Why Art - Subversive Placebo

Jaanika Peerna GLACIER ELEGIES

Through an aesthetic “shock” art can have the capacity of suspending our typical reactivity. 

Cloaked in an aesthetic context ecologic dangers or other implied threats, reactive anxieties or hyperbolic feelings can be modified by an art experience. In this way art is of critical value to the unconscious. The subtle shock (or aesthetic, sublime trauma) momentarily suspends our typical behavior – sensually, emotionally, neurologically. 

As such, art becomes a place holder for feeling safe in chaotic circumstances – A “placebo” for well being.

There are many functions served by a “placebo.”

Placebo

“A placebo is a substance or treatment that looks like an active drug or therapy, but contains no active ingredients.” (AI sourced)

One of the works of Estonian artist Jaanika Peerna is a shard of ice, an actual fragment of a melting glacier that is passed amongst her audiences, like a “glacier placebo.” 

Her GLACIER ELEGIES empower participants to invoke and advocate for climate reparations, spiritually if not directly. 

Jaanika invites remedial engagement in advance of apocalypse. 

Subversive Placebo

Alluding to (anticipated) catastrophe through art.

Jaanika, subverts that which many see as inevitable by applying creative intervention to the corporate agenda – the actual subversive effect of industrial pollution.

Art can help avert problems that artist visionaries foreseeby creating a “subversive placebo" effect.

Another way that subversive placebo in art might be considered is when the art is used as a placebo (or placeholder) of an apocalyptic crisis.

Art that references element/s of social criticism or engagement serving topics of inequity, environment, human rights, etc., it introduces a new aesthetic or “placebo effect” into the conversation.

From Institute for Cultural Activism International’s zoom event annoucement for Sunday May 4th’s 3:30pm interview with Jaanika Peerna. (See link below):

“When thinking of Jaanika Peerna, images of her performing those solemn, loving elegies to the foreboding meltdowns of towering icebergs and glaciers flood our minds. Yet, how many of us know how deeply effected she was to sing in solidarity with the Estonian resistance movement as a young child, against the Russian occupation and how that would precipitate her helping found an art school and inform, perhaps, her other community based works?

Jaanika’s studio work may be less known than her public art and role as Estonia’s cultural ambassador. Repetitive forms, lines and layers echo the rhythmic movements of sound, ice and water, voices and history, the dips and peaks of seismic waves or the floating ice mountains.” 

This aspect of 21st Century Cultural Activism represented by artists like Peerna and other I.C.A.I. featured guests differs from the confrontational art of the 1970’s, a different time. 

If we seek to create dialogues embracing a cross section of society, community engagement in art rather than alienation, is critical element.  

Cultural Activism as Mediation

Just as art becomes a safe space or placebo for vulnerability and openness in chaotic situations, so does meditation when examining trauma. 

As with the “safe space” of art, evoking a calm mental state to analyze trauma, a meditator generates a state of deep and aware relaxation. They then dwells on the motivation to meditate and observes their conditioned behavior, deconstructing reactive patterns, without reacting.

As art is a placeholder mediating reactivity to chaotic content, serenity in meditation, is not the goal, but the means to unpacking problems. 

Ego–Centric Vs Eco–Centric 

When the flight or fight aspects of survival mechanisms occur in art or meditation, thanks to the safe place/placebo effects in both situations, reactivity is sublimated allowing for both interior understanding and social dialogue. Then inner ecology transforms outer ecology.  

To Participate in Jaanika Peerna’s TUNING FORK interview Sunday May 4th at 3:30PM EDT click www.studioicai.org