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Title: The Case Against Art Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: anti-civ, art Source: Retrieved on 11th February, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/case-art.htm
Art is always about “something hidden.” But does it help us connect with
that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.
During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem
to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that
“unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools
were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of
form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the
irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.
The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure
or blown pigment — a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later
in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the
rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like
Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often
breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such
as the widely-found “venus” statuettes of women, was quite stylized.
Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede
domestication of nature. Significantly, the “sympathetic magic” or
hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence
that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.
The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt
before: in Worringer’s words, “creation in order to subdue the torment
of perception.” Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of
discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious
slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony
parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual
re-enactments of the moment of “the beginning,” the primordial paradise
of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in
controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself.
And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the
half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into
opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and
nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps
already prefigured.
The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in
reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of
senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and
seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings,
moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification.
LĂ©vi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been
able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so
very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training
sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying
repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in
favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anesthetizes the sense organs
and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces
culture, which can never compensate for the disability.
Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian
principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The
shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the
point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It
seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the
shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further
alienation and stratification.
Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces
exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a
community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstoy’s
statement that “art is a means of union among men, joining them together
in the same feeling,” elucidates art’s contribution to social cohesion
at the dawn of culture. Socializing ritual required art; art works
originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of art and
the artistic production of ritual are the same. “Music,” wrote
Seu-ma-tsen, “is what unifies.”
As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony;
art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely
following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of
the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other
symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective
memory. Nietzsche saw the training of memory, especially the memory of
obligations, as the beginning of civilized morality. Once the symbolic
process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception,
putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that
one person’s action could be compared with that of another, including
portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled.
Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property
of the subject.
Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman’s role was to
objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity
alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of
conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from
nature and dominated, at the deepest level, socially. Art’s ability to
symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were
led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in
nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic world, the
Fall of Man.
The world must be mediated by art (and human communication by language,
and being by time) due to division of labor, as seen in the nature of
ritual. The real object, its particularity, does not appear in ritual;
instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial
expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division
of labor, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of
ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on
equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is
gradually liquidated in favor of agriculture (historical production) and
religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production.
The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, enroute to priesthood, leader by
reason of mastering his own immediate desires via the symbol. All that
is spontaneous, organic and instinctive is to be neutered by art and
myth.
Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a
couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their
actions and projected them on a TV monitor before the two. The man’s
eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more
exciting than the act itself. The evocative cave pictures, volatile in
the dramatic, lamp-lit depths, began the transfer exemplified in
Fischl’s tableau, in which even the most primal acts can become
secondary to their representation. Conditioned self-distancing from real
existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the
category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art
has striven to make life itself an object of contemplation.
As the Paleolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic arrival of agriculture
and civilization — production, private property, written language,
government and religion — culture could be seen more fully as spiritual
decline via division of labor, though global specialization and a
mechanistic technology did not prevail until the late Iron Age.
The vivid representation of late hunter-gatherer art was replaced by a
formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to
symbolic shapes. This narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting
himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the
symbolic universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the
hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who
associate line with civilization: “This country has become civilized,”
literally means, in Yoruba, “this earth has lines upon its face.” The
inflexible forms of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent;
Gordon Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that
the pots of a Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the
form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art.
The work of art was in no sense autonomous at this time; it served
society in a direct sense, an instrument of the needs of the new
collectivity. There had been no worship-cults during the Paleolithic,
but now religion held sway, and it is worth remembering that for
thousands of years art’s function will be to depict the gods. Meanwhile,
what Glu:ck stressed about African tribal architecture was true in all
other cultures as well: sacred buildings came to life on the model of
those of the secular ruler. And though not even the first signed works
show up before the late Greek period, it is not inappropriate to turn
here to art’s realization, some of its general features.
Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic
part of the symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said
that art does not imitate life, but vice versa; which is to day that
life follows symbolism, not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that
produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Eliot, is “an
attack upon the inarticulate.” Upon the unsymbolized, he should have
said.
Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and
within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual,
in adopting these modes of expression, didn’t settle for far too little.
Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols,
such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our active undoing of all
the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolutionary situations,
immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly.
The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one’s own
motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All
art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes,
surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is
falsification. Under the guise of “enriching the quality of human
experience,” we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should
feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art
and myth provide for our psychic security.
Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in a medium of symbols. Not
only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic form are canons
of symbolization, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely
averred, for example, that a limited number of mathematical figures
account for the efficacy of art. There is Cezanne’s famous dictum to
“treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” and Kandinsky’s
judgement that “the impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle
produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the
finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” The sense of a symbol, as Charles
Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, this an
endless reproduction, with the real always displaced.
Though art is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to
rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons.
“Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne; Shelley praised the
“unpremeditated art” of the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more
beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes,
flowers, etc., beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact,
termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “warty, threadbare
approximation, a dry porridge.”
Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and
palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient
and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to
one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s own
existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like
religion, arises from unsatisfied desire.
