The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn:
The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (2014)
He [Jorn] believed that expression is a basic human potential that the institutions of art actually deny ordinary people by turning it into the specialty of a few heroic geniuses. (8)What "institutions of art" "deny" to "ordinary people" is NOT their potential, but rather recognition and resources. If Sunday Painters believe they are entitled to those things simply for being human, then they deserve neither!
As a child of the 1980s who is suitably well-versed in motivational posters, I believe it to be true and prescient that No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission. They ought not, at least, simply by forming insitutions for the pursuit of a common agenda, or not necessarily. Past and present adherents to the doctrine enumerated in this passage hence contradict themselves by seeing institutions as inhibiting potential, since it is recognition that is withheld rather than freedom. Certainly it seems true that mere knowledge of the existence/praxis of recognition does inhibit many amateur artists; but this merely proves (proves!) that recognition is in fact their motive! This is SELF-inhibition!
The SI ultimately considered visual art mere cultural capital with no agency to effect broader social change (a belief that led Jorn to leave the movement). While Jorn's ongoing engagement with such neo-Marxist critiques of the institution of art was one of the driving forces behind Situationist theory, he also remained firmly committed to the idea that art plays a very specific role in society. For Jorn, art fulfilled a basic human need for expression. Yet even as modern art foregrounded personal expression for the first time in history, its institutionalization as a specialized sphere of the social elite cheated the non-artist out of a fundamental aspect of human experience. (10)Oddly, this wording connects the seemingly new, proto-postmodern focus on the everyday to the older (typically intensely ideological) trope of "moral" uplift through the arts.
...the young and idealistic artists regarded Helhesten's ["Hell-horse," journal published in Denmark from 1941 to 1944 by Jorn and colleagues] activities as a direct intervention in social life, rather than simply an art movement. (27)
Jorn would continue to uphold this view of the avant-garde as an emancipatory force in both art and life, writing in 1949 that, "The purpose of art is first of all moral, and subsequently aesthetic." (27-28)
[from a notebook, 2018]
1 comment:
Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
"This protest [of Dada and Duchamp] against the deification of art might have desirable effects if it went along with a protest against the degradation of work and workmanship. It is because the taste for beauty and the "instinct of workmanship" no longer find satisfaction in the workplace that they have to seek an outlet in the modern religion of art. This was clearly understood by forerunners of the modernist movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, and even by early modernists like Walter Gropius, who commended Ruskin and Morris for seeking "to find a means of reuniting the world of art with the world of work" and deplored the "rise of the academies," which "spelt the gradual decay of the spontaneous traditional art that had permeated the life of the whole people.
(p. 142 [footnote])
Here is the old saw, and here is a chance to turn the socio-determinist angle against itself:
if the explanation for why the academies rob the common people of their creativity is properly sociological and not (as it indeed cannot be argued) material;
that is,
if the state-of-having-been-robbed is just as much a result of
"certain ways of looking at the world"
as
"Negro Music"
is for LeRoi Jones;
then in that case,
the way that these people are looking at the world is a way by which they can be cowed out of just about anything simply by becoming aware that someone else is doing it too,
or claiming to do it well/better than them,
or declaring that there is a certain way to do it,
or best of all, conspicuously refusing to do it where/when it is most expected.
Reversing Eleanor Roosevelt's famous formulation, people who feel artistically disenfranchised by "the rise of the academies" are people who give others open-ended consent to make them feel inferior.
Really this is not unique to "the academies," but rather is something that everyone faces to some degree, unless they live in a hole in the ground (which incidentally is pretty much how many people do end up deciding to live when they simply can't handle the conflict between their inner pretensions and the outer obstacles to realizing these pretensions).
I submit that the people who cannot be cowed in this way are the people we call artists.
Post a Comment