UTOPIAN LONGINGS:
ROMANTICISM, SUBVERSION AND DEMOCRACY IN COMMUNITY ARTS
by
Laurie McGauley
Thesis presented as a partial requirement for the
Master of Arts (M.A.)
in
Interdisciplinary Humanities: Interpretation and Values
School of Graduate Studies
Laurentian University
Sudbury, Ontario
Canada
© Laurie McGauley, 2006
1
Utopian Longings: Romanticism, Subversion and Democracy in
Community Arts
Abstract
Laurie McGauley
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Lucien Pelletier
Laurentian University, 2006
This thesis looks at the philosophical and theoretical foundations of community
art practices and their connections, if any, to radical political praxis. Starting with the
theories of affirmative and hegemonic culture that instigated the counter-culture
movements of the latter part of the 20th century, I situate these practices as a particular
turn in the oppositional traditions of modern art. Initially a reaction against the
commodification and reification of art, and the atomism and radical individualism of
society, I look at how collaborative art practices have shifted their focus in the wake of
their institutionalization, particularly towards ideas of “building community”, individual
and social resolution and utopian aspirations. Tracing these developments to Romantic
assumptions, the thesis analyses Kant and Schiller’s aesthetic theories, in particular their
ideas on the relationship between art and freedom, morality, authenticity and utopian
resolution. From this foundation, I deconstruct the problems that stem from the Romantic
aspirations implicit in these practices, and the reasons that they are so eagerly and easily
incorporated by dominant ideologies. Reformulating these practices according to dialogic
and democratic theories allows us to salvage possible directions for a new radical practice
that rejects a transcendent ideal of utopia towards what Miguel Abensour calls a new
utopian spirit and a savage democracy, based on the idea of individual judgement.
2
Acknowledgements
The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the guidance and
patience of my supervisor, Dr. Lucien Pelletier, who took on the thankless task of trying
to keep my restless mind focussed. He helped me to see traces of new utopian
possibilities, and his teachings will remain with me long after this project is over.
As well, I would like to thank:
My son, Jesse Brady, who was writing his Master’s thesis at the same time as his mom. It
was with him that I had the best discussions, and I was always enriched and enlightened
by his insights, advice and humour. His love and support inspired me to go on. He
finished his thesis before me, which is only right and just.
Dr. Laurence Steven and Francine Arsenault, from the M.A. Interdisciplinary Humanities
Department, who got me through the bureaucratic maze and put up with me as this
process went on way too long.
All the friends, Board members and co-workers at Myths and Mirrors Community Arts,
who patiently waited for me to go through this. Their “play drive” is embodied in their
creativity and passion for social justice, and they are the reason I really wanted to do this
right. In particular, I am grateful to my co-worker Tanya Ball, a brilliant community
artist. Without her, I could not have found the time and space to complete this project,
which to her must have seemed neverending.
My grandmother, Florence Charron, who always offers her unconditional support.
And finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my father, Jim McGauley, who passed
away during the writing of it, and to my beautiful mother, Jean McGauley. Throughout
my life, as I ventured from one romantic, crazy idea to another, I always knew that I
could draw on their support and love. They have bequeathed to me their great faith in
humanity, a gift that continues to inspire my utopian longings.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract............................................................................................................ iii
Acknowledgements...........................................................................................iv
Introduction
1
Chapter One: The History of An Idea
6
Affirmative and Counter Culture
The Critical Eye
Collaborative Approaches to Art Making
The Turn to Community
A Crisis of Meaning
Chapter Two: Art, Autonomy and Freedom
6
10
20
26
30
33
Aesthetic Judgement
Freedom through Beauty
Romantic Legacies
Longing for Community
Is it Art?
33
41
50
56
63
Chapter Three: Reclaiming Art, Democracy and Utopia
71
A Hopeless Paradox?
The Ties That Bind Us
Longing for Meaning
Our Dysfunctional Community
A Relational Aesthetic
Longing for Utopia
The Art of Democracy
71
73
77
78
81
84
86
Conclusion: A Global Counter Culture
99
Works Cited
102
Selected List of Works Consulted
106
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INTRODUCTION1
1
A note on gender and pronouns: to balance the extensive use of “man” in the original sources, all other
pronouns are either pluralized or in the feminine.
5
In a situation where the miserable reality can be changed only through
radical political praxis, the concern with aesthetics demands justification.
It would be senseless to deny the element of despair inherent in this
concern....
Herbert Marcuse,1939
6
The tortured sentiments expressed in these opening sentences of Herbert
Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension resonate throughout modern attempts to establish a
viable function for art in social and political matters. This Master’s thesis is a modest
attempt to navigate through some of these waters, with the purpose of analysing what
connections there may be between community art practices and progressive political
praxis. This pursuit originates from questions and problems that have arisen in my own
practice as a popular education and theatre worker, and for the past ten years, as the
founder and director of a non-profit community arts organization.
However, humbly following Marcuse, this project demands justification. I start
with the premise that the urgency of our times demands radical political praxis if we are
to have any hope of changing our current “miserable reality”. The intentions of activists
who are working in fields outside of politics, whether in the arts, media, culture or
education, are that their work will lead to radical political praxis, not replace it.
Challenging our perceptions of the world, developing critical consciousness and analysis,
and inspiring our consciences and imaginations are the radical functions of these fields in
progressive politics. However, the relationship between art and politics presents
particular problems. The temptation to bring them together and the contradictory
determination to keep them apart are both reactions driven by the assumption that
elements of art and politics share one powerful and volatile attribute: a longing for
7
utopian resolution. At the same time, we also understand that aesthetics and politics
appeal to different logics that do not come together easily, and that many argue should
not come together at all. Art as politics becomes propaganda; politics as art becomes
spectacle. Community art practices are susceptible to all of these problems, which are
complicated even further by their deliberate blurring of the socially recognized
boundaries and definitions of modern art.
Marcuse asserts that the radical qualities of art lie in the artwork’s “indictment of
the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation” (Aesthetic
6). This view of the work of art’s abilities to awaken the subversive imagination
continues to resonate throughout modern art’s claims for social and political relevance.
Community arts make the same claims, however, they broaden the sphere outside of the
reception of the particular work of art to include the collective creation process as well.
By including non-artists in the creation of art, these practices make claims for the radical
qualities of this creative process, often asserting that it is more important than the artwork
itself. This focus on the process as the site for the radical qualities of art tends to narrow
the reach of this radical potential to the actual project participants; critics charge that the
resulting artworks are subsumed to the process, and do not succeed as art.
The original ‘community artists’ were not concerned with creating great art or
with legitimizing their work to artworld: they were more interested in developing radical
artistic practices that engaged people, both as creators and audiences, in responding to
immediate social and political issues. These practices were part of larger social or
political movements, and were necessarily marginal and oppositional. Once they were
8
institutionalized as “community arts”, new problems emerged for artists who were
interested in the radical qualities of these practices. Outside of artworld, the tendency has
been to instrumentalize these practices for their healing qualities and to romanticize the
notion of community; inside artworld, the pressure has been on these practices to
legitimize themselves as art.
The basic question of this paper is whether or not radical qualities can still be
salvaged in these practices. Understanding the theoretical assumptions that are currently
shaping community arts is the first prerequisite to the task. This takes us into large
questions of aesthetics, authenticity, morality, judgement, and democracy. I make no
claims that any of these topics are examined in an exhaustive manner; my goal is to lay
out a rough sketch of the territory that community arts are situated in. Once we have a
sense of these assumptions, we are better able to analyse the problems and possibilities
for the radical qualities of these practices.
Chapter One begins with an overview of the various directions that current
modern oppositional art theories and practices have taken, in particular the philosophical
assumptions that have driven the counter-culture movements since the 1960s. It looks at
the development from negative aesthetics to overtly political art to the collaborative ideas
that led to collective creation and finally to community art practices. Through this
overview, other presuppositions of these practices are revealed, in particular the
Romantic notions of community, art and resolution.
Chapter 2 pursues these ideas with an overview of the aesthetic theories that
underlie our understanding of modern art. Looking at Kant and Schiller’s responses to the
9
Enlightenment views that excluded anything outside of pure reason introduces us to the
idea of aesthetics as a distinct and separate logic or sphere of knowing. Their aesthetic
theories expressed the longing for resolution of the duality of reason and nature that
ushered in the Romantic age. Kant lays the groundwork for the autonomy of aesthetics
and the idea of judgement. Schiller develops some of these ideas in formulating his own
distinctive aesthetic theory of the ‘play drive’. Through these theories, I explore the
intricate relationships between our modern ideas of art and individual authenticity; the
role of morality in art; and the expressivist notion of freedom. Schiller’s claims for art are
revealed to be the precursors for many of the assumptions of community art practices.
The second part of the chapter analyses these assumptions and how they are shaping
these practices. In particular, I look at how the Romantic notions of community and of art
can subvert the radical qualities of these approaches. These theories are interwoven with
our modern ideas of duality and resolution, of individual authenticity and morality, of
society and autonomy. This section looks at how some of these ideas have resulted in
rigid binary paradigms that offer us no escape except through Romantic notions of
transformation from the miserable reality to a utopian resolution. It analyses how
community arts both challenge and reinforce these binary views, and how these practices
are so easily incorporated by dominant power and ideology.
In chapter 3, Charles Taylor helps us to shift the paradigm from a monologic to a
dialogic idea of authenticity, art and freedom. This frees us somewhat from the rigid
constructs that both exclude community arts from a strictly autonomous view of art while
congruently affirming their tendencies to romanticize the notion of community. A
10
reformulation of these practices reveals the strong democratic principles, the commitment
to free play and the practical utopian longings that can salvage the radical qualities in this
work. Through the writings of Miguel Abensour we are introduced to the idea of a
“savage democracy” that is based on the free play between utopia and reality and is
shaped by individual judgement. Through these ideas, we are able to outline the possible
directions for collective art practices whose intentions are to awaken the subversive
imagination towards radical political praxis.
Finally, this paper concludes with a vision of a global counter-culture offered by
Susan Buck-Morss, a vision that provides a possible radical context for these practices.
What this paper reconfirms, is that art’s role in changing our miserable reality is limited,
and cannot replace political praxis. What I hope this paper reveals, is that collective art
practices can be reformulated to emphasize their radical qualities, opening up new
possibilities for art to both model and inspire radical political praxis. Within a global
culture of struggle and resistance, these possibilities can offer us hope for change rather
than the futility of Marcuse’s despair.
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Chapter One
THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA
The current practices called community art can trace their development to the
counter culture debates about art’s function in politics that have taken place throughout
the later part of the twentieth century. This chapter will retrace some of the more
important theoretical threads and movements that have brought us to the present. The
goal of this outline is to provide us with a better foundation from which to understand
these artists’ intentions for this work and what questions and problems they are
responding to. In particular we will trace the current assumptions about art’s relationship
to politics that have influenced this artistic turn.
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Affirmative and Counter Culture
The turn towards community art practices can be directly attributed to the counter
culture movements of the 1960s, which were themselves deeply influenced by early
Western Marxist cultural criticism. In the 1930s, Herbert Marcuse laid out some of the
foundational principles for these analyses in The Affirmative Character of Culture,
principles which helped to shape much of the debate about the role of modern art and
culture in the latter half of the twentieth century.
