Derrick Jensen addresses the idea of hope in his article “Beyond Hope” in a negative manner. He claims, “Hope is what keeps us chained to the system...” For Jensen, hope is an inactive word; incapable of pushing the individual to protect the world they live in. The world is rapidly deteriorating. Jensen expresses frustration due to the passive behavior of today’s population.
He presses for optimism in the individual. To obtain that optimistic attitude, you must “die”. What he means by this is to shed hope. Essentially hope embraces a third person stance, a word spoken from someone who has backed away from the problem, someone relying on an external source to clean it up. Once the individual stops relying and putting faith into a higher authority, they must depend on themselves. They begin to fend for themselves; a necessary quality in the advance for change. Independence becomes the active push towards making progress.
As Jensen had explained, hope is bad because it inhibits us form taking a stance on important issues. This concept opened my eyes because I tend to be passive, especially with environmental issues. I find it hard to know where to begin to make a difference, but one way is to show it in my artwork. In ADP III, we discussed that the ability to send messages to a viewer through art is a powerful quality. It can affect many people. The graphs and charts used in lecture proved points that I was unaware of. The more I saw the statistics, the more I wanted to act. I believe that is an important response not only for the artist, but for the viewer as well. It causes them to want to become active in solving these issues.
thank you for posting this Lauren
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