DRAFT
An Open Call for Open-Minded Artists
Whither art?
Is art a "practice? It is routinely spoken of as such. Does it change? It is always changing, on the whole, albeit with certain details held constant for long stretches of time. Does art matter? Its sheer pervasiveness, viewed from outer space, suggests that it matters deeply, as few other human practices and artifacts can. Meanwhile, from the global level on down to the nation, the community, the affinity group and, finally, the individual, matters become confounded very precipitously and very badly. It becomes difficult, in certain matters artistic, aesthetic, literary, theatrical, and otherwise, to ground one's community or even oneself in the kind of practice which proceeds as suggested above.
Most art that is made does not matter a lick; other work (conventionally speaking the miniscule "great" subset of the whole) seems to matter greatly. No such judgment is absolute, and it is better that it is not so; all is badly confounded anyway, and so it is difficult to take even the first tentative step towards a rational or "analytic" form of discourse on art. When a great work can become not great so quickly and easily, and vice versa, without anyone lifting a finger to make it so, or perhaps only after entire fists and limbs have risen and fallen several times before finally running into something good and flush, practicing people are easily disoriented, even if they are very intelligent and very adept practictioners. They remain human beings, ostensibly, and this means that they never really observe the root of the problem firsthand. It is guessed at, first, as people are thrust blindly into whatever culture they inherit; then, practice proceeds on the basis of those guesses; and from there, as certain radicals would say, all things are possible; or so it may appear, for a while.
As for the present study, there is no pretense to having gained any more complete understanding of the cosmos, or of the individual, than is already implicit in existing cultures, practices, academic disciplines, communities. The effort here can only be as any human effort is: incomplete, slanted, half of a whole problem which amounts in the end to nothing. There are aspects of the problem, however, as with anything that has already been labeled a "problem," which move in and out of human beings' field of direct observation. It is not all for the better that events, very occasionally, reveal their partial answers very unequivocally, while the rest of the time, life is a motley. To human beings it can only seem as if all degrees short of perfect knowledge are equally hazardous, since there is then no more true certainty for the adept than for the novice; it is logical, from here, if this is indeed the assumption that has been made, to assume ultimate uncertainty at all times. This, however, is unjustified, and indeed just as hazardous to all concerned as to stake everything on a longshot gamble.
The field of "science" consists in the ascertaining of near-certainties. It can seek these answers, of course, only from problems which seem amenable to offering them up; the process of assessment of a problem as amenable or unamenable is very well codified and will not be entered into in any detail here, for now, because it is relevant only to say that this seems to work very well within the range of its own purview. But this range of inquiry is limited, profoundly so; this all the same regardless of the import in terms of human life, which can be ultimate, in rapture and destruction alike. Human beings can glimpse ultimate ecstacy and ultimate terror through their own works, scientific and otherwise. They have not yet succeeded in returning all of humanity to the earth, nor in ascending as one species-group up and out into the cosmic light. Suffice it to say: they are working on it. Both things. Concurrently. Never one without the other.
The two ultimate outcomes are not commensurable, however. Here on earth, these are not merely two sides of the same coin. There is no dialectic here, not in terms of human life. This study is humanist, then, in the too-literal sense of assuming that humanity ought to continue to exist, or most likely will in any case; and it is antihumanist in the basic sense of opposing most of what has fallen under the heading of "humanism" for the last 500 years. Antihumanism here on earth is humanism when it is viewed from outer space. This is the one and only "national prejudice" which is tolerated here.
Mostly human beings will not sniff anything scientifically actionable unless they are very adept in science itself. Mostly, but not entirely. Happenstance may grant them a front row seat for the revelation of something profound, concrete, ecstatic, and perhaps also terrifying. They become true believers in their own certainty on the matter at hand, even where they remain contentedly uncertain of very much else and not particularly troubled or bolstered by the fact. This then becomes just another form of difference between and among human beings, a difference of practical knowledge rather than of formal education, but with some of the same contours. This is why human beings have killed each other over their art, even though art hardly matters at all to anyone, seemingly. Also, it is why so many among those who have glimpsed the absolute truth of "great" artworks could remain or become among the most violent and destructive people in history. These are the two sides of the pragmatic problem to be faced here, and it is an ultimate problem not in terms of any artistic absolutism but rather of human life; this quite literally; this foremost; and then, secondarily, also in the broader, looser, artsier sense.
On this point, the hope is merely to reveal something, anything at all, that is humanly actionable but has not been acted upon because it has not been understood, or not understood by and for people, in a time and place and in mundane circumstances which permit of any such actionability. That is all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Whither art practices?
