ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XIV. CONSTRUCTIVISM
Formalist abstraction is not the only kind existing today; within abstract art there are two main tendencies that deal with the issues confronting art and artists in diametrically opposing ways. These tendencies are social and historical rather than organized associations. The need to generalize categories nonetheless remains, despite the danger of oversimplifying an extremely complex and contradictory process. Formalism in practice is the breakdown of the existing mode of social design into its component parts and functions, each of which is then treated as an art form. When applied to aesthetics, it is a passive 'realism' of existing design; the idealization of present day social relations as they are reflected in architecture, transportation, communications, and industrial design, the lack of overall planning, the alienation, the social randomness, private profit-seeking, and morbid individualism of the urban cityscape. Formalist aesthetics postulates no revolutionary role for the arts. There is no contradiction between Formalist art and the anarchy of bourgeois design; in fact, there is a continuum between the two.
In contrast to this we have the statement of Michel Regon, a spokesman for French artists during the May-June revolutionary uprising of 1968,
"The artist in contemporary society should be of such a kind...that the worker does not have art in his home, but that he lives in art, that his house and place of work be works of art, that the streets be works of art, that the entire society bathe in art..."
The Constructive artist creates works that are an expression of what our society could be like if we used our tremendous productivity for the satisfaction and creation of human needs rather than economic profits. Constructivists are consciously creating an aesthetic for industrial society. We create works of art, but we will never be satisfied until society itself is transformed.
The fundamental historical force behind the Constructivist tendencies is the growing notion that people who live in a society have the right to design their social landscape and plan and shape their social existence, everything from the sound and visual environment to the economic and social goals, which in the end cannot be separated. The sounds of transportation and production, the forms of home and factory should be beautiful and express our collective aspirations and feelings.
The industrial and technological revolutions of the last two centuries have made it possible to end material scarcity for the first time in history. This is the dynamic behind Constructivism, just as it is the dynamic behind the workers' revolutions of modern times. Constructivist art is a signal post of the growing idea that we all have the right to design our productive and social existence, that it need not remain in the hands of the privileged few as it was in the days of our ancestors due to the iron, unbendable reality of the law of scarcity.