ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XI. INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM:
The Split Within Realism - The Birth of Abstract Art
Then came the industrial revolution, spurred on by the mighty force of capitalist competition, and in the hellhole of the early factory was forged the gateway to the new world. It socialized the act of production and brought with it the potential for satisfying the material needs of all of humanity. For the first time in history, it became possible to imagina a future where the exploitation of one person by another was not the necessary prerequisite for the creation of science or culture, as it was when the ruling classes of history accumulated leisure time for intellectual development along with the other privileges of wealth and power. As a result, the socialist movement sought to end exploitation by socializing ownership of the means of production to make it coincide with the social act of production itself. A further result of the vastly increased productivity of industrialism was a crisis of values among bourgeois artists, who sensed the need to re-evaluate individualism as the basis of their language of art. At first, this crisis was reflected in a rigidifying of bourgeois genres and a hearkening back to Classicism - the Neo-Classicism of 1750-1800 - coinciding with the beginnings of the industrial revolution. As capitalist ideology loosened its grip on the intellectual, a split occurred among the Bourgeois Realists. This split continues to this day. The "art world" characterizes it as follow: The Classical school vs. the Romantic. But the so-called Romantic school has a dual character; it contained many tendencies, some of which became utterly backwards and indeed laid the basis for fascist art, and another of which laid the foundation for the abstract art, social documentary, and "Social Surrealist" movements.
The origins of Romanticism were indeed progressive. In the later work of Goya we find the beginnings of both documentary and expressionism. When Goya portrayed the DISASTERS of WAR; without the slightest shred of idealism, he was helping to create an entirely new art which was taken up by the pioneer photographers. When he painted SATURN DEVOURING HIS SON with strokes so broad and summary that it resembles nothing less than a sculpture by Henry Moore, he was laying the groundwork for an art of expressive form. Another of the pioneer Romantics, Turner, explored this branch of art even more deeply. Turner's late land and seascapes represent a re-creation of the concept of color and form in painting. For this artist the subject matter of the bourgeois landscape painter became merely an excuse to create a giant tapestry of curvilinear shape that expresses forces from the primeval to the erotic, from the birth of a new technology (RAIN, STEAM, and SPEED;) to the mystery of life itself (KEELMEN HEAVING COALS by MOONLIGHT). Turner was the first visual poet of the industrial revolution. His art was the embryo of a new industrial aesthetic, taken to the next step by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose GATES of HELL is a supreme masterpiece exploring proletarian suffering. Rodin also continued the work of Michelangelo, in a more explicit and expressionistic vein, by exploring eroticism as a legitimate and humanizing subject, as in his DANAID.
In the New World, the novels and short stories (BARTLEBY) of Herman Melville, culminating in his uber-masterpiece MOBY DICK, are a fertile examination of similar proletarian themes in literature. Melville also wrote a short story, THE BELLTOWER, about a mechanician who builds an automaton which eventually kills him. Ah humanity! And his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The ARTIST of the BEAUTIFUL (1844), from "Mosses from an Old Manse", told a strange story about an automaton maker named Owen Warland. Ambrose Bierce wrote MOXON"S MASTER about a thinking machine that plays chess. These works presage a panoply of mechanical humans making guest appearances in 20th century literature and media, such as the Tin Man in the "Wizard of Oz", Thomas Edison's mechanical girlfriend in "Tomorrow's Eve" by de L'isle-adam, the robo-woman in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", and the moronic childishness of George Lucas' "Star Wars" efforts.
Bourgeois Realism today is like a corpse that won't be buried. From Impressionism onwards, Bourgeois Realism has increasingly dissociated itself from the task of expressing the human drama, but the techniques and genres of Bourgeois Realism are still unquestioningly learned by a significant, if shrinking, majority. The industrial revolution created an equally powerful ideological revolution - one that honored and accepted the idea of progress. The Civil War in the United States was the high point of a heroic, socially progressive capitalist revolution. It was also the last important transformative movement that the industrial bosses were to motivate. The contradiction of progressive technology producing massive over-privilege for a few, instead of overall social improvement, inspired a profound fear in the inner core of the powerful...a fear of the slave class awakening. This eventually caused the ruling class to lose the most precious spoils from its war against the oligarchy - its realism.
The ruling class today spends most of its energy creating a false culture for the working class. Its own art suffers and eventually disintegrates. The grotesquely resurrected corpse of individualist, nationalist, commodity fetishist, bootstrap American dream-myth culture is re-animated by a multi-billion dollar "entertainment" industry. This leaves the bourgeoisie with only a small fraction of their energy to create their own modern day culture.
Starting with Impressionism in the late 19th century, Bourgeois Realist art went through a disintegration and breakdown similar to that of an aging individual. Cataracts, putting a film of dots on the picture, first obscure content. Then the subject breaks down into a hallucinatory and dissociative abstraction that expresses an inability to deal with reality and a corresponding need for an artificial security to replace it. Becoming hyper-mechanistic and hyper-religious at the same time, the late-bourgeois artist develops a hyperbolic forgetfulness that allows infinite regurgitation of the most retrograde, empty and trivial concepts. Voltaire said, "If I can get you to believe in absurdities, I can get you to commit atrocities," and the empty absurdities of the 20th century art world are accompanied by the greatest litany of atrocities in history.
Karel Capek wrote a play called R.U.R., for Rossum's Universal Robots, in 1920. In the play, a capitalist by the name of Rossum makes and sells robots, which eventually make an uprising with horrible consequences. (This play was the origin of the term 'robot', which comes from the Czechoslovak word meaning 'worker.') The contradictions of mass-scale mechanization under the shackles of private ownership thus commence breaking through the thin skin of the collective unconscious...
22 years later Isaac Asimov wrote a story, Runaround, about robots. This work is the source of the famous three rules robots should always obey:
1. A robot may not harm a human, or allow a human to come to harm through inaction.
2. A robot must obey a human's orders unless they conflict with the first law.
3. A robot must protect itself unless this conflicts with the first or second law.
Obviously the image of the mechanical worker is becoming more and more impressed upon the social landscape, and both industrial classes, capitalist and worker, and forced to clarify their views forthwith. Asimov's contribution is to imply that robots will do as they are told. The myth of "artificial intelligence" gets its first public bashing.
