The Case Against Art

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[Michael]

John Zerzan: The Case Against Art

Introductory comment: From John Zerzan comes the provocative - and threatening - insight that “All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification.” Like language (words) and numbering, art too must necessarily carve up the wholeness of life into discrete, alienated objects, thus “freeing” them for human use. As such, modern human life does indeed imitate art in its reduction of the whole of life on Earth, including ourselves, into a collection of abstracted - and hence utilitarian - things to be manipulated and destroyed in service to other reified abstractions such as “civilization”, “progress”, “freedom”, “democracy” and so forth.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Art is always about “something hidden.” But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.

During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that “unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.

The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment - a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found “venus” statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the “sympathetic magic” or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.

The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer’s words, “creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.” Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of “the beginning,” the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself.

And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured.

The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Levi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability.

Not surprisingly, the first signs of a departure from those egalitarian principles that characterized hunter-gatherer life show up now. The shamanistic origin of visual art and music has been often remarked, the point here being that the artist-shaman was the first specialist. It seems likely that the ideas of surplus and commodity appeared with the shaman, whose orchestration of symbolic activity portended further alienation and stratification.

Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstoy’s statement that “art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling,” elucidates art’s contribution to social cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing ritual required art; art works originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of art and the artistic production of ritual are the same. “Music,” wrote Seu-ma-tsen, “is what unifies.”

As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony; art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory. Nietzsche saw the training of memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning of civilized morality. Once the symbolic process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception, putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that one person’s action could be compared with that of another, including portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled. Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property of the subject.

Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman’s role was to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from nature and dominated, at the deepest level, socially. Art’s ability to symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic world, the Fall of Man.

The world must be mediated by art (and human communication by language, and being by time) due to division of labor, as seen in the nature of ritual. The real object, its particularity, does not appear in ritual; instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division of labor, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is gradually liquidated in favor of agriculture (historical production) and religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production.

The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, enroute to priesthood, leader by reason of mastering his own immediate desires via the symbol. All that is spontaneous, organic and instinctive is to be neutered by art and myth.

Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their actions and projected them on a TV monitor before the two. The man’s eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more exciting than the act itself. The evocative cave pictures, volatile in the dramatic, lamp-lit depths, began the transfer exemplified in Fischl’s tableau, in which even the most primal acts can become secondary to their representation. Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art has striven to make life itself an object of contemplation.

As the Paleolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic arrival of agriculture and civilization - production, private property, written language, government and religion - culture could be seen more fully as spiritual decline via division of labor, though global specialization and a mechanistic technology did not prevail until the late Iron Age.

The vivid representation of late hunter-gatherer art was replaced by a formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to symbolic shapes. This narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the symbolic universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who associate line with civilization: “This country has become civilized,” literally means, in Yoruba, “this earth has lines upon its face.” The inflexible forms of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordon Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that the pots of a Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art.

The work of art was in no sense autonomous at this time; it served society in a direct sense, an instrument of the needs of the new collectivity. There had been no worship-cults during the Paleolithic, but now religion held sway, and it is worth remembering that for thousands of years art’s function will be to depict the gods. Meanwhile, what Gluck stressed about African tribal architecture was true in all other cultures as well: sacred buildings came to life on the model of those of the secular ruler. And though not even the first signed works show up before the late Greek period, it is not inappropriate to turn here to art’s realization, some of its general features.

Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part of the symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that art does not imitate life, but vice versa; which is to say that life follows symbolism, not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Eliot, is “an attack upon the inarticulate.” Upon the unsymbolized, he should have said.

Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual, in adopting these modes of expression, didn’t settle for far too little. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our active undoing of all the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolutionary situations, immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly.

The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one’s own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification. Under the guise of “enriching the quality of human experience,” we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security.

[Michael]

Part 2:

Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic form are canons of symbolization, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely averred, for example, that a limited number of mathematical figures account for the efficacy of art. There is Cezanne’s famous dictum to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” and Kandinsky’s judgment that “the impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, this an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced.

Though art is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons. “Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne; Shelley praised the “unpremeditated art” of the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes, flowers, etc., beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact, termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge.”

Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s own existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire.

Art should be considered a religious activity and category also in the sense of Nietzsche’s aphorism, “We have Art in order not to perish of Truth.” Its consolation explains the widespread preference for metaphor over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis of art. In dominated life freedom does not exist outside art, however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcomed. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee.