How has art been practiced through the ages? Many ways, and in many incommensurate ways. How has change unfolded here? Presumably it was very slow or non-existent for a very long time, until it began to accelerate out of control. Have these recent jolts of innovation been validated by practice? Or have they merely made people angry, caused suffering, threatened to lead humanity ever further down the road of self-annihilation? And, of course: have they finished expanding because they have already filled the entire art-universe and there is nothing left for them to expand into?
The latter questions are phrased in the language of the preceding sections of this study, and they are framed such as to reflect this study's central theses. They are trite questions which have been discussed endlessly. It is a bit jejune even to present them here. They have not been answered satisfactorily, though. No one can agree on the answers, but everyone agrees that there are plenty of unresolved tensions.
The various accounts of this on the very broadest causal level are, of course, not too controversial. When formerly isolated peoples make contact, the more so when they are thrown together to live in close quarters, "ideas have sex," and change is accelerated. This is how the pace of change begins to outpace human beings' ability to keep up. The glacially slow material process of practical discovery and validation cannot keep pace with ideal reproduction. All of that kind of thing is thrown into chaos and confusion as more and more new ideas are born than can be provided for. As Becker explains so well, no one ever knew very many of all the things they really needed to know about their world, but they had enough communal protection against the bugbears that mere survival, at least, was still possible. Now, slowly, and eventually quickly, all of that was rolled back to make way for the "innovations" that would deliver humanity, advance it, to some new-and-vastly-improved way of life, the way of complete knowledge of and oneness with the cosmos.
For this process to take its course, it could not be regulated; not fully regulated, at least, not in the broadest sense, nor in the later technical sense. It is not even clear, even now, how certain branches of it would or could be regulated. And so it has run away and has to be chased down by regulators, if they have a visual on it at all. Government regulators are just one example. Any political relation, any "institutionalized inequality of power," is a latent conduit of regulation, broadly construed. There are plenty of these conduits around, perhaps more than ever, too many; but one cannot even see innovation by looking through them, so far has it advanced out into the expanses.
Individuals are also self-regulators, autonomically and willfully both, and of course they also have regulation done to them by all the circumstances unfolding outside of their own bodies. When Rank writes of artists meeting their own dynamic needs of equilibriation, he is honing in one very peculiar type of self-regulation. As is clear enough by now, this is just one side and merely to quote it out of context, as above, is already risky. The risk is well-known to any artist who has received more than cursory critical attention: if the art has been a violent lurch away from prevailing norms, something previously must have lurched at the artist just that violently; or, just as speciously but not quite as baldly aggressive, if the art has been so conventional as to be worthy of its inevitable short ride to oblivion, then clearly the artist must be a fat-and-happy bourgeois with plenty of time, money and intimacy to keep them in the mainstream, in art as in life. Input: Output. Image: Reflection.
There is no need to abandon this folk wisdom, not yet, nor to abandon the many witticisms and anecdotes based upon it. It is probably true on the whole. But what does "on the whole" actually mean? What can really be said about the whole world, and then applied so directly on smaller scales, all the way down to group or individual concerns? There is not much at all of this kind, and that is why there are two absolutely opposed theories of "society"; that is why some people have questioned whether society per se exists at all in reality or is merely the cultural illusion du jour. The two theories have been called "ontological nominalism" and "ontological realism," but this is unwieldy. For ease of use, colloquial discourse received the ideal reductionist phraseology when Margaret Thatcher declared of society that, "There is no such thing!" Ever since, there have been Thatcherites and Reaganites, and there have been Social Democrats; and around the fringes there have been the timeless boutique centrisms and extremist death spirals.
The position taken here, tersely condensed, is that believers in society are onto something, but they have one humungous detail all mixed up: much of what they are after is simply untenable on the scale of the post-industrial nation-state. It is not even possible in a city of millions. Information technology, designed to overcome precisely this pessimism of scale, has merely validated it beyond a shadow of a doubt. When people are not accountable to each other by way of mutual integration into elemental social structures, it does not matter what kind of choice architecture or content moderation prevails on a given internet channel; there will be truly antisocial behavior. (Antisocial, not misanthropic. There is always some of that too, but that is something else. Rather, antisocial, as in "society.")