For Marcuse, high culture is characterized as such not only in reference to its
reified position in the cultural hierarchy, but because it is literally and figuratively out of
reach of the majority. In the Western world, this reification can be traced back to
Aristotle’s hierarchy of different forms of knowledge, separating the ‘useful and
necessary’ from the ‘beautiful’, which has no purpose outside of itself, a distinction that
divorces art and philosophy from any purpose other than reflective enjoyment. Because
the material world is governed by competing social interests and is thus unstable, messy
and unreliable, the pursuit of beauty and truth has to occur within the realm of pure
thought. The highest truths are the Ideal, transcending the life of exploitation and poverty
of the majority, and reserved for the ‘higher’ level of society, those whose minds are
uncluttered by distractions like cold or hunger, and who naturally generate art and theory
that confirm their power. Since idealism asserts itself as the domain of the privileged, it
eventually comes to terms with the established order; thus the ideal becomes accepted as
reality and the ‘true’ culture. The ‘untrue’, the daily oppressive struggle for existence in
the material world is stuff to be manipulated or ignored as needed, akin to non-being.
13
Divisions of labour and power, which are actually fixed in a particular historical context,
take on the nature of metaphysical predetermination, out of time and place, a manifest
destiny.
Marcuse describes how affirmative culture is maintained and reinforced in
modern times. Liberal enlightenment and capitalism introduce the myth of a culture that
is open to participation by all members of society, while actually reifying and
standardizing cultural values that are deemed to have universal applications to all
civilization. Culture continues to be exalted as separate from civilization, as the
transmitter of an ideal world with universal values that are expected to be affirmed
unconditionally by everyone. This ideal has no resemblance to the real world of struggle,
but it is the responsibility of each individual to try to attain it. Affirmative culture protects
power from the threats inherent in a system that claims freedom and happiness for all,
while actually denying freedom and happiness to the majority.
But one of Marcuse’s key arguments is that art can contain within itself the
potential for subversion, and that high art can create a longing for the ideals of equality
and freedom that could disrupt the “resignation of everyday life”. To counterbalance this
threat, high culture and art are contained and controlled in specific spaces, themselves
architectural affirmations of power: museums, opera houses, theatres. Although idealistic
art can succeed in awakening a longing for something beyond the suffering of daily life,
and carries within it the truth that change cannot happen alongside oppression, idealism’s
solutions always remain in a separate realm that can’t acknowledge human history.
14
Catharsis is safely contained within majestic walls and institutions built with substantial
public and private funds for exactly that purpose.
Adorno and Horkheimer broaden this analysis to the culture industry in The
Dialectics of Enlightenment. The title of the chapter “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception” states their essential thesis. The myth of equal and
open participation in culture is extended, even celebrated through the culture industry.
Corporate power depends on the common affirmation that equality is extended to all; but
capitalist production depends on inequality, so again, equality becomes the ideal, rather
than the reality. The fundamental idealism of affirmative culture serves power’s interests
by responding to the real suffering of the majority with individual transcendent
experience or with platitudes that deny the inherent systemic contradictions that are the
foundational causes of much of this misery. Individuals are encouraged to affirm this
ideal world as attainable from within themselves, without recognizing any need to change
the social or economic conditions of their lives. According to affirmative culture, it is the
individual’s responsibility to pursue happiness, and the culture industry fills the need by
selling commodities as symbols of happiness that are theoretically accessible to all
individuals equally. Once the profit motive is transferred onto cultural forms, artistic
products are eagerly integrated into the economy and judged mainly on their market
value, even over their affirmative function. Since the whole objective is to sell, whether
products or ideas, an advertising aesthetic becomes the cultural norm. The focus on
realism and mimesis confuses reality and culture. “Real life is becoming
indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film is far surpassing the theatre of
15
illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience”
(Adorno 126).
Popular culture, which initially referred to culture that originates from, by and for
‘the people’, gets gobbled up by the culture industry, commodified into mass product,
and is then resold to the people, for a price, or bought for them by corporate sponsors
through advertising dollars. The meaning of local and folk culture is destroyed: its
inherent pride and defiance is removed from its context and integrated into the latest
consumer trends (Held 91). Corporate culture has swallowed up the media, and extended
the commodification to communications and news. As mass media incorporates art,
entertainment, advertising and information, they become indistinguishable from each
other in their standardized affirmation of dominant ideology and power. The culture
industry produces for mass consumption while significantly contributing to the
determination of that consumption. Consequently, its products can be characterized by
standardization, pseudo-individualism and repetitive affirmation of the status quo.
Commodified, mass culture is controlled by those in power, and insidiously results in
cultural and by extension political hegemony (Marcuse Affirmative; Adorno,
Horkheimer. Dialectics 120-167; Held 89-109).
Variations of these critiques of art and culture became the accepted paradigm for
much modern art and activist theory and practice, and fuelled the counter-culture
movements of the past five decades. In response, modern aesthetic experience has
developed a role that it hasn’t had before in the history of art: to oppose the experiences
and language of a consumer society (Jauss 146). This oppositional function underlies the
16
different artistic responses to reification and capitalist alienation that we will look at next.
Despite the differences in prescribed solutions, there is an implicit assumption that
progressive art and culture are necessarily separate from and in opposition to dominant
affirmative culture.
The Critical Eye
It followed that, if culture and art – the languages and symbols we use, our
‘agreements in meaning’ – are affirmative of a society which we recognize to be unjust,
violent or oppressive, the language and symbols themselves must be critiqued,
deconstructed, ‘re-claimed’ or rejected and alternative forms must be created. The latter
solution was exemplified by Adorno’s idea of negative aesthetics. In order to fend off the
“reification [which] enters the pores of modern art...from all directions” (Wellmer 10), art
can only serve a critical function through its “autonomy from everyday reality, its
functionlessness and through an uncompromising aesthetic form” (Walker 79). This
emphasis on pure form over content was intended as a deliberate negation of the
advertising aesthetics of affirmative culture. Clement Greenberg wrote that “art’s
autonomy had to be preserved against the incursions of mass culture, as a kind of mute
repudiation of capitalism’s values..and that the arts should follow the example of music’s
essential abstractness”. This ‘formalist’ prescription became
17
the basis on which a model of the unfolding of the avant-garde’s destiny
was constructed such that any painting hoping to qualify as art had,
necessarily, to address a set of problems intrinsic to the nature of painting
posed by previous avant-gardes (quoted in Hopkins 25).
18
The opposition to affirmative culture was in the refusal to participate in anything that was
perceived as a cultural norm. In this way art should never be engaged directly with
politics; not only do these mundane concerns diminish art, but political content in art
legitimizes the dominant ideology by participating in it. It is only in the deliberate
negation of the everyday that our false perceptions of the world can be disrupted and we
become aware of our true alienation. The everyday includes our norms of discourse, and
therefore the communicative function of art itself needs to be resisted. If there is any hope
in this approach it is that this new awareness will trigger our longings for alternative
possibilities. However, “the immeasurability of the gap between reality and utopia means
that reality becomes fixed transcendentally, so to speak, prior to all experience, in
negative terms” (Wellmer 12). Despair is inherent in Adorno’s views, and even
admitting to hope would be understood as compromising the autonomy of art.
The emphasis on abstract form was producing art that was becoming ever more
alienated from the experiences of real people, and often was a deliberate repudiation and
negation of their lives and longings. Art’s resistance to communicability and
identification was turning modern art into intricate contextual puzzles, that most of the
public were not interested in solving. This thread seemed to reinforce an extreme form of
intellectual and aesthetic elitism, to solidify the autonomy as well as the reification of the
artist and to reinforce art’s separation, not only from affirmative culture, but from
everyday experiences of life. Its deliberate elitism meant that the dialogue remained
within a small circle, that more often than not, reflected the same privileged hierarchy
that it ostensibly decried. This movement’s insistence that it represented the only true art,
19
whose purity needed to be guarded from contamination from society, reinforced its
exclusionary nature as it diminished other aesthetic experiences. As a political tactic, this
extreme refusal to participate in the world was limited to creating another form of
deliberate alienation . The irony of course, is that high modernism’s implicit and explicit
arrogance and siege mentality alienated the public, but was easily incorporated into the
high art culture industry.
Some of this art caused great controversy, but unfortunately not on the terms
wished by the artists. The public was expressing its alienation and outrage at art itself, as
evidenced in the case of the Tilted Arc, an overwhelming abstract steel sculpture erected
in downtown Manhattan in 1981, and removed in 1989, after years of lawsuits and
complaints from the public (Kwon 57). In Canada, there was a national uproar in 1990
when the National Gallery of Canada announced its $1.8 million dollar purchase of
American artist Barnett Newman’s painting Voice of Fire. Bronwyn Drainie, in her
analysis of the causes of the furor, concludes:
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To put it crudely, Canadians don’t like Voice of Fire because it doesn’t
like them. In fact, it wants nothing to do with them.. The acolytes of high
modernism - the critics, the curators, the collectors - still hanker after the
days... when art was a formal private party and the general public simply
wasn’t invited. It is that precise moment in cultural history that Voice of
Fire captures so it’s not surprising that it evokes feelings of inadequacy,
smallness and resentment in the population at large. It was meant to. (7677)
21
Another branch of the resistance to commodification resulted in “the death of the
object” altogether and the move to conceptualism (Hopkins 161). This was a more
engaged form of political dissent, where “artistic tendencies such as Arte Povera, Land
Art, Conceptualism and Performance art interrogated not just aesthetic but social and
cultural preconceptions”(161). These approaches featured conceptual play with cultural
signs and symbols, art stripped of all externals down to the physical body and natural
materials, art integrated into nature, and multi-disciplinary installations. Social criticism
was often embedded in both form and content. A strong influence was Guy Debord’s
theories as explored in his book The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967.
According to Debord, the alienation of commodification necessarily renders the world,
and art, into spectacle “where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own
making” (34). Debord focussed on the examination of “everyday life, with its alienating
work routines and stultifying restrictions” (Hopkins 163). He founded the “Situationist
International” a group of artists who
22
denounced the myths of social freedom and satisfaction promoted by
forms like advertising, asserting that such representations merged into a
monolithic ‘spectacle’...They devised two strategies for undermining its
control. One was the playfully disruptive principle of dérive (drift) which
might involve mapping alternative routes through the city in accordance
with their desires rather than civic prescriptions. The other, détournement,
(diversion), involved the rearrangement and derailing of existing routines
and sign-systems. (Hopkins 164)
23
The direct manipulation of advertising and cultural images or the creation of
oppositional, counter images and ‘situations’ that intruded into the public sphere, were
intended to expose the operations of militarism and capitalism. These strategies were
adopted by a generation of politically engaged artists, and can still be found in
performance or street art, the juxtaposition of cultural, social and political symbols in
visual art and music, or in activities like ‘culture jamming”, the deliberate intervention in
advertizing culture. The Situationists were in search of authentic experience by exposing
and breaking through the simulacrum of daily existence. This direct action approach to
art is still prevalent in political art and ‘cultural interventions’ are considered a tactic in
social change movements. However, Debord himself eventually dismissed art’s potential
to affect social change, and disparaged the aesthetic sphere as just another branch of ‘the
spectacle’. The group turned to direct political mobilization for the militant student
strikes in Paris (164).
