CAPITALISM IN THE PUBLIC REALM – HOPE GUIDES ME in English, Arabic and Chinese as public art interventions and permanent monuments
Orpheus backwards turned his sight
And looking lost her twice to fate.
For you the legend I relate,
You who seek the upward way
To lift your mind into the day;
For who gives in and turns his eye
Back to darkness from the sky,
Loses while he looks below
All that up with him may go.
De consolatione philosophiae, Anicius Manulius Severinius Boethius (ca 480-524 CE)
Arabic calligraphy – Senstad uses language as demonstration of universality and our shared human condition. Hope guides me speaks about ethics, the ethic inner compass and search for inner truth over greed and the transitory nature of wealth/materialism/power. Inspired by De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) by Anicius Manulius Severinius Boethius (ca 480-524 CE). The carved text into marble refers to the Roman and Greek use of marble as materiality in architecture, and the traditional cultural use of text as a carved gesture, represent permanence, monument and memory.
HOPE GUIDES ME by Anne Katrine Senstad (2009 – ongoing). Inspired by De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) by Anicius Manulius Severinius Boethius (ca 480-524 CE)
Senstad’s initial use of the extracted expression HOPE GUIDES ME, emerged in 2009 for her agricultural land art work THE SUGARCANE LABYRINTH in Theriot, Lousiana, including the resulting short film with the same title (2011). She has transformed the statement for use in numerous projects such as GOLD GUIDES ME (2015), Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale, Belgium, and her monograph NEON GUIDES ME ( published in 2022, Praun & Guermouche).
“You are playing with me,” I said, “by weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of divine simplicity?“
De consolatione philosophiae, Book III, prose 12 , Verse 96, Anicius Manulius Severinius Boethius (ca 480-524 CE)
ON HOPE GUIDES ME: The Consolation of Philosophy was written during a one-year imprisonment Boethius served while awaiting trial – and eventual horrific execution – for the crime of treason under the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. Boethius was at the very heights of power in Rome and was brought down by treachery. This experience inspired the text, which reflects on how evil can exist in a world governed by God (the problem of theodicy, and how happiness can be attainable amidst fickle fortune, while also considering the nature of happiness and God. It has been described as “by far the most interesting example of prison literature the world has ever seen.”
Even though reference is often made to God, the book is not strictly religious. A link is often assumed, yet there is no reference made to Jesus Christ or Christianity or any other specific religion other than a few oblique references to Pauline scripture, such as the symmetry between the opening lines of Book 4 Chapter 3 and 1 Corinthians 9:24. God is however represented not only as an eternal and all-knowing being, but as the source of all Good.
Boethius writes the book as a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy. She consoles Boethius by discussing the transitory nature of fame and wealth (“no man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune”), and the ultimate superiority of things of the mind, which she calls the “one true good”. She contends that happiness comes from within, and that one’s virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.
Boethius engages questions such as the nature of predestination and free will, why evil men often prosper and good men fall into ruin, human nature, virtue and justice. He speaks about the nature of free will versus determinism when he asks if God knows and sees all, or does man have free will. On human nature, Boethius says that humans are essentially good and only when they give in to “wickedness” do they “sink to the level of being an animal.” On justice, he proclaims criminals should not to be abused, rather treated with sympathy and respect, using the analogy of doctor and patient to illustrate the ideal relationship between prosecutor and criminal.
In the Consolation, Boethius answeres religious questions without reference to Christianity, relying solely on natural philosophy and the Classical Greek tradition. He believed in the correspondence between faith and reason. The truths found in Christianity would be no different from the truths found in philosophy.In the words of Henry Chadwick, “If the Consolation contains nothing distinctively Christian, it is also relevant that it contains nothing specifically pagan either…[it] is a work written by a Platonist who is also a Christian, but is not a Christian or religious work.
Capitalism in the Public Realm 