“I just want to make people think.”

In 2002 (and probably many times before and since), Damien Hirst was reported as saying: “I want to make people think, not to totally shock the shit out of them for the sake of it.”

Personally, I find Damien Hirst’s work ineffective in this regard. However, he deals with issues such as disease and mortality with which I’ve been very familiar from a young age … I’ve already thought far more about them than is probably good for me, and being presented with some dead or butchered meat in a gallery doesn’t really send me anywhere new.

However, I continue to be intrigued by this common thread running through modern and postmodern art, the desire to make people think, which is also an important strand in my own work.

Thought Control

I want to take all those people who blindly believe everything they’re told – on the telly, by their parents, by their Church, in the papers – and make them question some of it. Push them into asking: “Can I really trust these people, what do I really believe, what do I really want out of life?”. I want to offer people a genuine alternative to the assumptions, prejudices, misinformation and delusions which they have so often received from those who seek to control them.

Challenging the status quo, providing another ready-made way of seeing the world, and persuading people to abandon one set of beliefs in favour of another is not a genuine alternative. Promoting a revolutionary political ideology. Converting people from one religion to another. Advocating a new pseudo-philosophical doctrine such as socio-biology or rationalist atheism. These approaches just replace one set of control-structures with another.

Making people think, providing a real alternative view on life, is about bringing people in touch with their own, and other peoples’, innermost feelings: what are the things I really love, what do I really want out of life? Who are the people I really hate and why? Who are the people I really feel drawn to, and why? Who, if anyone, am I really? … And what on earth can I do about it all?

How to make people think

But bringing people to a place from where they can challenge the received wisdom is not as simple as it sounds – There are all kinds of ties, emotional and material, from which it’s almost impossible to struggle free: going against one’s family is not just a huge emotional risk, but can seriously damage one’s economic security; challenging the values dispersed by the media and the state can quickly lead to alienation and marginalisation, with all the attendant financial problems … and in today’s political climate, can even lead to accusations of terrorist sympathies.

This process of raising self-awareness, and awareness of one’s surroundings and one’s community, is as much a process of reflective healing as it is one of aggressive challenge. Acknowledging the injustice and emptiness of one’s own situation, past and present, can be a painful process, which has to be accomplished one tiny step at a time. A question here, an intervention there; chipping away at the great edifice of tradition and conservatism, one fragment at a time; emptying the great lake of personal and shared suffering, one cup at a time.

It’s an obsession shared by many artists, famous and obscure. Damien Hirst’s shock-art is aimed at jolting people out of a complacent comfort-zone, while Anthony Gormley’s enigmatic figures are designed to invite the viewer to muse on the nature of our bodies, and our attitudes towards them.

How does Ritual promote thought?

Through the ceremonies I organise, I try to break down prejudices and divisions by bringing diverse people together in the awareness of our common humanity: that we all walk on the same earth, breathe the same air, drink the same water, and sit round the same fire. Simple facts that require no given set of beliefs.

I celebrate the passing of the seasons, as this is something everybody shares, right across the globe – and I design the ceremonies using symbols, activities and stories drawn from many traditions, past and present. Again, requiring no fixed set of beliefs.

In doing this, I hope to provide people with the space – physical and emotional – to explore their own spiritual beliefs. By using symbols which are either abstract, or the interpretation of which is open-ended, I hope to encourage people to see a little of themselves in their surroundings, and in each other, and hence become both more self-aware and more community-aware.

Finally, in giving people the opportunity to reflect on the past, and contemplate the future, I hope to enable them, in a very small way, to reinvent themselves and their view of the world, raise their expectations, and become just a tiny bit more than they already are.

And ultimately, I hope, these events will bring people to think, just a little more deeply, and a little more independently, than they did before.