Others approached the relationship between art and politics by focussing on the
politics of art. These artists were criticising the affirmative authority of the galleries and
museums that were becoming privileged artist ghettos. Famous among these conceptual
exhibits was a show by Hans Haacke in 1974: “ He exhibited listings of the corporate and
business interests of the Guggenheim Board and Trustees...the interests underpinning
art’s supposedly ‘neutral’ institutions were systematically exposed in a dry, pseudobureaucratic presentational style” (Hopkins 167). These overtly oppositional works were
directed towards the art establishment and institutions, as well as being deliberately antiaesthetic. Creating art that directly challenged any form of commodification, as well as
24
any traditional definition of art, was seen as a legitimate area for artists, as opposed to the
wider world of social injustice and politics. Criticism of the classism and affirmative
nature of traditional art institutions led to experiments with models such as artist-run
galleries and theatre collectives. The debates that these movements raised were of interest
only to the artistic sphere that they challenged, but they did anticipate the wider
questioning of the roles and responsibilities of the artist to break out of the self-referential
elitism of the art world. Many artists were questioning “the arbitrary separation of
artworld and real world [that] had made them less effective as artists, and caused them to
call into question their commitment to the public” (Burnham xxiii). Politically engaged
artists’ criticism of the art world precipitated a turn outward; if they refused to participate
in the established art institutions, they had to find or create other spaces and explore other
functions. This was a fundamental turn from the protection of a disengaged aesthetic
sphere and began an era of experimenting with the creation of art that was directly
engaged with its social and political context.
The ideals of counter-culture of the 1960s that inspired these questions were
fundamentally anti-elitist. Theodore Roszak, who is credited as a leader of the movement,
explained counter-culture as “an opposition to hegemony by a utopianist idealism, which
promoted an egalitarian ethic through the advocacy of participative democracy on a
localised level” (quoted in Kershaw 39). This initially produced a movement of
politically engaged art that confronted issues directly and whose critique of the dominant
culture was explicit. There was a deliberate ‘re-claiming’ of folk culture and a strong
resistance to technology. Following traditions of socialist realism, much of this work
25
took the point of view of the oppressed and marginalized. Art was committing itself to
the role of social critic, deconstructing the myths of affirmative culture, directly exposing
power, oppression, injustice and inequality, and sometimes offering prescriptive
solutions. Issues of identity and representation were key elements in civil rights and
liberation movements, to the point where artists from oppressed and minority groups
were expected to address them through their work. There was a proliferation of artists
experimenting with forms of social protest art and theatre. Harry J. Elam Jr. compares the
work of two of these troupes:
26
El Teatro used satire, parody and slapstick humour to educate its
audiences and to direct them toward nonviolent resistance. The Black
Revolutionary Theatre’s performance philosophy, on the other hand
valorized bloody, violent, physical confrontations with the dominant white
authority. (5)
27
Feminism made major contributions to these cultural movements, unveiling the
realities of misogyny, power and violence contained in our cultural, social and political
signifiers. Questions of representation were at the forefront, and feminist artists like Judy
Chicago were contesting the male aesthetic hierarchy that excluded women as cultural
producers. Both in form and content, they broadened the definition of art and culture and
created their own cultural spaces outside of the established art institutions. Although,
along with Virginia Woolf, they probably craved “a room of one’s own”, many feminists
fundamentally rejected the myth of the isolated, autonomous (usually male) artist,
creating his masterpieces in spite of and against the rest of the world. Claims for the right
of the artist to complete autonomy were being tempered by questions of the responsibility
of the artist to the rest of society (Burnham xxiii). Disciplinary silos were regarded as
essentially male constructs, and women artists were breaking down the barriers, or
ignoring them altogether (xxi). Artist Arlene Raven writes that feminist processes of the
time “prefigured the emerging public art practice today that moves fluidly among
criticism, theory, art making and activism. Our work was interactive and collaborative,
our criticism...mutual and participatory. Our notion of common good centered on ideals
of equality” (164).
These movements directly challenged gender, race and class domination over the
means of cultural production. Women, people of colour, Aboriginals and others were
demanding equal access and opportunity to be cultural producers. Cultural democracy
became a political issue. Buzz Kershaw defines cultural democracy “in which the people
participate in and even control cultural production and distribution,” in contrast to the
28
“democratization of culture, in which high art is brought to the masses, a hegemonic
procedure that aims to cheat the mass of people of their right to create their own
culture”(Haedicke14). A commitment to cultural democracy necessarily led to a
questioning of some of western society’s foundational principles about aesthetics, the role
of the artist, our ways of understanding and evaluating art. Authorial authority was being
displaced by the perception of “the author position not so much as stable, a fount of
social insight, as constituted out of a plurality of socially determined assumptions”
(Hopkins183).
As the autonomy of art was being questioned and the authority of the individual
artist was being eroded, artists were experimenting with collaborative forms of creation.
The feminist mantra, ‘the personal is political’ focussed on personal narrative as the site
for political analysis. Most collective techniques built on this premise, using individual
experience as the ‘truth content’ that was collaboratively shaped into artistic form. As
the neutrality of the art establishment was being discredited, art was moving into or
creating open spaces for experimentation, and making claims to the public sphere. Agitprop, cultural interventions and other forms of oppositional art were taking their message
directly to people outside of mediating institutions or markets. Traditional popular forms,
such as melodrama, satire, clown and acoustic music were resurrected to tell modern
stories of social justice struggles.
It is clear that politically engaged art of the time was part of a larger counterculture movement that was in reaction to all spheres of society, with the ultimate goal of
radical social change. J. Elam Jr. contends that it was the social/ psychological condition
29
of ‘urgency’ for change which characterized the counter culture: “The urgency in the
1960s and 1970s fuelled and in turn was fuelled by the performability of the entire social
environment. Dramatic social events such as protest demonstrations, draft card burnings,
and acts of civil disobedience were notable not only for their subversive political intent
but for their performative quality”(25). Art as activism was often indistinguishable from
activism as art, at once an acknowledgement of and a challenge to society as spectacle.
Art’s function in these movements was to unveil and reveal systems of
oppression, and to educate its larger audience about systems of oppression that were
masked by dominant culture. Through education, the population would develop the
critical tools and the collective consciousness necessary for the mass mobilisation that
was a prerequisite to any social change, whether the goal was radical revolution or better
environmental policies. This level of engagement was a fundamental rejection of
Adorno’s thesis; although art should remain autonomous from affirmative culture, it
could not remain autonomous from social concerns. Following thinkers such as Gramsci,
culture and education were seen as central to radical politics, to engaging working
people, the “organic intellectuals”, in the larger struggle: “Consciousness of being part of
a particular hegemonic force (that is to say political consciousness) is the first stage
towards a further progressive self-consciousness” (Gramsci 333). Art was enlisted as part
of this campaign, and the communicative as well as reflective functions of art became the
priority.
Congruently, theatre was being used for educational and social purposes in Third
World countries. In Latin America, Africa, and South and East Asia theatre artists,
30
development workers and adult educators saw theatre as an effective technique “to
embody and make culturally specific development messages.” Jan Selman points out the
problems with the initial ‘theatre for development’ model: “In the 1960s, development
communications generally meant the transmission of messages from the centre to the
periphery. The model, consciously or not, was colonial” (10). Like much of the social
protest art, theatre for development maintained the separation of artist and audience, and
through its overt oppositional or pedagogical messages, the artist-as-genius was also
reified as the artist-as-expert. For politically engaged artists, this model undermined the
very critical thinking they were advocating. Rejecting the role of political expert, artists
began exploring more radical forms of critical pedagogy and alternative ways to use art in
the service of educating for social change. Using the democratic principles that were at
the base of their movement, some artists began by engaging communities in decisions
about representation.
Collaborative approaches to art making
Haedicke and Nellhaus describe the historical development from overt political
drama to community-based performance as best understood “through the changes in the
sorts of questions that practitioners and scholars asked”(13). Bertold Brecht, with his
focus on the representational process had shifted much of the questions of political
content, “what is performed?”, to questions of “how is it performed?”. In the 1960s and
70s, these questions brought alternative forms of theatre into the streets, parks,
workplaces, and led to a new set of questions about audience and place, “who is it
performed for and where?”. Also following Brecht, theatre began investigating political
31
content in popular artistic forms, opening up questions of “whose material?”. And in the
1980s and 90s:
32
Another set of issues slowly came to the surface, questions focussing on
the process of producing theatre, especially issues of social location,
control, authority, and authenticity: “Who performs, whose material is
performed, and who decides?” Those are the core questions of
community-based theatre now. (13)
33
This movement was part of the post-modern democratization of ‘truth’, the key
question being “who decides?” This acute awareness of the embedded ideology in all
social relations and cultural forms encouraged artists’ supersensitivity to ‘imposing’ their
particular point of view, particularly in representation of the Other. This demanded
another approach to art making that included the Other in the decisions, not only of
content, but of form as well. Engaging communities directly in decisions about artistic
representation of their situations involved skills and theory that most artists, trained for
traditional artistic activity, were not familiar with. This turn was a fundamental shift in
the monologic nature of art production – the artist produces, the audience receives – and
put into question the creative process itself. Haedicke and Nellhaus note that much of this
focus on process is rooted in radical pedagogy, a Freirean approach to a “problem-solving
education” , emphasizing communication in which all involved are “jointly responsible
for a process in which all grow”, and in which the goal is to demythologize traditional
“commonsense”, in a “constant unveiling of reality” (16). Brazilian Paulo Freire’s project
was the development of dialogic models of education, a critical pedagogy in which
“teachers and students...co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of
unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of
recreating that knowledge” (Freire 56).
Leading the way in the integration of radical pedagogy with artistic practice is
Brazilian theatre artist Augusto Boal, who developed his theory and methods of ‘theatre
of the oppressed’ based on Freire’s ideas. He explains why with this story:
34
My comrades and I of the Arena Theatre, were about to perform a musical
agit-prop piece intended to activate [the peasants]. We ‘taught’ them that
they should free themselves, fight. At the end of the performance, a
peasant came up to us and said ‘we are delighted that you did this
play....come with us because we’re going to take over the lands of a
colonel who had us evicted by his ‘capangas’. We’ve got rifles for you...’
We explained that we didn’t know how to use rifles. We were good at
giving advice, but incapable of following it. From that day on, I decided
that it would be better to invent another theatre form that would be more
useful and honest in cases where the artist is not in the same situation as
the spectators, doesn’t suffer the same oppression. (Theatre 51)
35
Boal’s conversion to a dialogic from a monologic method of creation and
performance was a reflection of the movement worldwide. Kamal Salhi comments on this
transformation in his study of African theatre for development: “Performance had moved
away from being the prerogative of a few highly trained specialists towards once again
being the right of everyone to make and to do” (9). Many Latin American practitioners
were at the forefront of developing models for democratic collective creation processes
(van Ervan139), which were adapted and incorporated in the north with many of the
feminist practices mentioned earlier. “ Thus, the dramatic text and often the performance
developed collaboratively out of the community, as individual authorship by a playwright
unaware of the particular community waned” (Haedicke 14). These experiments were
taking place throughout North America: Théatre Parminou in Quebec, Headlines Theatre
in Vancouver and Mixed Company in Toronto are three Canadian troupes who developed
successful models for democratic participation in the collective creation and performance
of identity and issues based theatre.
A dialogic model was an appealing shift for politically engaged artists and
activists, particularly after the end of the Cold War, when the Left was in complete
disarray and the Right was proclaiming global capitalism the big winner of history.
