meaningful work? Journal of Management Development, 30(6), 548-557. DOI: 10.1108/02621711111135152
  2. Sorell, T. (2003). Morality and Emergency. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 103, 21-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545384
  3. Wolf, S. (2013, February 21). The Routledge Lecture. URL: https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/a652a216-0e44-47e2-ad8a-1351b8c6ae48/content

Tour Sitrep, Thu.12.Oct-14:10 and, Fri.13.Oct-07:30, and Fri.13.Oct-09:48

Thu.12.Oct-14:10 (Onboard a Deutsche Bahn regional train in Landkreis Oder-Spree, between Berlin and the Polish border) // Low gray clouds spit mist, and all the pavements are wet and reflective. I can hear freeway rush nearby when the doors open at stations, louder the closer we get to the Tesla factory. Inside the train it is clean and dry, and a young man deafens himself by suavely blasting German trap through earbuds. Occasionally his chill vibe is harshed by an add for online gambling, but the volume stays at gun range level. Poor guy.

Fri.13.Oct-07:30 (Warsaw West bus station) // Transferring in Warsaw was an awkward dream; a big box of a station with pedestrian underpasses, som3 taped off with flickering fluorescent lights, a dignified but well-worn facility of smooth charcoal/tan concrete. Bus station breakfast time air is a colloidal suspension of 63% bacon vapor, 29% atomized cleaning fluid, and 9% warm bread. I tried to order a coffee an alcove a few tables partitioned from the waiting hall by transparent yellow plastic strips but my Polish failed me, so I gave up and tapped my card on one of the beverage automats lining the wall.

There was an oddly pale flatscreen TV — a faulty HDMI cable with a broken red channel pin? I watched the state-run TV broadcast scary insinuations about a recent wave of migrants, faces of worried-officials technocrats cut with grainy footage of people in puffy jackets dragging roller suitcases across a wet-looking forest behind a razor wire fence. (It was this.) Two bored old men pointed at the screen, muttering to each other. We all sipped our automat coffee.

Fri.13.Oct-09:48-16:00 (Onboard the Warsaw-Lviv express bus about 100 km north of Lubin) // A mostly-flat rural expanse. The sunrise was golden on the freeway through Warsaw but we drove straight into a rainstorm and it has been low-contrast cloudwash since then. I have time to think, and write, and set up live audio scenarios for the clip launchers at my shows.

We got through Polish exit control and Ukrainian entrance control faster than I expected. The landscape doesn’t change much, but some basement windows have sandbags stacked against them and I see a few burned-out farmhouses. I was surprised to see signs of the bombardment of Lviv so immediately. But the mood on the bus is cheerful; an Italian young man seated next to me tells me that he is on his way to meet a friend he met a few months ago at university who had to return home. He doesn’t get specific, but the way he talks about her makes it seems like he cares for her very much her. “I’m Luigi!” he said, holding up a wallet charm of the Nintendo character namesake. “In case you forget my name, just remember this!’

I hope he and Sofia are having a wonderful time.

Emperor X Opening for Foxing / The Hotelier in November throughout Eastern U.S.

Nov. 1 (Wed.) – Millvale, PA – Mr. Smalls Theatre – TIX

Nov. 2 (Thu.) – Columbus, OH – Skully’s – TIX

Nov. 3 (Fri.) – Nashville, TN – The Basement East – TIX

Nov. 4 (Sat.) – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant – TIX

Nov. 5 (Sun.) – Lawrence, KS – The Bottleneck – TIX

Nov. 7 (Tue.) – Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line – TIX

Nov. 8 (Wed.) – Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall – TIX

Nov. 10 (Fri.) – Toronto, ON – Lee’s Palace – TIX

Nov. 11 (Sat.) – Detroit, MI – The Magic Stick – TIX

Nov. 12 (Sun.) – Cleveland, OH – Beachland – TIX

Nov. 14 (Tue.) – Washington, DC – The Howard – TIX

Nov. 15 (Wed.) – Philadelphia, PA – The TLA – TIX

Nov. 16 (Thu.) – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg – TIX

Nov. 17 (Fri.) – New York, NY – Racket – TIX

Nov. 18 (Sat.) – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair – TIX

Nov. 19 (Sun.) – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair – TIX

Day 1: DISASTER

D.C. Friends: I am furious and sad to inform you that about 60 minutes after I landed in the U.S. a freight train threw sparks that lit forest fires near Metropark, NJ and shut down all rail traffic in the northeast corridor for the night.

I am stuck in Newark, safe with friends but really really annoyed that the first night of my transit-themed tour starts with a transit-caused cancellation. The only silver lining is that the song that’s gonna come out of this will be SOMETHING.

Anyone who has tickets to tonight’s show at @PieShopDC can email me (info@crmatheny.net) with a screen cap of your ticket and your mailing address and you’ll get a special surprise in the mail. I will also inform you ASAP when this show gets reschduled.

Hey @musicofeyelids — have an amazing show, and please if you remember announce this thing about the ticketholders getting a free surprise next week if you’re not too busy blowing everyone’s minds.

This Weekend’s Supporter Access Video Walkthrough

The video above is a walkthrough for this weekend’s uploaded supporter-access session files and premasters. If you’re interested about what that’s all about, check the Comms page. I’m sort of halfway between it being public and not right now; it has been a slow process figuring out a way to do it sustainably and I haven’t wanted to hang up a “WE’RE OPEN!” sign yet for that reason. But quite a few of you found out about it without me even posting about it, which has given us an opportunity to test-drive. I’ll be posting more information about it over the next few weeks as the regular pattern of activity emerges.