ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
V. THE ROLE of the INDIVIDUAL in ART
"...In our times, art begins with the psychological make-up of certain individuals who to some degree usually suffer from psychoneurosis...Since all historic art making is the sum total of the individuals' emotional potential, it is likely that art in its last stages constitutes a structural reversion to the infantile stages of human development."---Jack Burnham, The Artist as Shaman
The characterization of artist as neurotic, as well as Burnham's assumption that art in general is on its last legs (another quote from the same article: "Contemporary art has finally arrived at the critical stage of its crisis, one inducing the dissolution of the component structure of art until it no longer exists in any functional capacity.") demands an examination of the role of individual artists in the evolution of art. Nowhere does Burnham state why it is that art is ceasing to exist; can this be because art is the only human activity exclusively carried out by neurotics, or is he mistaking the disintegration of a certain kind of art for the end of art itself? A very common phenomenon among kings, czars and presidents faced with the prospect of imminent revolution, is to confuse the end of their personal or class domination with the end of civilization. Mr. Burnham's song thus takes on the aspect of a lamentation for the self-immolation of bourgeois art. Is it true that "art begins with the psychological make-up of (the) individual?"
The answer to this important question is no, art does not "begin" with the "psychology of the individual" any more than does physics, paleontology, or shamanism. These are all social activities carried on in the context of a historically defined social mode of organization and independent of the individual's will. Art movements, like political ones, operate in relation to a set of social and historical givens, a context which they can consciously affect only by first understanding the laws of development of said context, and then acting within these to bring about the desired changes. Freedom is indeed, as Frederich Engels said, based on necessity. Individual artists participate in the unfolding of art not as passive spectators or as heroic loners. They are mediators representing their classes' aesthetics, while struggling in concrete situations with issues and problems that have a material base and whose dialectic the genuine artist always insists on confronting.
Art movements have often exhibited the peculiar "optical illusion" of history; the individual who appears to be the instigator, or perpetrator, of a particular tendency in art was in fact propelled to a leadership role by the dynamic of the movement itself. Movements create leaders, not the other way around. The great Russian sculptor Naum Gabo said this about his role in the writing of the manifesto of the early Constructivists, one of the first important progressive art movements of the 20th century:
"I am the author of the manifesto. But if you ask about the genesis of the whole ideology then I must say that, although I wrote it and although the ideology was defended by me for a long time during the five years in Russia and later, it would be a fallacy to say that the progenitor of the Constructive ideology was one man. If the constructive movement had been initiated or created by one man alone, then the whole movement would not be worth more than the piece of paper on which it is written. An ideology, any ideology, is valuable only in so far as it is an integration of ideas already latent in the spirits and minds of the people of its time and to which they respond when it takes form. It is never the invention of one man's mind. The role of the individual artist in the Constructive movement must be evaluated by the measure of how essential were his creative contributions to the foundation of the ideology and practice of this movement and what influence they had and have on its direction and development."
In Burnham's article, The Artist as Shaman, he quotes from Hans Sedlmayr: "We must not fail in our trust that the individual in healing himself will contribute to the healing of the whole... the diseased condition of the whole has its starting point in the rotting away of individual cells." What is the nature of this strange disease? Nowhere do they explain it, and nowhere do they offer a solution, except to recommend the Shaman (neurotic artist) as the healer. Their analysis of present day society is not adequate precisely because they fail to see the social, political and economic context. It's no wonder then that magic is their solution, which is the famous structuralist "reversion to the infantile stages of human development."
On top of the groaning edifice of individualism, a giant superstructure of pseudo-scientific shamanism has been erected to compensate for, or obscure, one or another of its obvious failings. As a result, there are many sub-species of the present-day bourgeois aesthetic animal. Despite the emotional collapse of the ultra-privileged and a consequent pilot fish-like tendency to feed off working class (folk) culture, the rich still have a monopoly on the high-art dialogue and are constantly finding new and "higher" levels of obscurantism beneath which they challenge each other to sink. It would be a useless task to analyze in depth even a significant portion of them - like shoveling sand under water, or herding cats...wasteful and distracting. We prefer to focus on addressing and changing the underlying conditions that give rise to such hysterical feats of acrobatic intellectual charlatanism as the "institution" theory, "structuralism", "deconstructionism", etc., which vastly underrate the role of content in art.
The other side of the official "art world's" aesthetic coinage, (heads I win, tails you lose), is the pseudo-Marxist notion of the equivalence of art and ideology. This branch of modern 'art theory' is an intellectual cottage industry rooted in the reactionary and parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies that grew to dominate and, in most cases, cause the overthrow of the revolutionary processes in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe. The hacks of the pseudo-left put forth a bulky, mechanistically materialist "aesthetic" that puts the ideas contained in a work of art on the inquisition block - thus vastly overrating the role of ideological "subject matter" and content in art. Both the bourgeois and the pseudo-leftist traditions of modern art fear the development of a genuine, highly developed, working-class culture and Marxist aesthetic theory. They can't prevent it, so they have evolved complex ideologies of containment. Both the "personal expression" theory of the bourgeois avant-garde and the "mechanical materialist" notions of the pseudo-left contain a grain of truth - just enough to mask their limitations.
Now on to the real battle - forthwith, a presentation of a theory of art as the mechanism, the 'gene' as it were, of cultural evolution. Friends, hold my arms!
