ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE:
Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation

a Manifesto of the OmniCircus

X. THE CAPITALIST EPOCH:
The Culmination, Disintegration and Dissolution of "Realism"

This brings us to the three stages of the Western capitalist epoch: commercial, industrial, and monopoly. Each of these is a qualitative stage in the evolution of realism. Commercialism was the initial stage of capitalism. Industry and agriculture were freed by a series of political and economic revolutions form domination by the Catholic feudal aristocracies. Merchants, farmers and small handicraftsmen could, for the first time, own their means of production and carry out the process of wealth accumulation on a small scale by employing only a handful of workers. The ideas formed during the early commercial stage of capitalistic development gave us the myth and ideologies that still predominate today and help to sustain capitalism far past the stage of its historic usefulness. These ideas are first expressed heroically in art by the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance - Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo foremost. The Renaissance was the period when the bourgeois became the dominant class culturally, long before they took power in a political and economic sense. (In that regard it resembles our own time, when the rising class - this time the working class - is the becoming the dominant class culturally, through rock music, etc., before it 'takes over' politically and economically.)

Leonardo's VIRGIN and CHILD with ST. ANNE and his MONA LISA are fundamental and epochal in their transmission of a revolutionary and mystical new form of beauty, one based not on the idealism mandated by the church but instead on the realities of nature and society. The figures in these works are painted with an amazing new level of atmosphere, subtlety and realism, and the landscapes of these two masterpieces are some of the great achievements of art - mysterious, primal, infinite and other-worldly, they take viewers on a trance-journey to the innermost tunnels of the duality of life and death. Michelangelo's LAST JUDGEMENT continues in the Boschian tradition of portraying the suffering of the toiling classes using the (legal) metaphors of a religious Hell. It is one of the most grandiose and profound visions of the oppressed in the history of art. Like his sculptures, it carries forth a new definition of the eroticism, and suffering, of the "slave" classes. Humanity needs a new "great" sculptor every time we need to re-invent the collective self-image of our own physical body in the laboratory of art, and implement that new perspective through masterpieces. Michelangelo lived during the period of history when the church, which had completely repressed eroticism for a thousand years, was facing the coming bourgeois revolution, which was initiating a re-appraisal of the fundamental existence of toiling and oppressed peoples. He addressed the suffering and eroticism of the DYING SLAVE, as a metaphor for an ascetic and spiritual view of life, but his work also (unconsciously) revealed and partially created a new level of empathy and awareness of the human body and its journey through the stream of life. His sculptures on this theme also contributed in a powerful way to a political movement which ultimately re-invented the notion of the individual and the personal.

The Bourgeois Realism of the English and Dutch revolutions in the 16th and 17th centuries, whose artistry culminated in the theatrical works of Shakespeare in England, and the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, in Holland, was able to go even further in some respects. This is the most progressive stage of Bourgeois Realism, when the rising and genuinely revolutionary bourgeois were struggling against the tyranny of feudal institutions for the freedom to carry on their economic relations without political or religious discrimination (racial, sexual and class discrimination were still OK, of course). A giant affirmation of the (middle-class white male) individual, his psychological and intellectual reality, was the main progressive characteristic of the bourgeois "modes" which were created at this time. This is expressed most clearly in individual and group portraiture. In addition, the still life expressed the mysticism of the commodity, and the great new importance that commodity production had for the new class. The landscape, cityscape, and architectural painting, expressed the desire and will of the bourgeoisie to create and recreate the environment as well as the need to understand accurately the laws of nature in order to bring them under the guidance of production. The nude, then as now, defined an archetype of the role of women in bourgeois society as a function of the capitalist "nuclear" family. Historical and (Protestant) religious paintings, the last of the bourgeois genres created at this time, helped cement the new capitalist myths as being an expression of the "eternal order" of things.

XI. INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM: The Split Within Realism - The Birth of Abstract Art