This separate realm of contrived life is both important and in complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its institutionalized separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in general, where its elements are not, and cannot be, actualized; the work of art is a selection of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic terms. Arising from the sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to religion not only by reason of its confinement to an ideal sphere and its absence of any dissenting consequences, but it can hence be no more than thoroughly neutralized critique at best.

Frequently compared to play, art and culture - like religion - have more often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the ludic function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence, should be estimated as one might reassess the meaning of Versailles: by contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining its marshes.

Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the plane of daily struggle “to a world of aesthetic exaltation,” paralleling the aim of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the conservative office of art when he wrote that without art works civilization would crumble “within fifty years” … becoming “enslaved to instincts and to elementary dreams.”

Hegel determined that art and religion also have “this in common, namely, having entirely universal matters as content.” This feature of generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce the notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art.

Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can be seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to repudiate its intent and contents with “well, after all, it is only art.”

Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized culture industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness, rather, a mass diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged control.

Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and music, largely through the electronic media, the representation of representation. Image and sound, in their ever-presence, have become a void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the distance between artist and spectator has diminished, a narrowing that only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate and manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of political power.

Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avant-garde movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue that Aestheticism, or “art for art’s sake,” is more radical than an attempt to engage alienation with its own devices. The late 19th century art pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the world, as opposed to the avant-garde effort to somehow organize life around art. A valid moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that division of labour has diminished experience and turned art into just another specialisation: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its own content.

The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prizes novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated.

But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world’s capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.

Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde movements, its negative image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical collapse radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be against all “isms,” including the idea of art. But painting cannot negate painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that all symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and communication. [Nor can writing negate writing, nor can typing radical essays onto diskettes to assist in their publication ever be liberating - even if the typer breaks the rules and puts in an uninvited comment.] In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the rigidities and irrelevancies of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of art; Hans Richter’s memoirs referred to “the regeneration of visual art that Dada had begun.” If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists reformed it.

Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission of art. Before trailing off into Trotskyism and/or art-world fame, the Surrealists upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock “the Marvellous” which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false judgment that would have re-introduced art into everyday life and thereby transfigured it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art to repressive society. The real barrier is not between art and social reality, which are one, but between desire and the existing world. The Surrealists’ aim of inventing a new symbolism and mythology upheld these categories and mistrusted unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter, Breton held that “enjoyment is a science; the exercise of the senses demands a personal initiation and therefore you need art.”

Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision could art survive. With the least strain of embellishment possible in a formal language, art became increasingly self-referential in its search for a “purity” that was hostile to narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it.

But the strategy of trying to empty art of symbolic value, the insistence on the work of art as an object in its own right in a world of objects, proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This “radical physicality,” based on aversion to authority though it was, never amounted to more, in its objectiveness, than simple commodity status. The sterile grids of Mondrian and the repeated all-black squares of Reinhardt echo this acquiescence no less than hideous 20th century architecture in general. Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased Drawing, exhibited after his month-long erasure of a de Kooning drawing. The very concept of art, Duchamp’s showing of a urinal in a 1917 exhibition notwithstanding, became an open question in the ’50s and has grown steadily more undefinable since.

Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media (e.g. ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of a Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless, depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its world revealed.

The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the ’60s - Conceptual, Minimalist, Performance, etc. - and the accelerated obsolescence of most art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism” of modernism by an eclectic mix from past stylistic achievements. This is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments, announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so.

Occasionally critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability “to stimulate the growth of a really troubling doubt,” little noticing that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and as such must be superseded, that art is disappearing because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the world that must be voided.

Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification, throughout all culture. But this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is stymied by its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an aversion it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, Deconstruction’s seminal figure, deals with language as a solipsism, consigned to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own surface.

Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm, and crucified to a Volkswagen, we see in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi - with his eyes closed. “Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write seriously.

In a jaded, enervated age, where it seems to speak is to say less, art is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century and more later, how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare the consolation or station of “timeless” art.

Adorno began his book thusly: “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experiment with our hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must enact, the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will recommence at that moment.

(From John Filiss’ Primitivism web site.)

[Nickeson]

If these primitivists weren't so amusing they'd be totally irrelevant.

[marianthi]

I read only some of the comments on the posts above, MichaelD, but I want to respond to them here with a few lines I like -and agree with-  about some forms of art and artists:


East Indian aesthetics sees art in reverse from the way we do. We think that an artist has a brilliant idea and then independently executes that idea. But (for them art is) thought of as the Absolute descending into the world. The vision in the mind of the artist is the first stage of the descent. Then, using susceptible material in the relative world (paint, paper, clay), the Absolute impresses itself as form.

