Artmaking and mythmaking

Excerpt - Mary Antonio Wood

Artmaking of any kind is a “storying,” – an assemblage of existing elements into a unique whole that, with luck, holds the power to revel and transform. Mythmaking is no different, although myths are generally thought of as lies – harmless, powerless, and sometimes captivating, lies. Myths are lies – just as every poem, song, painting, and film is a lie. Myths do captivate, but they are far from being harmless and powerless. Myths are timeless and necessary fictions emerging from psyche’s ceaseless imaginings; they are exquisitely flexible lies that refashion themselves for every age in order to story (and re-story) our realities for better – or for worse. “Myths” according to poet, scholar, and painter, Dennis Patrick Slattery, “give back to an individual or even an entire people a felt sense, through images, of what matters and of what is at stake if what matters is lost, trivialized and muted.” While myths are powerful modes of orientation and reorientation, they are certainly not all good; nor are they above being twisted and wielded as tools of oppression. Philip Wheelwright’s lamentation on the degradation of humankind’s relationship with myth is eerily prophetic of our modern social and political instability:

This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for . . . myth-consciousness is a bond that unites men both with one another with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves men radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.

Wheelwright went on to assert that it is the artist who is tasked with leading us into a generative and conscious relationship with the stories that drive our lives. More recently, author, storyteller, and conservationist, Barry Lopez observed: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories, and compassion.”