Progressives were reduced to a purely critical role, their utopian energy diffused if not
completely dissipated. Criticising the alienated world without any hope of possible
alternatives tends to result in impotent rage and despair, which was reflected in much of
the popular art at the time: the nihilism of screaming punk rock, dark satire and irony
36
ushered us into this “post-utopian” age. Marlene Martineau reflects on these times in
Théatre Parminou’s history:
37
The period that followed the dissolution of several Marxist parties in
Quebec and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc provoked a crisis of meaning
in our artistic work. Its identity defined by its usefulness, our theatre had
great difficulty overcoming the political disappointment arising from all
the efforts we, like so many of our fellow activists, had invested in a
dream of social change. (6)
38
Identity and issue politics were de-radicalized, their critiques narrowed to liberal
social norms of equality of opportunity and individual freedom, firmly within the limits
of the now undisputed reign of the ‘invisible hand of the market’. Competition, atomism,
alienation and individualism were presented as the undisputed natural order of things; and
while artists continued to directly confront these presumptions in political art, it was no
longer as part of any obvious movements towards something better. The major economic
restructuring that took place in the early nineties to accommodate global ‘free market’
capitalism hit art and cultural institutions hard, particularly the grassroots, marginal or
politically engaged groups. One of the many casualties was the Canadian Popular Theatre
Alliance, a coalition of political theatre artists and troupes from throughout Canada that
had organized national biannual conferences throughout the eighties, and nurtured
criticism and theoretical debate in the evolving explorations of popular theatre (7). The
death of dozens of small troupes throughout the country made the Alliance obsolete.
In the midst of this ideological confusion and the disintegration of activist
networks, the paradoxes of art’s role in progressive politics were accentuated. Critics
charged that the modernist project of negative aesthetics had failed, precisely because it
didn’t escape institutional integration (Uzel 269). Although many theorists thought that
oppositional art had become synonymous with modern art, Uzel claims that is was
painfully obvious that art on its own had not managed to permanently shift the
foundations of capitalism, in the artworld as well as the larger society (269). Politically
engaged art had become mainstream, and when incorporated into the culture industry,
reification of the ‘star’ had replaced the ‘genius-artist’.
39
Radical artists’ own critiques had helped to delegitimize the autonomy of art, and
their opposition to the experiences and language of a consumer society had assured them
a place on the margins. But the margins were no longer counter-culture; they were
shifting, becoming at once larger and more conformist. Cultural critic Terry Eagleton
says: “the true scandal of the modern world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the
margins” (19), rendering the oppositional symbolism of deliberate marginality almost
meaningless.
The initial move towards a collaborative practice had been founded on a critical,
oppositional ideology as part of larger movements for social change. But Lacy claims
that the transition from a “model of individual authorship to one of collective
relationship... was not undertaken simply as an exercise in political correctness” (36).
This latest shift towards community-based art was in some ways a reaction to the
shattering of the counter-culture movements, and a disillusionment with ideology. In the
vacuum left by post-modernism and the overwhelming nature of the spectacle of global
capitalism, many activists and politically engaged artists felt what art theorist Lucy
Lippard calls “the lure of the local” (7). This commitment to place provided a grounding
in what seemed an ungrounded world, and the cliché, “act locally, think globally” was
taken up by artists in an attempt to involve residents in critical reflection about local
issues and local solutions, while making the connections to global systems of oppression.
The goal was to ground and engender criticism and art as ‘tools for social change’ for
marginal groups in the global economy. Radical pedagogy remained the initial impulse,
and methods that were used in oppositional liberation movements were transferred to
40
local issues and communities. This approach also followed Alinski-style neighbourhood
organizing strategies, where popular education and art were tactics to educate and
mobilize neighbourhoods around self-identified issues (Kuyek 80). Soon, the emerging
anti-globalization movement was becoming the backdrop to connecting local and global
issues, symbolically reinforced at demonstrations and counter-summits responding to
meetings of the World Bank, the G-8, and other international rituals of capitalist power.
Community-based work was linked to the struggles taking place around the world, as the
anti-globalization movement provided radical criticism of corporate capitalism in the
public sphere, even if only through the number of protestors beaten up and arrested by the
riot police. At the demonstrations, artists are creating low tech carnivale elements: giant
paper mache puppets, banners, and other visual, musical and theatrical elements, which
theoretically are protective of the demonstrators by making it difficult to characterize the
protests as menacing enough to warrant police brutality. These elements are also meant to
evoke the utopian possibilities of a world shaped by expressive freedom rather than
market brutality, as declared in the movement’s motto: “another world is possible”.
The Turn to Community
What is now called community art has its roots in active struggles for social
change that were pushing the boundaries for free space for art and social criticism.
During the ‘80s and 90s, programming and policy reforms in art institutions opened up
small opportunities to develop this work. The initial attempts to standardize these
practices began with the language to describe them, and it is at this time that ‘community
art’ became the official moniker. For thirty years, these practices have been struggling
41
with languages to describe the work, from ‘new genre public art’, ‘popular theatre’, ‘art
for social change’, to ‘cultural intervention’. Once institutionalized as ‘community art’,
the ‘means of production’, through (small) State and Foundation granting programs,
became available. But as Honour Ford-Smith points out: “Once greater access is
achieved, more complex contradictions begin to emerge” (16). With the focus now on the
‘community’ and the ‘art’, rather than on ‘intervention’ or ‘social change’ the questions
have shifted.
In the current community art practice, Suzanne Lacy writes: “a longing for the
Other runs as a deep stream through most of these artists’ works, a desire for connection
that is part of the creative endeavour in all its forms” (36). The nature of the practice is
not only concerned with social criticism and opposition, it is responding to a deeper
malaise about the nature of society itself. Lacy goes on:
42
This relational model, whether expressed psychologically or politically,
draws upon a spiritual tradition in art. Many new genre public artists
express their connection through memory, to traditions of ethnicity,
gender, or family. They talk about their habitation of the earth as a
relationship with it and all beings that live there. These essentially ethical
and religious assertions are founded on a sense of service and a need to
overcome the dualism of a separate self. (36)
43
This is a significant shift for politically engaged artists. Whereas art’s function
had been to question and criticize alienation and oppression, art is being proposed as an
answer, as a means to resolve and heal the wounds of alienation itself. “There is a need
for new forms emphasizing our essential interconnectedness rather than our separateness,
forms evoking the feeling of belonging to a larger whole rather than expressing the
isolated alienated self” (Gablik, Reenchantment 5).
The current practice of community-based art is mainly concerned with
experimenting with these forms. Considering the range, scope and variety of community
art projects and the inter and multi-disciplinary nature of the work, it is obviously an
evolving practice that does not fall under neat categories . In order to understand the
work, Elaine Goldbard suggests these guiding principles: “first, community art is based
on the belief that cultural meaning, expression and creativity reside within a community”;
and second “collaboration between artists and others is central and necessary to the
practice”(1). Jan Selman says that to understand popular theatre, we must recognize these
elements: intention, context, creators’ relationship to the community, process and
product, the artistic form and the nature and relationship of the audience to the work (23).
For the purposes of arriving at some common principles, it is evident that relationship is
a constant theme underlying most descriptions of community art. For Lacy, the resulting
art work itself is “ a metaphor for relationship”(82). According to Gablik, this represents
more than just one element of community art, it is the defining element of a new thinking
“that involves a significant shift from objects to relationships” (Reenchanment 7). A
recurrent theme throughout all the discourse is the insistence that the collaborative
44
creative process is more important than the product, or even that the process itself is the
art, as expressed by Jeff Kelly:
45
Processes are also metaphors. They are powerful containers of
meaning...There’s a false dichotomy that’s always talked about...between
objects and process. Any time we objectify consciousness, it’s an object in
a sense, a body of meaning. Looking at a product at the end, or looking
only at the social good intentions or effectiveness of the work is certainly
not the whole picture. (Quoted in Lacy 45)
46
The priorizing of the process over the product can be traced to the movement
against commodification, but the focus on relationship raises questions that are usually
outside the realm of art. Suzanne Lacy insists that we are still discovering what this turn
is, “a redefinition that may well challenge the nature of art as we know it, art not
primarily as a product but as a process of value finding, a set of philosophies, an ethical
action, and an aspect of a larger sociocultural agenda” (46). Gablik argues for an
“ecological perspective [that] connects art to its integrative role in the larger whole”
(Reenchantment 8). This involves a crucial rejection of the alienated world, by creating
alternative spaces where we can liberate our authentic selves in creative connections with
others. The focus on re-connection and reconciliation is intended to heal our fractured
selves, before we can heal the fractured world. “Overcoming the crisis of disenchantment
has become the greatest need of our culture at this time” states Gablik,
47
Reenchantment, as I understand it, means stepping beyond the modern
traditions of mechanism, positivism, empiricism, rationalism, materialism,
secularism and scientism - the whole objectifying consciousness of the
Enlightenment - in a way that allows for a return of soul... a release from
the affliction of nihilism. (Reenchantment 11)
48
Opposition is no longer directed solely towards an unjust economic system or a
commodified culture; it is towards the “consciousness of the Enlightenment” itself. This
“return of soul” is to be found through re-connecting to the Earth and to each other in
community.
A Crisis of Meaning
Much of the thrust of the opposition movements to global capitalism has been
tempered by 9/11 and the subsequent violence and fascist tendencies of the Bush
administration. The world seems more dangerous and alien than ever: dystopian
ideologies are taking violent prominence in our lives, and combined with neo-liberal
economic pressures throughout the 90s, have become the new backdrop for art. Susan
Buck-Morss quotes the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious
observation that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre was: “the greatest work of
art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we composers are nothing”.
Buck-Morss contends that this comment should lead to, among other things, “critical
reflection on the autonomy of the artist, the impotence of art, and the anaesthetized
reception of global images of reality” (73). The role of art is once again in question in the
brave new world, and in the midst of what Charles Taylor calls the “malaise of
modernity”, the turn to community sounds reassuring. And in the current climate of fear,
authoritarianism and the creeping criminalization of dissent, it can also feel safer.
Current community art practice talks of “healing” and of “building community” in
an alienated atomistic society. The intention of working with politically coherent
communities to criticize and challenge liberal power has shifted. One reason is that there
49
are fewer politically coherent communities to work with in these conservative times.
Politically engaged artists who turned to the local in search of an “authenticity” beyond
the spectacle are finding themselves ensconced in neighbourhood community centres and
other public institutions. In times of social foment and relatively free public debate, this
can be an exciting place to be. In times of social conservatism, the artist who wishes to
engage with others can find herself bound by the prevailing fear and conformism,
reinforced by State funding requirements. The temptation is to see the community as in
need of healing and reconciliation, as well as education. The original impulses of critical
pedagogy, collective creation and cultural democracy that emerged in opposition to
oppression are diffused. More and more, these practices’ repeated claims to progressive
social change are appealing to effects that go beyond the aesthetic reception of the art
work.
This brief, and certainly incomplete, overview of recent oppositional art
movements has revealed some of the traces that have led to the practices known as
community arts. In the face of an alienated world of affirmative spectacle, artistic
resistance to reification has taken different turns, from covert negative aesthetics to overt
populist and socialist realist approaches. Art has extended itself outside of the museums,
galleries and theatres to claim spaces in the public sphere and to infiltrate the everyday.
Cultural democracy has opened up small, always vulnerable spaces for alternative voices.
Although these oppositional streams represent divergent approaches to art’s function in
politics, the one thing they hold in common is their intention to disrupt our perceptions of
the everyday, to subvert affirmative culture, and to either direct us or to hint at other
50
possibilities. Even in streams that emphasize the performative elements of activism, or
direct action agit-prop presentation, the aesthetic dimension’s connection to politics is
seen, at most, as inspirational toward, and not as a replacement for political praxis.
