ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE:
Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation

a Manifesto of the OmniCircus

XII. THE CONTINUITY OF GENRES

If art works are the laboratory for the creation of design languages, including forms of personality, ideology and modes of mass culture, it should be possible to trace the lines of development from the early bourgeois artistic expressions to their descendants in modern day mass entertainment culture. Each one of the genres of 17th century Dutch Realist painting, exemplified by the genius of Rembrandt, represented an essential component of the ideology of dawning capitalism. There were eight generic categories of image making in early Bourgeois Realism: the portrait, still life, historical painting, religious painting, martial painting, family group, nude, and the "scapes" (land, sea, and city). The Dutch made the second successful bourgeois revolution, after the English, but they managed to go much further in the creation of a middle-class, democratic republic with relative freedom of thought, expression and religion. As a result, a flowering of art and science took place. Descartes settled in Amsterdam, Dutch mathematics and mechanics lead the world, and Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer were the leaders of a uniquely "realistic" school of painting. The underlying assumptions of each subject-genre were partially, indeed mostly, progressive in the context of their day. In our time, however, these same ideals have become perverted and monstrous as has the mass culture based on them. On the following page is a chart showing the main line of development from the laboratory of bourgeois revolutionary art to its final degradation as television "entertainment" (it is necessary to keep in mind that the bourgeois democratic revolution and its ideology had a dual character, and we are not herewith analyzing its progressive side, but schematizing its negative modern-day repercussions).

The idea that artists should create likenesses of the surface appearance of faces, bodies, objects or nature has various hidden pre-suppositions. During Rembrandt's day the progressive movement in science and art was fighting a battle for the right to examine the self and the environment as it is. This new empiricism created a passive-reflection theory of art, which utilized accurate depictions of surface appearance as a means of exploring the reality of the material world. The early commercial stage of capitalism was concerned with the development of nationalism and individualism. A contradiction? Not really. The optimum condition for the development of a bourgeois class was a national geo-political forum as opposed to the city-state of the feudal period. Artists were expected to produce idealized pictures of the state, the 'police,' and the national heritage of that particular entity to help solidify the national identity of the people, and undercut their class-consciousness that (except for that of the bourgeoisie themselves) stood in the way of the ascendancy of the business class. Rembrandt's NIGHT WATCH and his CONSPIRACY of the BATAVIANS are anthems for the Dutch Republic, present and past. Within the bourgeois class there was a massive extension of what we would call the development of the personality. The complexity of unconscious processes, the uniqueness and mystery of genius, the dark face of greed and selfishness, heroism and cowardice, all become subject and source for the artist. The awesome power of human creativity was examined for the first time as godlike, and an attendant, celebratory fascination for the things produced by creative and industrious minds developed.

Industrialism produced a monstrous power for a few, and similarly potent new genres evolved. The monster novel, such as Mary Shelley's "FRANKENSTEIN" and Bram Stoker's "DRACULA", was an unconscious expression of the gigantism of personality that accompanies the terrifying rise to over privilege of the modern-day corporate power structure, the most dangerous and destructive ruling class ever to walk the earth. Similarly, the other progressive and experimental genres of Rembrandt's day produced horrifying and reactionary new offspring, born of the inner contradictions of the incomplete nature of bourgeois revolutions. The particular genius of American entertainment television is that it has packaged these cancerous pre-apocalyptic degenerations as safe and sappy escapism, with the noxious messages buried deep in layers of reassuringly disassociating laugh tracks. On a modern-day game show, the prizes are arranged like a Dutch still-life and audiences scream as in a Dionysian ritual when the refrigerator and microwave are introduced one by one, as if they were alive, as if they were themselves famous, as if they could kiss us, put us to bed and tell us everything will be there tomorrow just as we remembered it before...

A large number of artists have thrown off the aesthetic outlook of the original bourgeoisie and are casting about for a replacement. Many artists, after the Russian Revolution in 1917, began an examination of the design elements themselves - form, color, line, as a source of growth and renewal beyond realism. Their hope was to bring about a new form of beauty, an aesthetic for the industrial culture of our age. Other progressive artists such as Picasso engaged in an effort to make a world poly-fusion visual language, inspired by a synthesis of the world's folk and classical art. The worldwide Constructivist and Surrealist movements resulted. This revolutionary process has been countered by the "art world" of the bourgeoisie, creating, among other vomitous quagmires, a retrograde abstraction known as Formalism.

XIII. FORMALISM