ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
IV. THE PERSONAL EXPRESSION THEORY
The official "art world" of today is trapped in a wild oscillation between support for a retrograde bourgeois realism, recalling the forms of its own heroic revolutionary past, and variations on a formalism whose spiritual and experiential emptiness reflects (uninformatively) the hollowness of late capitalist culture. Variations on the themes of realism and formalism have intertwined, like a psychotic Bach fugue, for at least 75 years. (See Leon Trotsky's excellent essay on 'pure' art.) The oscillation between the two creates the illusion of change and therefore progress.
This disgraceful and hysterical dance is made possible by the overwhelming dominance of an idea whose universal influence has had paralyzing consequences in our time. It is really an aesthetic theory containing a definition of art, but because it is accepted by educated and uneducated, progressive and reactionary, it has become part of the unspoken and unexamined underpinning of our society. It is the birthright of every citizen of the industrial world - the personal expression theory. In a way you already know what it is because you believe it.
The basis of this theory of art is the notion that everyone has a unique and separate personality and sees the world in a different way from everyone else. Art is driven by an instinctual need for self-expression and is therefore a "personal" expression because of the aforementioned uniqueness of the artist. The viewer of the work of art is similarly locked into his or her individuality and therefore has a purely personal reaction to the art work. Beautiful and simple, containing more than a grain of truth, the personal expression theory additionally benefits in our times from having once been a progressive, indeed revolutionary leap forward.
When the bourgeoisie were fighting in Western Europe against the tyranny of their submersion in the mass of feudal class and caste structure, individualism appeared as a massive justification for new rights and powers for the (mostly business-owning) people. The land owning class moved over, if not down, to make way for the globe-hopping merchants whose manufacturing techniques were transforming the world. The art sponsored by this newly powerful class respected, for the first time on a developed level, the complexity of the psychological identity of individuals (Shakespeare) and even their individual appearance, warts and all (Rembrandt).
The personal expression notion came to symbolize a way of looking at all human activity in economic, social, scientific and cultural spheres; it became a theory of history, a theory which posits that the actions of supposedly larger-than-life individuals, 'heroes', are the determining factor in human events, and the rest of us are passive spectators. This ideology grew more extreme as a brazen attempt to justify the growing and monstrous privileges of the industrialists, so-called 'entertainment' celebrities and politicians in our times. It is even applied to "counter-culture" art and artists, where it serves to promote a view of isolated, alienated creators whose ideas and visions are independent of the social fabric within which they create. The gigantic and (sometimes) inspiring power of masses of people in motion, as in radicalizations, social movements and wars, and the unifying forms of consciousness that are welded by the social bonds such as class, race, oppression and the sacrifice of shared struggles, are downplayed or ignored by the 'personal expression' theory, whose basic function has evolved from a progressive defense of individual liberty to an ideological tool for de-politicizing the working class.