Art should be considered a religious activity and category also in the
sense of Nietzsche’s aphorism, “We have Art in order not to perish of
Truth.” Its consolation explains the widespread preference for metaphor
over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were
somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the
antithesis of art. In dominated life freedom does not exist outside art,
however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is
welcomed. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee.
This separate realm of contrived life is both important and in
complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its
institutionalized separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in
general, where its elements are not, and cannot be, actualized; the work
of art is a selection of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic
terms. Arising from the sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to
religion not only by reason of its confinement to an ideal sphere and
its absence of any dissenting consequences, but it can hence be no more
than thoroughly neutralized critique at best.
Frequently compared to play, art and culture — like religion — have more
often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the ludic
function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence, should be
estimated as one might reassess the meaning of Versailles: by
contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining its
marshes.
Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the
plane of daily struggle “to a world of aesthetic exaltation,”
paralleling the aim of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the
conservative office of art when he wrote that without art works
civilization would crumble “within fifty years” ... becoming “enslaved
to instincts and to elementary dreams.”
Hegel determined that art and religion also have “this in common,
namely, having entirely universal matters as content.” This feature of
generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce
the notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art.
Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the
contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation
only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard
found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable
reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can
be seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to
repudiate its intent and contents with “well, after all, it is only
art.”
Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The
situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized
culture industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness, rather, a mass
diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not
forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its
alleged control.
Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and music,
largely through the electronic media, the representation of
representation. Image and sound, in their ever-presence, have become a
void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the
distance between artist and spectator has diminished, a narrowing that
only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and
what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate
and manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of
political power.
Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avantgarde
movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any
more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue that
Aestheticism, or “art for art’s sake,” is more radical than an attempt
to engage alienation with its own devices. The late 19^(th) century art
pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the world, as
opposed to the avantgarde effort to somehow organize life around art. A
valid moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that
division of labour has diminished experience and turned art into just
another specialisation: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its
own content.
The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a
leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a
social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly
prizes novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that
reality must be constantly updated.
But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world’s capacity
to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise is
another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.
Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde movements, its negative
image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical collapse
radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be against
all “isms,” including the idea of art. But painting cannot negate
painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that
all symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and
communication. [nor can writing negate writing, nor can typing radical
essays onto diskettes to assist in their publication ever be liberating
— even if the typer breaks the rules and puts in an uninvited comment]
In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the
rigidities and irrelevancies of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of
art; Hans Richter’s memoirs referred to “the regeneration of visual art
that Dada had begun.” If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists
reformed it.
Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission of art.
Before trailing off into Trotskyism and/or art-world fame, the
Surrealists upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock “the
Marvellous” which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false
judgement that would have re-introduced art into everyday life and
thereby transfigured it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art
to repressive society. The real barrier is not between art and social
reality, which are one, but between desire and the existing world. The
Surrealists’ aim of inventing a new symbolism and mythology upheld these
categories and mistrusted unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter,
Breton held that “enjoyment is a science; the exercise of the senses
demands a personal initiation and therefore you need art.”
Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that
it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its
field of vision could art survive. With the least strain of
embellishment possible in a formal language, art became increasingly
self-referential, in its search for a “purity” that was hostile to
narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is
consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it.
But the strategy of trying to empty art of symbolic value, the
insistence on the work of art as an object in its own right in a world
of objects, proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This “radical
physicality,” based on aversion to authority though it was, never
amounted to more, in its objectiveness, than simple commodity status.
The sterile grids of Mondrian and the repeated all-black squares of
Reinhardt echo this acquiescence no less than hideous 20^(th) century
architecture in general. Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by
Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased Drawing, exhibited after his month-long
erasure of a de Kooning drawing. The very concept of art, Duchamp’s
showing of a urinal in a 1917 exhibition notwithstanding, became an open
question in the ’50s and has grown steadily more undefinable since.
Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media
(e.g. ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced
look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of a
Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless,
depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious
marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its world
revealed.
The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the ’60s — Conceptual,
Minimalist, Performance, etc. — and the accelerated obsolescence of most
art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism”
of modernism by an eclectic mix from past stylistic achievements. This
is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments,
announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global
devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new
symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so.
Occasionally critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability
“to stimulate the growth of a really troubling doubt,” little noticing
that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art
itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and
as such must be superseded, that art is disappearing because the
immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the
world that must be voided.
Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding
Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification,
throughout all culture. But this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden
ideology is stymied by its refusal to consider origins or historical
causation, an aversion it inherited from
structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, Deconstruction’s seminal
figure, deals with language as a solipsism, consigned to
self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing
about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this
approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature,
like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own
surface.
Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a
gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm, and crucified to a
Volkswagen, we seen in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such
as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi — with his eyes closed.
“Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry
nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the
Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as
the only way to write seriously.
In a jaded, enervated age, where it seems to speak is to say less, art
is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a
society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century an more later
how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more
threadbare the consolation or station of “timeless” art.
Adorno began his book thusly: “Today it goes without saying that nothing
concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its
relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory
affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and
to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of
culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that
the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming
clearer that when we really experiment with our hearts and hands the
sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must
enact, the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the
real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will
recommence at that moment.