Art offers us strength when the world feels unsteady

In metallurgy, there's a concept called "yield strength".

Like bending a paper clip that you can never quite return to its original shape, yield strength is the maximum stress you can apply to a material before it distorts irrevocably.

Yield Strength is the title of this year's Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where the curator, Ellie Buttrose, has invited a broad collection of Australian artists to consider the resilience and strength of their materials, the work they make from it, and the world to which they deliver it. We spectators view this work at time when the "safe loads" of our societies, communities and capacities are under the crushing, life-changing stressors of the bin-fire world we inhabit.

We wrestle, like the artists, with what is affecting us, and what may also be deforming us for all time.

The importance of art in our lives right now 

I am so taken by the concept Buttrose and the artists involved are testing, because there could not be a single better representation of the vital importance of powerful, resonating art in our lives right now, when leadership, meaning or even trustworthy direction is lacking in so many institutions, governments, corporations and world powers.

While those powers frighten us, fail us or in some cases destroy us, our artists keep trying to connect us to what is true, meaningful and enduring about the human spirit. And they do it at a time when it surely makes more sense to just give it up.

Fascinatingly, world audiences are making it very clear they never want their artists to stop. In her international smash, Hamnet, the director Chloe Zhao, has lit a new fire of understanding and connection beneath a Shakespeare classic that foregrounds love, loss and grief in a way that every filmgoer feels in their marrow.

Passionate arguments still rage world-wide about whether a beloved Victorian classic by Emily Bronte, has been misrepresented or reawakened in the new film version of Wuthering Heights. And a mind-blowing performance by singers Rosalia and Bjork paying homage to classic Berlin techno in their song Berghain has been the musical highlight of my year so far. 

'Being an artist right now is so important'

All this work shows the connective strength — yes, the infinite yield strength — of creativity: songs and books and films and stories that endure through time and past the rise and collapse of world orders. We remember these creations. We recite them and sing them and share them with each other and turn to them in the biggest moments of our lives — birth, loss, joy — precisely because their meaning and emotional truth are persistent through time like high-tensile steel.

We build our real lives, our emotional lives, around these creations because our memories of them are strong, and they give us shelter.

For the creatives themselves, I'm sure that most artists, given world circumstances, are feeling a bit like this meme right now — uselessly whistling their music into the hot wind of global horror: what's the point of another recital when schools are being bombed?

But the English artist Tracey Emin had the best answer to that, as a massive retrospective of her work opened last week at the Tate Modern in London: "Art is one of the last good things we have left in the world that humans do… art is the antithesis of everything which is bad that's created by humans … being an artist right now is so important." 

Emin is the artist whose installation "My Bed" tells the story of her emotional collapse at the end of a relationship, and there would not be a woman alive who looks at the dishevelled bed and its detritus and does not understand exactly how those four, desperate and drunk days in it felt. Emin's representation of depression is as banal as it is ecstatic because it feels like everyone's.

That's what the six distinctive artists featured in the new series of Creative Types which premieres on ABCTV tonight hope to do: to connect, to make you feel and to make you feel human when the rest of the world seems controlled by bloodless ideologues and bots.

From Andy Griffiths to Andrea Lam

Peerless actor Hugo Weaving finds the humanity in even the most difficult of men; Andrea Lam proselytises the emotional impact of the piano to any person — young or old — that she can; Andy Griffiths is on a lifelong mission make children love reading; Jimmy Barnes turns trauma into a national soundtrack; dancer David Hallberg wants us all to feel and understand our body's relationship to dance; and Nazeem Hussain fearlessly makes comedy about the tragedy of Gaza.

All of that is, I think, some of the most important work anyone can do.

In their book, Your Brain on Art, Johns Hopkins scientific researchers, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, suggested that one or more art experiences a month can extend your life by 10 years — promoting sensory engagement, neuroplasticity and increased cognitive skills — and is as important as sleep, movement and nutrition.

You can dive into their research yourself to see if it persuades you  — but I'm not surprised.

Because the opposite of yield strength is ductility: a material's ability to undergo serious, permanent stretching without breaking.

Put another way, that's resilience.

And as our countries, our ecosystems, our communities are stretched to breaking point, I know that the lessons of our Australian creatives in true resilience — in connection, fulfilment and deep, human understanding — will land right now rather like survival strategies for us all.

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne. The episode with Jimmy Barnes airs at 8.30pm Thursday 5 March on ABCTV, and you can stream all episodes and past series of the show now on ABC iView.