On a scale of individual-to-society, there is a Puritan waystation, community, which best names the price. Communities are not as individualistic as contemporary Western democracies, but nor are they any more "societies." Not at all. Communities are highly independent, perhaps self-governing and isolationist, confined to a patch of ground, tending more towards stability than innovation. Cloistered bourgeois neighborhoods and recreational affinity groups are referred to, these days, as "communities," but really they are just what they are: cloistered away or escaped into. They quite literally get their sustenance from farflung sources: from food grown on the other side of the world by people they will never meet, or from a parasocial relationship with a celebrity who may well turn out never to have existed at all. That is not all bad, but it is not community. Actually it is the opposite.
As with anything and everything human, the ideal of community is an ideal. Real life is never so simple. Any and all of that kind of thing is happily conceded here. All the same, this is how the present study aligns itself on the matter: as a work of left conservatism, as Russell Arben Fox has proposed such tendencies be labeled.
What of art, then, if both contemporary social democracy and classical individualism are abandoned for this thing called community? Is this not the death knell for modernism? For experimentalism, for activist ostentation, and for hyperminimalism too? Is Pure Art out and Functional Art in? Are all the artists who have pursued all of this so doggedly throughout the tumultuous and long twentieth century simply to be abandoned by the side of the road? Perhaps in the end, but not yet. For now this work appears as just another body of practice, groping in the wilderness for feedback, receiving some, going wanting in other ways, and then dropping into the postmodern grab-bag of intertextual reference and filmic leimotif, from which it is fished out only for very calculated reasons; indeed, it is trotted out most often as a form of critique and rarely at all as living practice.
Rightly or wrongly, modernist and experimentalist art always has, from the get-go, been emblematic of the Great Acceleration. It changed too much and too quickly for audiences to get a bead on it; therefore audiences not only rejected it, largely, but were (and still are) for the most part repulsed. People still react to early modernism with the same deep distaste and even aggression with which its very first audiences did. That is said to settle the matter right there. The reason people still encounter this work, however, is that yet other people, a tiny elite perhaps, have worked tremendously hard to preserve it and keep it in circulation. This cohort is tiny and their quality of commitment is ultimate. That is a delicate problem for a "society" to confront, even in the sphere of leisure.
In a very famous series of lectures, published as Art and Technics, Lewis Mumford gives voice to the everyman's experience of modernism.
the symbols that most deeply express the emotions and feelings of our age are a succession of dehumanized nightmares, transposing into esthetic form either the horror and violence or the vacuity and despair of our time
(p. 7)
This towards the beginning of the lecture series. And towards the end,
The healthy art of our time is either the mediocre production of people too fatuous or complacent to be aware of what has been happening to the world--or it is the work of spiritual recluses,...artists who bathe tranquilly in the quiet springs of traditional life, but who avoid the strong, turbid currents of contemporary existence, which might knock them down or carry them away. These artists no doubt gain in purity and intensity by that seclusion; but by the same token, they lose something in strength and general breadth of appeal.
(p. 147)
Few see fit to disagree with this outlook whenever it is offered up, at least as concerns their own sensibilities; nevertheless, the argumentation here is tragicomically wrong, and it stands out as such because there is not very much that Mumford ever got wrong, not like this. It stands out particularly to a Rankian, too, because Rank's book was twenty years in the rear-view by this time; Rank had already shown just how dubious this kind of socio-determinism really is; also, Rank and Mumford indeed evince much the same eclectic polymathy on some of the same subjects. Mumford, however, reveals here that he had not thought very hard at all about the relationship between creation and experience; despite his encyclopedic grasp of the creations, his account of the creators will not do.
The purely procedural gaffe Mumford begins with is
to take Picasso's
Guernica
to be a representative work.
He takes it to be such because it is considered "great," perhaps
the greatest.
But
that is precisely why it is not
representative.
Mumford had his reasons for doing so, it seems;
unfortunately they are not good ones.
Guernica
is a one-off among one-offs; so one can only hope, given the event which it portrays. Elsewhere in the world, even at this fraught historical moment, many other people were painting landscapes, reviving Shakespeare, and singing
lieder.
It is not so easy to simply round out the tautology and insist that these people, if this is what they were doing, must not have been too disturbed over the bombing of Guernica, or perhaps did not even know about it. That is a difficult point to litigate granularly, it must be conceded; but it is dubious anyway on a high level. Indeed, all things are not possible at all times, but
much
remained possible in 1937 besides "vacuity" and "nightmares." Much of what had already been done in Europe and America remained doable, and people did it. If Picasso or Faulkner was too much, there was always Benny Goodman or Charlie Chaplin. What was
not
doable?
That which had been forgotten, disused, or wilfully eradicated.
[Mumford on the death of "polytechnics"!!]