However, this turn towards communities is working on other crucial assumptions
that are not articulated in this history. Both the institutional language and the languages
of longing used by artists are appealing to notions of art and community that are outside
of the critical function of art as a resistance to hegemony. Whereas all artistic claims to
political relevance are tentative, they rely on the reception of the audience to the artwork;
the moment of epiphany or transformation of our perceptions of the world. These
community-based practices are longing for something more or different than a shift of
perception or the awakening of a political consciousness; they are longing for a
connection and a solidarity through artistic practice. Far more than a critique of
alienation, many of these artists call for a resolution of, in Gablik words, “the whole
objectifying consciousness of the Enlightenment”. Although she proposes that this turn is
the beginning of a new paradigm, her challenge to Enlightenment consciousness carries
strong echoes of classic Romantic thinking that need to be clarified. In the following
chapter, we will look at the sources of these Romantic longings in order to understand
their influences on community art practices.
51
Chapter Two
ART, AUTONOMY AND FREEDOM
52
But should it not be possible to make better use of the freedom you accord
me than by keeping your attention fixed upon the domain of the fine arts?
Is it not, to say the least, untimely to be casting around for a code of laws
for the aesthetic world, at a moment when the affairs of the moral offer
interest of so much more urgent concern, and when the spirit of
philosophical inquiry is being expressly challenged by present
circumstances to concern itself with that most perfect of all the works to
be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political freedom?
Friedrich Schiller, 1789
53
Schiller made his revolutionary argument for aesthetics as the way to deal with
the creeping rigidity and unfreedom of Enlightenment thought, in his book On the
Aesthetic Education of Man. Written in 1789, this work was the first to develop a
philosophical argument that art and aesthetics had the potential to change society. His
radical vision for art built on elements of Kant’s aesthetic theory, and many of these ideas
influenced the beginning of the Romantic period and our modern notions of art. Schiller’s
theories in particular laid the philosophical groundwork for art practices that make social
and political claims for art.
Aesthetic Judgement
In the last chapter, I tried to establish that community art practices represent a
particular turn in an oppositional tradition of late twentieth century counter-culture. As
we’ve seen, this oppositional function exists for most modern art in one form or another.
However, this role was not original to these counter-culture movements; our modern
notions of aesthetics and art as oppositional spheres can be traced to and linked to the
Romantics. Schiller’s opposition to instrumentalism and his argument for expressivism
directly challenged the Enlightenment concept of political freedom, and introduced a
vision of aesthetic wholeness through expressive freedom that resonates throughout a lot
of community art discourse. As expressed by writers such as Suzi Gablik and Suzanne
Lacy, these practices are a turn towards resolution, connection and a collective creation
of meaning. What exactly this means for community art’s potential contribution to
political praxis is not clear. This chapter will tease out the Romantic notions of
54
community and of art and the nature of their relationship to politics, in order to
deconstruct the Romantic assumptions of these practices.
To understand the oppositional Romantic impulse, it is helpful to establish what
this movement was reacting against. Arguably the most significant turn in modern
aesthetics initially was not concerned directly with art or politics at all, but rather with
foundational methods of disclosing truth. The Enlightenment promised to free us from
the slavery of pre-determined identity in a pre-structured world, where people were
“sacrificed to the demands of supposedly sacred orders that transcend them” (Taylor,
Malaise 2). In the seventeenth century, Descartes was building on Platonic and Christian
traditions when he developed his theory of the separation of reason and nature. But he is
identified as the guy who made the final cut, then had the surgery sanctified by the
enlightened God of reason. His famous dictum “I think therefore I am”, was not merely
stating the obvious. He went on to add:
55
I knew from this that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of
which was to think and which, in order to exist, has no need of any place
and does not depend on any thing material. Thus this self - that is the soul
by which I am what I am - is completely distinct from the body and is
even easier to know than it, and even if the body did not exist the soul
would still be everything that it is. (Descartes 25)
56
Not only did Descartes claim that the mind was the only certainty, and reason the
only method to arrive at that certainty, he came to the radical conclusion that therefore he
was essentially mind, that his mind and his physical nature were separate substances, and
that furthermore, mind did not need nature in order to be. The aesthetic has no pertinent
role to play in this scientific pursuit of truth, since art itself is suspect and non-verifiable
through rational methods. Disengaged reason drains what it is observing of any inherent
meaning and significance resulting in the disenchantment of art along with the rest of the
world. This one dimensional, standard, utilitarian view was a radical turn from which,
according to many, we have still not recovered: “A vigorous debate has been going on for
a couple of centuries as to whether this was an unambiguously good thing” (Taylor,
Malaise 3). The reward for this radical autonomy was that Descartes’ new methods
promised “to thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature”
(Descartes 44). In this world view, the enlightened disengaged mind sceptically observes
matter in order to impose rational meaning onto a meaningless world. Truth can only be
verified inwardly by an independent, sceptical subjectivity, objectively observing matter.
Nature, including our nature, needs to be divided, dissected and categorized if it is to be
understood and ultimately controlled: once nature is tamed through reason, we can arrive
at objective empirical truth and realize our ideal potential as rational beings. Science
becomes the only legitimate arena for validating truth. Since what is ‘real’ and true is
only that which can satisfy subjective reason’s criteria of clarity and distinctness, our
sensory experience of necessity becomes illusory, untrue. Art was free to pursue its own
ends in a world in which it had no meaning.
57
In his response to this loss of meaning, Immanuel Kant’s initial intent was to
recover the integrity of the moral. “The fully significant life is the one which is selfchosen” (Taylor, Sources 383) is the foundational principle of his project. Although a
clear rationalist, Kant is sometimes referred to as a bridge between Enlightenment and
Romanticism (380). The opening for those looking for a way out of the desert of
disengaged reason came through the aesthetic theory set out in his third critique, Critique
of Judgement. In the first two critiques, Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical
Reason, Kant argued for this crucial distinction: “Thus philosophy is correctly divided
into two parts, quite distinct in their principles: the theoretical part, or Natural
Philosophy; and the practical part, or Moral Philosophy.” (Kant 7). Whereas pure reason
separates us from the objectified world, practical reason is the self-imposed choice of
duty over inclination and desire. Yet since these are both autonomous spheres, it is not
clear how they can possibly be related. Kant introduces a third mediating power in the
critique of judgement “as a means of combining the two parts of philosophy into a
whole” (12). He affirms a distinct function for judgement, that of ‘reflection’, a reflection
determined by ‘taste’:
58
In order to distinguish whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer the
representation, not by the understanding to the object for cognition, but by
the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with the understanding) to the
subject and its feeling of pleasure or pain. The judgement of taste is
therefore not a judgement of cognition, and is consequently not logical but
aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can
be no other than subjective. (Kant 37)
59
There are no a priori determinants to subjective aesthetic judgement; rather there are a
priori principles of taste based on formal harmony, balance and beauty. Although these
principles cannot determine aesthetic judgement, they ought to. A subjective evaluation
can make claims to objectivity and to universal validity based on what should be “a
sense common to all”(136). But this is an internal discourse, “done by comparing our
judgement with the possible rather than the actual judgements of others” (136). The
significance of Kant’s theory, according to Susan Buck Morss, is that it ushered in the
modern era, where “the definition of art was first posed in epistemological form, and the
discourse presumed the necessity of critical judgement” (66).
At the top of Kant’s hierarchy is disembodied reason, whose higher function
follows the Cartesian line of a disengaged subjective mind, observing matter in order to
understand it according to a priori determinants. Both the moral sphere and the aesthetic
sphere could be seen as two separate ways to deal with what he calls our ‘lower natures’:
our senses, desires, nature. The practical reason of morality must struggle to overcome
nature and inclination so that duty can triumph; this struggle is what gives a person the
dignity of a self chosen life. Aesthetic judgement is reason’s compromise with nature:
while Kant insists on the free imaginative play between matter and form, judgement is
ultimately based on a priori principles of form. And just as authentic morality must be
disengaged and disinterested from everything except a duty to something outside of
oneself, aesthetic judgement must be free of all rules and disinterested in all purpose
outside of the judgement of taste (161). Key amongst outside influences that must be
avoided is the mercenary:
60
61
Art also differs from handicraft; the first is called “free”, the other may be
called “mercenary”. We regard the first as if it could only prove purposive
as play, i.e. as occupation that is pleasant in itself. But the second is
regarded as if it could only be compulsorily imposed upon one as work,
i.e. as occupation which is unpleasant (a trouble) in itself and which is
only attractive on account of its effect (e.g. the wage). (146)
62
The artist must be free from all financial interests, just as the authentic moral agent must
be. But the artist requires freedom from all outside interests, including the moral
imperative of duty, for to be otherwise would corrupt the art work with a purpose outside
of itself, threatening to reduce her work to mere imitation, which Kant abhors as
deception (145). Art must be a free, original play of nature with form; therefore the artist
must be allowed a “certain audacity” which “becomes him well,... but it always remains a
fault in itself which we must seek to remove, though the genius is, as it were, privileged
to commit it, because the inimitable rush of his spirit would suffer from overanxious
carefulness” (162). This freedom from the rules is not for everybody; but everybody is
not an artist. On the contrary, the artist is a rare, unique, born genius: she alone can make
claim to this freedom from all outside interests. Her moral imperative comes from the
creative act itself, which makes her, like God, beyond man-made moral duties. Kant
describes the talent of the genius:
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The talent is, properly speaking, what is called spirit; for to express the
ineffable element in the state of mind implied by a certain representation
and to make it universally communicable ....this requires a faculty of
seizing the quickly passing play of imagination and of unifying it in a
concept (which is even on that account original and discloses a new rule
that could not have been inferred from any preceding principles or
examples) that can be communicated without any constraint of rules. (161)
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We see in Kant the artist becoming the repository for all of our longings. The artist
represents the spirit of creation itself, and the creative act is appropriated as the sole
domain of God and the artist. The opposition between rational freedom and nature is
resolved in the idealized figure of the genius-artist, but, to ensure that the “inimitable rush
of his spirit” isn’t made to suffer, he is separated and protected from the concerns and
responsibilities of daily life. Only in this way, can he be an authentic genius. Art for art’s
sake and the artist-as-genius have by now become calcified constructs in our social
imaginaries. Kantian aesthetics insists on this expressive freedom as the prerequisite for
the art to reach the ultimate artistic achievement, to “make it universally communicable”,
because “taste can be called sensus communis with more justice than sound
understanding can, and the aesthetical judgement rather than the intellectual may bear the
name of a sense common to all” (138).
The aesthetic, unlike pure reason or practical morality, depends on a judgement
that cannot be determined by any preestablished concepts. Rather, it demands a reflection
that of necessity must presume a sensus communis, “it gives a pleasure with a claim for
the agreement of everyone else”(199). Kant’s sensus communis retrieves the idea of
community that was so solidly rejected in the Cartesian paradigm, and re-situates it
within the aesthetic sphere. Rather than combining two parts into a whole, he succeeds in
creating an entirely new sphere of judgement that is autonomous from the other two, and
that presumes a connection with others that transcends both pure and practical reason.
