One aspect of the final film in the trilogy, Ong Bak 3, to which I keep returning is the relationship between classical Thai dancing, prayer, healing, and martial arts. Pim's dance in front of the temple while Tien is healing from the brutal torture he received from Lord Rajasena's men moves me tremendously. Every position, every motion is so precise. Pim invests herself so wholly in the dance. I can feel the dance-as-prayer and measure its effectiveness, its genuineness, its heartfelt urgency by the technical perfection of the performance. What does this have to do with anything? I feel a need to unravel the problem of the function of art as a prerequisite to justifying my personal approach to YA literature. My heart belongs to Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism, his belief in art for its own sake, his dismissal of utilitarian concerns. But I recognize that this, and other similarly Decadent approaches, comes from a place of privilege and comfort not experienced by vast numbers of people. It is a white male thing. Or is it? My experience limits my understanding. The debate has raged at certain points in the West whether art should serve a purpose or simply be, but how do people in other parts of the world understand the nature and function of art? My lifetime of cursory reading has given me a vague idea that some societies connect art more closely to religion, community, and practicality. I think of African art and the line is clear to me from it to Amiri Baraka shouting poetry in the streets of Newark as a riot goes on around him (a scene which I can't say for sure ever happened in real life). (I reflexively call this--call African, and by extension African-American, culture--"primitive," which reveals my own diseased thinking. Surely, says the privileged mind, any society that posits a clear purpose for its art is not as sophisticated as a society whose art is beautifully useless and uselessly beautiful. Every day, I discover new corners of racism in my mind that I need to unpack and clean out.)
How is it in East Asia? Is haiku as aesthetically tuned as it seems to me, or is it understood to have a practical or ritual function? Must there be a difference? Or, as in the precision of Thai dance, are the aesthetic elements intimately linked to more practical concerns? Do more beautiful sounds reach god's ears more effectively? The whole truth of the matter needs to take into account both (1) that my habitual approach to nearly everything comes from a place of privilege that must be examined at every turn and (2) that the dialectic of aesthetic vs. utilitarian in some ways represents a false dichotomy. Every work of art is historically situated in a community of people with particular sociopolitical issues. Every work of art arises from a particular psyche with specific connections to the culture, conscious and unconscious. Every aesthetic aspect, every point of contact on every work of art, impacts and is impacted by all of these more practical concerns. Perhaps a useful alternative to the endless debate is to draw the connections explicitly, or at least to acknowledge them--to take one's place in the community and join the conversation instead of navel-gazing. Perhaps the answer to the question is Yes.
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AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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June 2021
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