The sin of modernism, then, is not that it succeeded or failed in its totalitarian ambitions. It would be just as easy to conclude, ahistorically, that modernism "comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable," nothing more nor less, and that the world actually and always
needs
just a little bit of that kind of thing (but
only
a little bit . . .). The reality, though, even for the advocate, is that certain parts of the world, at certain times,
did
get much more modernism than was good for them. Why? Because many modernists socially transacted in their work such as to impose it on people rather than to allow people to take it or leave it.
As concerns music, John Mauceri has recently put forth an account of this sordid history, an account which gets at many underdiscussed aspects of it, but unfortunately suffers from a condemnably vulgar form of socio-determinism which puts Mumford in the shade.
[link to some Gann material would be really helpful here...but which post(s) is it in?]
The reality, then, is that
even the ostensibly Puritan "high modernism" of the mid-twentieth century was not pure at all.
[note on Kavolis]
Rather, it was transacted viciously and absolutely. It was imposed upon the people by a tiny elite. By that time the aesthetics of it all do not matter a lick. The psychology of the creative process and the ramifications of biography do not matter anymore. There is a more basic problem.
Artists of advanced sensibility must confront this, openly and honestly, and they must do it with and for their audiences, not to their audiences. They must afford audiences the fundamental democratic right of abstention, without which there is no true consent. That is what was not done when modernism was fresh. And then, just as Lasch says, somewhere, that those calling most loudly for revolutionary liberation later are found at the head of some new system of oppression, the experimentalists and conceptualists took the helm. They are not quite as vicious as the modernists and are more in tune with their own times, but they are human beings thrust into much the same motley of global expansionism and ideological chaos as were their radical forebears. They have committed all of the same sins of impure social transactionality and top-down imposition; and so, where it once was atonality or nonrepresentationalism which was pushed on people, now all has become conceptual and didactic, all the same if its subject matter is soap or citizenship, food fights or class war.
No human matter ever unfolds ideally or according to plan, and art history is no different. But history can only unfold. It can be refolded and shipped to oblivion, postage due, only by being forgotten and disused.
Modernism's sins of transaction must not be forgotten, and neither must the work itself be forgotten.
The work and the transaction (and the backstories and the forestories) are not simple reflections or antitheses of each other. Their relationships are infinitely complicated. Those relationships are intractable. Communities can only make judgment calls on such matters; they cannot penetrate to the absolute truth of who was thinking what, why, and how.
The way forward, as Mauceri says in his brightest moment, is simply to present the work. Practice modernism within the social and legal norms of the time-and-place. Transact in purity and benevolence. Do not lure people into traps and then hold them there. Let them wander past, stop and look, come and go as they please. Let them stay for as long or as short a time as they wish. Let them think what they will.
Do not read the act of leaving a concert midway through in the manner it has always been read, not even if there are other hints to this effect. Do not read this as a Cognitivist does. Read it as a Behaviorist does.
Foremost of all: do not hold grudges. Artists must continue to practice community self-government and self-transcendence with and for all of their own concert-leavers. Otherwise they have excluded themselves from the community. They have not been excluded by their leavers; they have excluded themselves.
In other words: Turn absolutely against the radical platform of art-life monism. Compartmentalize, work, play, commune. In other words, practice community. Community can be stifling. It does not have to be that way.
Continue to give concerts and see who stays, and who comes back. Someone always does, though the door is always open for them to leave. This may mean that they need to be there. The reason for their need is not important. What is important is that it be met, and that the needs of the artist to have at least a few people watching them are also thereby met. These are basic needs. If either set of needs appears unreasonable, something larger, elsewhere, has gone very wrong.
This is how those subsumed within an insular, monolithic community life can find "their people" all the same. They can have just enough individualism to keep things fresh without needing to integrate the entire universe with itself.
By that time all is well except for one thing, which Becker has spoken to eloquently and extensively: the parties on either side of a social transaction must be weary of later landing, first, in sacralization, later in scapegoating of each other. When that happens (it almost always happens given long enough), practice has taken its course, the previous experiment has come to an end, and a new experiment must be launched. The community,
nominally,
remains unchanged. The body replaces its cells so gradually that it remains identifiably the same person; in fact becomes
only more like itself
with age. But the cells
must
replace themselves, or else the organism will quickly die. That is what modernism must become: cell replacement as against amputation, implantation or prosthesis.
NOTES
. . . "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Artists" . . .
The author confesses that he has not actually read the work whose title he riffs on here. He promises to do so soon.
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