Since art is released from practical concerns, there is no inherent morality in art,
and art has no direct connection to moral life. However, according to Taylor, Kant didn’t
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take the definitive step of declaring “the independence of the beautiful relative to the
good” (Sources 423) referring to his claim that “the beautiful is a symbol of the moral
good”(Kant 198). Kant makes the following distinctions between the aesthetic and the
moral. First, “the beautiful pleases immediately (but only in reflective intuition, not, like
morality, in its concept)”. Next, “It pleases apart from any interest”(199), unlike morality
which necessarily is interested in the concept of duty. The aesthetic is separate from the
moral; however, beautiful objects
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excite sensations which have something analogous to the consciousness of
the state of mind brought about by moral judgements. Taste makes
possible the transition, without any violent leap, from the charm of sense
to habitual moral interest, as it represents the imagination in its freed as
capable of purposive determination for the understanding, and so teaches
us to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction apart from any charm
of sense. (200)
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The freedom of the disinterested imagination and the free play between sense and reason
confirm Kant’s theories of moral freedom through analogy, for the judgement of taste is
ultimately the discipline that “tames the wild imagination”. And if a choice must be
made between both, then judgement eventually “will rather sacrifice the freedom and
wealth of the imagination than permit anything prejudicial to the understanding” (164).
The free play of aesthetics will not run amok, for its intention is communication which
relies on the assumption of universal understanding, an agreement in judgement.
Freedom Through Beauty
Kant’s contribution to the Enlightenment seemed to have safely cornered art into
a classical formalism and the aesthetic experience into an exalted subjective judgement of
taste, until the eighteenth century revolt of the Romantic movement. Chaffing at the
restrictions of the disengaged mind and institutionalized standards of judgement, the
Romantics found possibilities in the free and autonomous nature of aesthetics that Kant
had proposed, signalling the turn that set up the conditions for what Charles Taylor calls
“the great intramural debate of the last two centuries, pitting the philosophy of the
Enlightenment against the various forms of Romantic opposition” (Sources 101). This
rebellion marks the origins of the resistance to the instrumental disenchantment of the
world, a resistance that continues to animate oppositional stances from all sides of the
political spectrum. The seeds of this rebellion were contained in what Taylor calls “the
philosophies of nature as source”: “This notion of an inner voice or impulse, the idea that
we find the truth within us, and in particular in our feelings” (Sources 369). This
philosophical turn fundamentally rejected the ideal of duty over inclination, identifying it
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as an actual impediment to freedom. Our inclination was our inner voice, and the rational
construction of “ideal man” was in danger of destroying the very humanity it was
intended to liberate.
In On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller lays out the problem: “Man can
be at odds with himself in two ways: either as savage, when feeling predominates over
principle; or as barbarian, when principle destroys feeling” (21). The dominance of the
instrumental mode threatens our freedom through its construction of abstract laws that
deny our essential human nature, and through the imposition of standardized ideals that
cannot help but favour, if not enforce, conformity. Even the rational ideal of the ‘selfchosen life’ that constitutes freedom cannot be actualized within a political system built
solely on duty and rational principles. Schiller states that it is “life’s task” to actualize the
“ideal man”, who is however not an abstract concept outside of himself, but is rather an
“archetype” carried within each human being (18). True autonomy turns from being an
outside rational ideal to an inner expressive one.
We therefore have a crucial choice to make about the best way to ensure that this
true inner self can be manifested: “either by the ideal man suppressing empirical man,
and the State annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the State,
and man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as Idea” (19). For Schiller the
choice is clear: the Ideal of freedom, developed and defined by reason alone, cannot help
but restrict true freedom through a conformism imposed by the state on individuals.
Rather, the potential of the “ideal man” and true freedom is within each of us, and by
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extension, the ideal State is within our grasp, if “in time” we can do away with the false
separations we have created.
Schiller accepts Kant’s premise of the duality between reason and nature and
acknowledges the original necessity of fragmenting our being: “there was no other way
that man could have progressed”(39). But the price has been steep: this denial of nature
is precisely what sacrifices the physical person for an ideal and “risks the existence of
society for a merely hypothetical (even though morally necessary) ideal of society” (13).
The separation now seems to be irreconcilable as both modes make different claims on
us. “Reason does indeed demand unity; but Nature demands multiplicity....And a political
constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to achieve unity only by suppressing
variety”(19). Autonomous, instrumental reason dissects and isolates nature into
fragments in order to study and control it, and in so doing empties the natural world of its
inherent meaning; whatever political system is shaped from this worldview is bound to
reflect this suppression of variety and lack of meaning. There is an urgency in his
criticism, since “the very fate of mankind is being debated....before the tribunal of Pure
Reason itself” (9). Throughout his Letters we find the now familiar laments about the
emptiness and shallowness of a utilitarian, one-dimensional society, the bleak alienation
of a fragmented landscape in a disenchanted world and the political dangers of the
tyranny of instrumental reason:
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Civilization, far from setting us free, in fact creates some new need with
every new power it develops in us. The fetters of the physical tighten ever
more alarmingly, so that fear of losing what we have stifles even the most
burning impulse towards improvement, and the maxim of passive
obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life. Thus do we see the spirit
of the age wavering between perversity and brutality, between
unnaturalness and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief;
and it is only through an equilibrium of evils that it is still sometimes kept
within bounds. (29)
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In the fact that he could be describing prevailing opinions about our current reality, lies
the seeds for hundreds of years of anguished opposition between the potential of the free
authentic individual and the inauthentic, corrupting world. “It was civilization itself
which inflicted this wound upon modern man”(33). Schiller bemoans the utilitarian
society that has divided people according to “occupation and rank” and has severed the
inner unity of his nature. He expresses both the longing for connection, resolution and
true political freedom that are the hallmarks of the Romantic movement’s aspirations.
This urgent state of affairs inspires him to propose the “untimely casting around for a
code of laws for the aesthetic world” and to dare to put Beauty before Freedom: “If man
is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the
problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to
Freedom” (9).
Following Kant, Schiller is proposing aesthetics as a separate sphere that goes
beyond both reason and nature because it combines them. He extends Kant’s notion of
the beautiful as the symbol of the moral by suggesting that the aesthetic, rather than being
a separate and distinct form of cognition from the moral, is actually the path to the moral
that will rescue the connection between reason and nature. The experience of the
aesthetic is an experience that is freedom itself, a movement towards a spontaneous
morality. Schiller recasts the battle of higher reason versus lower nature; instead he
proposes that the duality is between two separate but equal drives: the sensual drive and
the formal drive. Both come together in the “play drive” to create the “living form”of
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Beauty, which does not sacrifice one to the other, but rather “is to be sought in the most
perfect possible union and equilibrium of reality and form” (112). Schiller is careful to
note that perfect equilibrium lies always in the realm of the Ideal: beauty in experience
will always “oscillate” one way or the other.
The play drive deposes practical reason as the highest purpose of man; rather
“man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only
fully a human being when he plays” (107). Whereas Kant’s aesthetic was based on
reflective contemplation and judgement, Schiller’s aesthetic is active: it is precisely the
creative act itself that leads to moral freedom. At the point at which we realize the
“autonomous shaping power within”(209), we are transformed into free moral beings
with the power to shape our experience into meaning. This personal aesthetic
transformation will awaken within us a natural solidarity with the rest of humanity, and a
longing for justice in the world: “The misfortunes of the human race speak urgently to the
man of feeling; its degradation more urgently still; enthusiasm is kindled, and in vigorous
souls ardent longing drives impatiently on towards action” (59). Aesthetic perception
and experience awaken sensibilities that are offended by injustice and oppression and
trigger corresponding longings for beauty and freedom.
However, Schiller warns against an impatience for action: its zeal is a
demonstration of a “pure moral impulse” that is “directed towards the Absolute”. The
Absolute is the enemy of the play drive, and an ardent longing for action has already left
the sphere of the aesthetic.
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Instead, Schiller counsels “the man of feeling”, who, “despite all the opposition of
his century, is to satisfy the noble impulses of his heart” to “impart to the world you
would influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it
to fulfilment.” (59). The “man of feeling”, the “aesthetic man”, are special and
enlightened individuals who must “live with your century; but do not be its creature.
Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise” (61). He
reinforces Kant’s separate status for the artist, but extends it to all “men of feeling, who
must disdain the opinion of the corruption of the age, which besets him on all sides” (57).
There is no need to engage directly with the world that we would influence: we are to
spread the word through the actions and creations of Beauty itself:
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Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the great and noble forms
of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until
Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over Nature. (61)
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Schiller states that “men of feeling” must first free their own inner beings from “the
edifice of error and caprice” before trying to influence others. Reason and serious
principles will “frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be
prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you
must lay hold of the timorous fugitive”(61). Although the corrupt world must be
avoided, the individual must maintain his connection with his community, because, “only
there, where, in his own hut, he discourses silently with himself and, from the moment he
steps out of it, with all the rest of his kind, only there will the tender blossom of beauty
unfold” (192). With the rest of “his kind” – those who have been transformed by
aesthetics – a spontaneous beauty will emerge, an essential connection with all that is
good in us.
A natural, humanist morality is at the root of Schiller’s aesthetic theory. And
herein lies one of the inherent contradictions of much modern aesthetics. For the tender
blossom of beauty must unfold according to its own rhythm and needs, and must not be
dependent on any necessity outside of its own development. Only then can it be pure
aesthetic semblance, versus logical semblance which, having a purpose beyond beauty, is
“soul seducing” deception (65). Since moral freedom is derived from the aesthetic, the
aesthetic does not originate from the moral; if it does, it becomes logical semblance.
Schiller clarifies the relationship: “To the question ‘How far can semblance legitimately
exist in the moral world?’ the answer is then, briefly and simply, this: To the extent that it
is aesthetic semblance; that is to say, semblance which neither seeks to represent reality
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nor needs to be represented by it” (199). This stance not only protects the purity of the
aesthetic sphere, it protects morality as well. Semblance should never be mistaken for
truth; to do so would collapse the difference between illusion and reality, effectively
neutralizing reality. Allan Megill notes that Schiller maintains Kant’s clear distinction
between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic (14). If art is to have any effect on the world,
it must be without any a priori interest in doing so; and yet the only reason for granting
art its exalted status is because of its effect on the world. And so Schiller also maintains,
and complicates, the distinctions between the aesthetic and the moral.
The transformation to the aesthetic needs to begin as a personal inner
transformation for each individual; once we have experienced the revelation of aesthetic
harmony “soon man is no longer content that things should please him: he himself wants
to please” (Schiller 211). As we slowly learn to shape experience and sense into a fusion
with form, our perception of the world will shift, and we will naturally want to share this
perception with others. This spontaneous morality is based on an assumption of a
benevolent inner moral source that just needs to be awakened through beauty. This
morality remains within the aesthetic realm however; our impulse to please others is
manifested first through surrounding ourselves with the holistic harmony of beauty, then
in the creation of beauty.