I always thought that inspiration was an opening, a breathing in, of what ´needed to be born´at the time of a creative urge or duty.  We open up to a conception and an eventual birthing. The offspring may be sublime or homely - but we keep going.  

Last summer I visited my all time favourite statue, Hermes by Praxiteles.  I leaned against a wall and cried while taking in the amazing beauty manifested there.  Where did Praxiteles find it?  How did he do it?  Why?  So many questions.  I left overwhelmed.

[Michael]

Hmmm...    I was rather hoping that would be amusing and/or interesting to you Steven.  Glad you found something there Marianthi...

I thought it was a highly ironic and creative effort, in the contrarian genre.

And I actually found a few interesting insights here and there.

[Nickeson]

Mercia Eliade coined a phrase, “nostalgia for paradise,” to describe a cultural trait of some people who suppose The Old Ones or the Ancestors had it better and were spiritually pure and knew more divine and magical secrets and were healthy and free of evil, closer to the truth, etc. and all of that has been lost through the pernicious advance of civilized cultures. Zerzan seems to be of that stripe. Apparently there are some anthropologists whose theories of Hunter-Gatherer lifestyles support this view, but they are in the minority. It has been found in the fossil record that pre-agricultural people did not have problems with tooth decay and obesity, the up side of that is they did not eat refined carbohydrates. The down side is that they didn’t live long enough to have their teeth rot or to put on weight.

The early Taoists venerated ancestors, but the veneration was not used as a reason to return to “paradise,” but as a reason to think critically about one’s own habits and practices…keep refined carbs to a minimum in the diet…that kind of thing.

But in researching Zerzan it appears that he advocates the return as the salvation of the species. But maybe not, maybe his rhetoric is just a militant Buddhist style expedient teaching to save us all from ourselves. He does not appear ready to return to the wild and when he goes to Europe I imagine he flies rather than paddles the Atlantic in a dug-out canoe.

It is true that some of his points about art and its functions are interesting, as you said Michael, but a lot of them have been said before. And most of them have been said by intellectual, art-chat, art lookers who want to invest their idea of meaning into other people’s stuff. Their ideas clearly aren’t the sentiments of those art creators who just want to make something that looks neat or sounds cool.

I do appreciate, however, Zerzan’s comments on the current tendency of people in the North American culture to put increasingly thicker and denser accretions of media between themselves and the rest of the world. I suspect that his rants are motivated only partially to be parables and cautionary tales, but a lot of them come from a need to vent, bitch, moan and throw peevish little tantrums about having been so victimized as to spend his otherwise perfect life in the Here and Now. I have quoted Yeats on this matter before, but Zerzan seems to be the perfect subject for the first five lines of Lapis Lazuli:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done….(disaster)

What is curious is the fact that he seems to think that if everyone else isn’t as miserable as he is, they should be…if only they knew what he knows. It is as if he wants to recruit everyone else into his miserable and victimized enclave through the use of the words “We” and “Our” and “Us.”

“Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one.

“Under the guise of “enriching the quality of human experience,” we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security.” (Emphasis, mine)

One would think that after years of being a rabble rouser Zerzan would know that this automatic and thoughtless “We” device separates his audience into two categories:

1– The perpetual victims who are thirsting for the Victims’ Prophet to unite them through their cultural victimization into Victim-hood Support and Perpetuation Clubs wherein they can message and refine their Victim Identities and which will provide them with life-time venues in which to bitch and moan and wail about the culture to to which they have been shackled like people from Montana bitching and moaning about Winter…the ridiculous hunger for suffering as ego-fodder. The Victims stay and listen.

2–Those who either weren’t born into victim-slavery, or who have escaped and who’s deft ability to handle themselves in any situation and who’s sense of self  precludes them from victim-hood. The people who act rather than talk. To them the "We" appeal is from weakness and is alienating. They act by walking out of the Wannabe Zerzan Recruitment Center and living well.

Below: Zerzan. Would you buy a used atlatl from this man?

[jimtzu]

a couple of simplistic thoughts on the primitivists:



art, as representation, is always a step away, the focusing on the finger instead of the moon it's pointing at. that humans can create something that is beautiful enough be distracting is truly amazing.  it's been said that art is the use of lies to tell a truth.
the symbolism of art to nature is like the symbolism of god to reality.
anything can be over intellectualized and deconstructed, it reminds me of the line "talking about music is like dancing about architecture", it can take away from the immediacy of the moment.