The Case Against Art

http://primitivism.com/case-art.htm

John Zerzan

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. Le'vi-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 Glu:ck 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 day 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.

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 judgement 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 judgement 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 seen 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 an 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.

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