It is difficult to see how this could lead to the construction of political freedom,
and Schiller himself admits that, historically, taste and freedom seem to “shun” each
other (69). But, until we have undergone this aesthetic transformation re-connecting us
with our own inner nature as moral source, we have no true knowledge of moral freedom
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and are only capable of reproducing either barbarism or savagery. It is not so much how
we attain political freedom that concerns Schiller: it is the definition of freedom itself that
he is challenging. Our longing for a freedom based on disengaged reason is misguided
and can only lead to more utilitarian wretchedness; true moral freedom, the play between
form and senses, creates balance, harmony and connection that can lead to his utopia of
an aesthetic State which “alone can make it [society] real, because it consummates the
will of the whole through the nature of the individual” (215). In other words, the nature
of the individual is the will of the whole, because this nature is universal. Individual
expressive freedom which “makes of him a whole, because both his natures must be in
harmony if he is to achieve it ”(215) will in turn shape a harmonious society for everyone
in the name of freedom. Aesthetic education is crucial, because aesthetic communication
is the only form that can unite us in the realization of the will of the whole. It is the
communicative function of aesthetics that extends this experience beyond the individual,
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All other forms of communication divide society, because they relate
exclusively either to the private receptivity or to the private proficiency of
its individual members, hence to that which distinguishes man from man;
only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it
relates to that which is common to all. (217)
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Although not the most developed part of his ideas, this communicative function follows
and expands on Kant. Aesthetic autonomy not only refers to a separate sphere of
subjective perception and knowledge, it extends to a separate and distinct mode of
communication, privileged as the only mode that is universal among men, that transcends
the alienation of reason to engage our “common sense”, as an existing faculty that needs
to be educated. Once aesthetic perception and communication have been experienced, it
is impossible not to be painfully aware of the discrepancy with the miserable reality: the
aesthetic’s role in our moral and political lives lies in awakening longings that are
common to all of us, and the corresponding revulsion for the corrupt reality. It is only
through art that we arrive at this epiphany and that true harmony and freedom are
revealed to us.
Romantic Legacies
For the Romantics, it is through the epiphanic function of art that our true moral
nature is revealed. This in effect raises the aesthetic above the realm of the moral,
certainly beyond Kant’s practical morality which is grounded in duty. And so Schiller’s
ethics of benevolence, precariously grounded on an aesthetic notion that excludes moral
interest from its intent, its process and its manifestation, are ultimately very vulnerable .
This belief in the exceptional nature of art threatens to discard the moral altogether.
Taylor points out the consequences:
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Thus a view has come down to us from the Romantics which portrays the
artist as one who offers epiphanies where something of great moral or
spiritual significance becomes manifest - and what is conveyed by this last
disjunction is just the possibility that what is revealed lies beyond and
against what we normally understand as morality. The artist is an
exceptional being, open to a rare vision; the poet is a person of exceptional
sensibility. (Sources 423)
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Kant’s notion of artist-as-genius has metamorphosed into the artist-as-seer and visionary.
This exalted status is an affirmation of the claim that artists have no responsibility
towards society; responsibility implies collusion with the corrupted world. Artists’ place
was outside the world, cut off from the concerns of other people and from the
contamination of instrumental/mercantile influences. Their alienation was seen as against
alienation itself. So, contradicting the amoral claims for art, the artist’s opposition to
society was itself understood to be a moral stance.
According to these terms, the reification of truly free, authentic subjects as
personified by artists depends on their opposition to and separation from the inauthentic,
false world. While the rest of us are blindly immersed in its corruption, and thus can
never be truly authentic, artists are released from the blood, sweat and tears of daily life,
so that they can freely create the epiphanic art that will reveal to us our true slavery
through the art created by true freedom. But as Taylor points out, the exaltation of
epiphanic art actually depends on its opposition to the world, which paradoxically implies
an inherent collusion between the two: “The opposition was necessary, because the life
forms of expressive fulfilment and instrumental-rational discipline were partly defined in
contrast to each other” (424). The instrumental world depends on art to save it from the
austerity and shallowness of disengaged reason. But, for the mass population, this
dependance is equivocated with a deep suspicion and an “ambivalence towards a world
and works which were a negation of and sometimes a threat to their values, but that many
of them also saw as a preserve, which protected and intensified many of the things which
gave life meaning” (424). The epiphanies of the artist’s subversive imagination have to
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be confined and controlled: “they cannot be allowed to break out and realize their full,
often anti-moral and usually anti-instrumental, intent”(424). So the artist and the
artworld’s voluntary banishment from daily life works to perpetuate and strengthen the
opposition/collusion between them, also revealing traces of Aristotle’s notion of
catharsis, a ‘safe space’ for the undesirable yet necessary aspects of art. Opposition to
the instrumental world remains the one outside interest that art is allowed, to the point
that it is understood to be implicit in a work’s form if not content.
Probably the most significant legacy from the Romantic movement is the idea of
an individual’s inner moral source, the expressivist turn that shifted our understanding of
morality and freedom. The Platonic Ideal of the good to which we all aspire and which
condemns the artist as nothing but a third rate imitator, as well as Kant’s a priori moral
determinants of duty, had positioned the moral as outside of the self, as what we had to
live up to. Romanticism developed the idea that the moral source is found within the
nature of each person, who cannot know our inner “élan, the voice or impulse” until we
have articulated it. It is through the subjective discovery and expression of our
uniqueness that we realize our authentic moral selves. To ‘be true to yourself” demands a
commitment to the highest moral source: one’s own inner voice. The shift in aesthetics is
from mimesis, the aesthetic representation of the world or the Ideal, to free self
expression of this inner voice.
Romanticism introduced the idea that we are alienated from our true selves by a
rational, instrumental society, “our will needs to be transformed; and the only thing that
can do it is the recovery of contact with the impulse of nature within us” (370). It is this
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inner moral impulse “which tells us of the importance of our own natural fulfilment and
of solidarity with our fellow creatures in theirs” (369). The narrow instrumental rules and
values of the world necessarily inhibit the voice of nature. If we follow Schiller, the key
is to remain within the aesthetic sphere, to focus on the authentic expression of our inner
voice, and eventually, the aesthetic and the real will slowly merge together and
“semblance will conquer reality”. It follows that Romanticism’s foundational premise of
humanity’s natural benevolence and solidarity only needs to be freed through aesthetic
perception and experience, for the creation of political freedom to follow.
Romanticism’s claims for art, freedom and community continue to resonate
throughout the last centuries to our times, even if they have failed to live up to their
promise. Although briefly revived at intervals, notably the 60s, the guiding concepts of
Beauty and Harmony have lost influence. But the ideal of expressivist freedom remains
an integral part of our social imaginary, along with its necessary opposition to
instrumental reason and the corrupted world. Cultural democracy and social justice
movements, as well as most liberation theories from Nietzsche to Marx, to feminism and
anti-colonialism, are founded on a concept of freedom that presupposes that each of us
has a unique, essential inner self that demands and deserves free expression. The
authentic human being must be free in order to be fulfilled in this expression. Taylor calls
authenticity the contemporary moral ideal, the “standard of what we ought to
desire”(Malaise 16). And the current standard is still represented by the artist, although
her status as genius has been somewhat tarnished and diminished. Art’s struggle for
freedom and autonomy from the world has been more or less successful; but as Buck84
Morss points out, “Artistic freedom exists in proportion to the artist’s irrelevance”(68).
Within “artworld” as she calls it, artists can say and do what they want; they are basically
ignored by the rest of society. If and when they prove relevance or present a real or
imagined threat to the dominant discourse, their freedom is usually curtailed. She claims
that the resistance to commodification through the death of the object has only intensified
the reification of the artist herself as the symbol of creative freedom. “Art is what artists
do”.
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Today’s art is “free”, because it obeys no laws of judgement, taste, or
relevance, submitting only to the decisionism of the artist, who can be
scandalous, playful, boring, shocking, or whatever – modes of being that
have no social or cognitive effect. Even “good” art cannot escape
trivialization in this insipid environment. Even “political” art is
depoliticized, becoming simply another genre of contemporary practice –
which has every right to be, but not to matter. (70)
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Freedom itself threatens to become meaningless in these conditions. Since the
artworld and the artist are the model for true authenticity, the potential of authenticity is
diminished and narrowed. As Marx and following cultural critics like Marcuse have
outlined, capitalism and the culture industry have alienated us from our “true” selves;
individual expressive freedom has been flattened and reduced to consumer choice and
moral relativism. Modern art’s opposition to and criticism of the culture industry and
bureaucracy are direct descendants of Romanticism’s opposition to instrumental reason
and the marketplace. But like the status of artists, this opposition has become almost
meaningless outside of artworld, even as the Romantic notions of expressive freedom and
the opposition to instrumentalism remain as strong currents in our society.
Community art practices have chosen to respond to this loss of meaning through a
contradictory approach that both instrumentalizes art as a curative to alienation and
oppression, and romanticizes art as a practice that will lead to personal morality, political
freedom and the ideal community. These traces run throughout community based art
theory and practice. Augusto Boal states in his latest book, Aesthetics of the Oppressed:
“Art is the most human characteristic of the human being; it is his or her capacity to
recreate the world” (41) and “Only Aesthetics can enable us to attain the truest and most
profound comprehension of the world and society”(29). Esteela Conwill Màjozo argues
that community based artists are those “who remember our common humanity and
instigate recognition of our true nature... who recognize the illusion of duality, the
miracle of collaboration and the beauty of making truth matter” (90). Common Weal
Community Arts in Regina states its mission as “People coming together creatively,
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emotionally and spiritually to create art and community” (Common, website). Although
opposed to disengaged reason and instrumentality, atomism and alienation, community
based art goes beyond the modernist, and certainly the post-modernist concept of art’s
function as social critic. In much of the current practice, aesthetics and art are presented
as remedy for individual alienation as well as for the alienation between individuals, “in
order to all say ‘I’, before coming together in another beautiful word: ‘we’ “ (Boal,
Aesthetics 62). Expressive freedom is possible once individuals have been reconnected
to their true nature, which is suppressed by the masks and rituals imposed by the
dominant culture. “The goal is not to learn the rhythms which are played everywhere, but
to rediscover and connect with our own internal rhythms, with the rhythms of nature”
(48). It is through the aesthetic that individuals finds their voices, liberating their
authentic selves from the inauthentic world. Freedom through Beauty sounds
anachronistic in our times, but much community art language is actually based on
variations of this premise. The insistence on the primacy of the creative process is often
justified through the transformative effect of the individual’s connection with her true
self, a therapy for the soul. This aesthetic experience transforms our perception of the
world and our place in it. For many community artists, this transformation involves a new
awareness of our common humanity, of our connections to each other and to nature.
Aesthetics provides a way of knowing, expressing and communicating that transcends
duality, difference and that has more universal resonance. This is a very Schillerian view:
we connect with our inner moral source through aesthetics and art. The goal of “creating
art and community together” sounds very similar to Schiller’s ‘Aesthetic State’ a
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Beautiful utopia shaped by our natural benevolence and solidarity. For much current
community art practice, creating art together and creating community are synonymous.
The “healing” effects of art are both individual and collective, and revolve around ideas
of reconciliation between our divided nature, between each other, between art and life.
This aesthetic synthesis follows in the Romantic tradition of the utopian function of art,
but this healing is easily reduced to the platitudes that Marcuse warned us about, that
deny any systemic cause for our pain, and offer us a quick aesthetic fix to get us back on
track.
The Longing for Community
The “community” in community art is understood in two different ways. First, it
is the base of the practice: art made in, by and for community. Second, it is the ultimate
goal of the practice: to create the ideal community through a consensual process, leading
to an ideal society through social change. Most of the discourse focusses on the first
when attempting a definition that pertains to the practice, but it is sometimes difficult to
distinguish between the process and the intention in the writings.
