Only Connect

By Dean Baldwin

There is an oft repeated line in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End that says “only connect,”: only connect the internal and the external, the man of action and the man of thought. Forster was commenting on how difficult it is to be both a man of action and a man of thought, to connect internal ideals with external actions. Forster had idealistic political ideas and recognized the difficulty associated with connecting those ideals with action.

Within my generation there is a trendiness associated with social justice, environmentalism, and equality. We live in a time where it is socially acceptable to talk about injustice and we seem to acknowledge elements of human depravity. The problem with my generation is not that we don’t talk about these issues, but that we too often don’t DO anything about them. We struggle to connect our idealism with action.

As I’ve been reflecting on art, often an idealistic/internal activity, I see a correlation between the struggle to connect art with reality and to connect idealism with action. See, art/artists that fail to connect idealism with reality end up being self-reflexive. I want to demonstrate this with one of my own art pieces that I painted as a social commentary.

I entitled this Willful Ignorance and it is meant to be a figurative description of what we do when we ignore social problems. With our access to news, there is no way we can truly be ignorant of the social fracture that continues to ail our society. The only way we can remain ignorant is if we willfully “paint over” the problems of our world. The man on the left in this painting is meant to be me in order to remind myself not to become willfully ignorant. Ironically, now that I have painted this I believe I am even more responsible to connect the sentiments reflected in this painting with the world around me. If I continue to be willfully ignorant and fail to connect the idealism within this painting into action, then I am one of the worst types of hypocrites. All too often I am one of these hypocrites.

Recognizing social problems, talking about them, reflecting on them, painting about them, without actually DOING something about them is as much like loving our fellow man as masturbation is like sex. It is as ironic as talking about genocide and starvation at a banquet.  It is completely self-reflexive and devoid of all value. We talk about justice because when we do, it is cathartic. Unless we connect our ideals to action we’re in great danger to ourselves and society.

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