Kathy deNobriga suggests that community is that “which is rooted in a shared
sense of place, tradition or spirit” (quoted in Cohen 1). Other practitioners have revised
this to “groups of people with common interests, defined by place, intention, tradition or
spirit”(Cleveland 1). Geographical proximity, groups sharing a common social position,
or a shared set of symbols are other criteria listed in the discourse (Haedicke 9). But even
these reasonable attempts at definitions demonstrate the problematic nature of the term
‘community’. There remains inevitable implications of a homogeneity within all these
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definitions, and a resulting flattening of power relationships. In her analysis of
community as the “over-used cultural catch-phrase of the 1990s”, Dot Tuer warns that
“appealing to an organic collectivity, it can end up collapsing differences in the name of
difference, sweeping away history in the name of solidarity”(3). Raymond Williams also
addresses the idealism of the term: “Community can be the warmly persuasive word to
describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an
alternative set of relationships” (76). He notes that unlike other terms for social
organization, community seems to carry within it only positive connotations.
Honor Ford-Smith helps us to understand the problems of this idealism:
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The idea that “community” is somehow a pure space that is inherently
more democratic and utopian and that exists in a space uncontaminated by
the ideologies of the marketplace does not necessarily follow. (20) ...
When the term “community” is invoked in discussions about community
art, it usually refers to groups that are different from the dominant (white,
middle-class) norm. The moral authority of these groups derive from
notions of essential authenticity. The “grassroots”, the “working-class”,
the “south-Asian community” and so on all signal homogenous entities
that are just as often contested from within. (23)
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By appealing to a Romantic, idealized version of community, one of transparency,
consensus, comfort, we risk ignoring the reality that community is also an ideological
concept, often invoked to affirm dominant ideology or to exclude others. In this sense,
communities are never ideologically neutral or homogeneous, any more than they are
fixed constructs. In his theory of “imagined communities”, Benedict Anderson states:
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All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact
(and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be
distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which
they are imagined. (9)
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It is clear that the dominant culture has no problem imagining ideal communities
that transcend difference; this is actually an essential myth of liberal power. The
affirmative nature of the concept of community, combined with these practices’
Romantic tendencies to idealize community as the final outcome, do not present a
challenge to these dominant constructs . Working with marginalized or oppressed groups
to liberate their authentic selves is easily interpreted as charity work, and community art
is domesticated and “becomes a way of massaging and managing social consent by
offering welfare to the most marginalized, in a bright new decorative package with all the
attendant hype of public relations” (Ford 19). Expressive freedom and community are
ostensibly celebrated in liberal democracies, and artists following a Romantic view of
aesthetics as a path to essential authenticity risk reinforcing “particular categories
generated out of dominant political discourse (‘at-risk youth’, the ‘underpriviledged’,
etc.) and have the effect of constructing the target population as an implicitly defective
but malleable resource” (Kester 163). In this shift, the community now needs to be
“fixed”, “an aesthetically driven process of redemption and personal transformation”
(144).
Empowering people through art to express themselves is probably a good thing,
but it is difficult to reconcile this activity with the aspirations of community art, as
outlined in the 2004 Conference proceedings of the Community Arts Network, the largest
community art organization in the U.S.:
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We believe, passionately, that creative, artistic exploration among people,
catalysed by an artist, is an important key to addressing injustice and
enabling the United States to live up to its great but unfulfilled promise of
a democratic society. (Durland 6)
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This grand vision is in painful contrast with the notion of artists “fixing” groups of
defective individuals for better integration into the world. We find ourselves facing
similar problems that we saw in Schiller: the claims for art as the path to political
freedom are tenuous at best. But we also find that these same difficulties arise in most
Romantic claims for political and social transformation, including those of Marx, who, as
we saw in Chapter One, inspired most of the discourse that influenced the development
of community art practices.
In his overview of Marx, Taylor helps us to understand that this discrepancy is
due to the essential flaw in the Romantic expressivist aspirations. Taylor puts Marx
squarely in the expressivist tradition (Hegel141), and grounds this view in Marx’s
concept of man’s alienation:
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He suffers alienation because at first under class society his work and its
product, transformed nature – which properly belong to him in the strong
sense that they are part of him, his expression - escape from him and
become an alien reality, with a dynamic of their own which resists and
opposes him. This notion of alienation thus belongs intrinsically to an
expressivist structure of thought. (142)
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Marx’s ultimate vision of freedom was the recovery of the worker’s labour and its
product to regain “wholeness”. “Generic man will return to himself in his own
embodiment, will enter a realm of freedom, that is, integral expression, one which will
belong indivisibly to the whole society, in which man will be reconciled with man” (144).
Humanity and nature will be reconciled through the transformation of both and deciding
together, “men will shape nature to a design freely created by them” (145), echoing
Schiller’s vision of “that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man:
the construction of true political freedom”. Also in the Romantic tradition, this
reconciliation goes beyond political freedom, it heals all wounds of false human division
and opposition. Taylor quotes Marx:
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Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully
developed humanism is naturalism. It is definitive resolution of the
antagonism between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict
between existence and essence, between freedom and necessity, between
individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows
itself to be this solution. (144)
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In the same intellectual vein as Schiller, Marx’s ideas were founded on a premise of a
benevolent humanism and natural solidarity, understood as the essential nature of the
proletariat, if not of the bourgeoisie. Unlike Schiller, however, our reconciliation is not
precipitated through the spontaneous recognition of aesthetic perception, rather it is
through an objectification of historical “man” and a science of the laws of bourgeois
society and how to dismantle it. Taylor argues that the scientific absolutes of Marx’s
criticism of society in combination with his expressivist vision of freedom is what gave
Marx’s theories “tremendous power”. It was also what proved untenable, not of his
critique of capitalism, but of his solutions to it. Taylor claims that the problem was not
that scientific objectification can never be combined with expressivism, and he uses the
example of the sculptor guided by engineering principles. Rather, the weakness in Marx’s
thesis lies in its central idea of the transformation from the abusive laws of capital and
scientific determinants of behaviour to a spontaneous expressive freedom, “because he
had an extremely simple-minded view of the transition. The revolution would abolish
bourgeois society and hence the laws of its operation, and a united class of proletarians
would take over and dispose freely of the economy which it inherited” (149).
The leap from aesthetic, or revolutionary, transformation to political freedom,
although arguably its most important tenet, continues to be the most undeveloped part of
Romanticism. Whether through expressive criticism, or scientific criticism, the
transformation to a united community making consensual decisions for the common good
was never itself criticized by Marx, any more than it was examined by Schiller, and, by
extension, by some community artists. This fuzzy idea of a magical shift to an ideal
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community has proven to lead to all kinds of social disasters and horrors, from Hitler to
Stalin to George Bush’s commitment to bombing countries into a state of democracy.
This disconnect is certainly what gives Romanticism a bad name, with the understanding
that its project will necessarily end in disaster. But this longing for a transformative shift
to a kinder, gentler community is seductive, not only to artists, but to social, cultural and
political institutions. It implies that there is an easy solution to oppression, in this case art,
that doesn’t actually require any structural changes. It is a longing that can make us
vulnerable to totalitarianism and fascism, in its “warmly persuasive” name.
Romanticism thus offers us two views of community that are untenable. The first,
negative view is any notion of community is a false construct maintained and
contaminated by instrumental laws and dominant ideology. The second is a utopian ideal
of community that is unrealistic and can actually lead to totalitarianism and/or heartbreak
if taken seriously. If the community artist turns to community with the first view, the
tendency is to want to fix, heal or educate people, a goal that is easily coopted by power.
If with the second view, she risks imposing an impossible ideal on the participants,
sublating difference and authenticity to this ideal.
Is it Art?
Using these romantic concepts, the ‘community’ in community art practices
proves to be an ideologically explosive base. But the concept of ‘art’ in the practice
proves to be equally problematic. Community art is breaking some of the main tenets of
modern aesthetic theory: that the artist and the art should have no other interest outside of
the work itself, and that the artist’s vision is a special, individual one that is corrupted
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when exposed to outside influence. Although modern art and popular culture had already
made the turn to art with an interest in political and social issues, its oppositional,
separate stance from the world was seen as essential to maintaining its autonomous status
as art. These practices threaten the autonomy of art and risk losing its subversive
potential.
Although most art institutions and funding agencies in Canada now have some
version of community art programs, the work’s place in artworld is still tentative. Many
community artists reject the attempt to situate the practice within artworld at all. While
writing his book, Kester found that it was artists who were asking “What is to be gained
by defining this work as art?”(188). When Bishop interviewed an art collective in
Istanbul – who generate community projects with their neighbours out of a three room
apartment – they claimed to be interested in “dynamic and sustained relationships”, not
“aesthetics”, which they deemed to be “a dangerous word” (2). Community artists are
crossing disciplinary and critical boundaries, challenging conventions of oppositional
activism and art; their resistance to situating their practices firmly in artworld can be
interpreted as a reaction against institutionalization and concerns about narrowing its
sphere and restricting the possibilities . Traditional art theory and criticism is just
beginning to deal seriously with this new direction, and some practitioners and theorists
believe that a new language is necessary to properly analyse the work. However, like any
work of art, these practices need to be critiqued according to their own intentions and
aspirations.
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In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse reminds us of art’s true and
only subversion: “the sensuous force of the Beautiful keeps the promise alive – memory
of the happiness that once was, and that seeks its return” (68). This promise belongs in
the autonomous aesthetic dimension and Marcuse’s appeal to the utopian promise of the
aesthetic echoes elements of Schiller’s, including his inability to explain its connection
with praxis: “There is in art inevitably an element of hubris: art cannot translate its vision
into reality”(57). If this means that the promise remains in the autonomous aesthetic
sphere, taunting us with its impossibility, this is consistent with how modern aesthetics
has conceived art. Politically engaged artists who have turned their focus on
collaborating with non-artists are potentially sacrificing the aesthetic to the social.
Paradoxically, ‘community art’ is also the romantic ideal, the Aesthetic State, the
happiness that we seek; it represents the ultimate resolution. To pursue the vision of
community subsumes art to this function; to pursue the relationships of collaborative and
collective art with others risks not respecting the specificity of art. The subversive
function is only inherent in the autonomy of art; in this view, community corrupts the
autonomy, and any subversive potential is lost.
We can look to Rousseau to understand one direction that this work might take.
Like Boal and most community artists, Rousseau disparaged the confining structures of
artworld. He thought that traditional theatre gives us nefarious illusions, false
separations, and total alienation (Starobinski, 116). Rousseau’s solution was the synthesis
of art and community. He proposed the ‘fête’, a spontaneous community celebration
where there are no divisions between actors and spectators, “faites que chacun se voie et
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s’aime dans les autres, afin que tous en soient mieux unis” (quoted in Starobinski 118).
There is no need for objects, for content or form, only for transparency and connection,
and the joy of the celebration, which must take place outdoors, under the sky and not in
some dark alienating theatre. The breakdown of traditional art forms, of the separation
between artist and audience, is seen as liberating both art and the community from
oppressive separations. The autonomy of art is fundamentally rejected as art is integrated
into the community’s celebration of itself. The artist’s role, if any, is to set up the
conditions for this celebratory expression, although not much is needed, according to
Rousseau: “plantez au milieu d’une place un piquet courronné de fleurs, rassemblez-y le
peuple, et vous aurez une fête”(118). In this version, the community itself is the art,
spontaneous and benevolent. Whereas the Romantic belief in the exceptional nature of
art threatens to discard the moral altogether, the equally Romantic belief in the
exceptional nature of communal morality threatens to discard the art. Autonomous art is
unnecessary in this construct, and the artist-as-genius is extended to the community-asgenius. The artist and the artwork can disappear in this happy community because
everyone is an artist, and art is unnecessary as an autonomous sphere. This purely
Romantic notion of community benevolence confuses politics and art, while removing
the notions of reflection, shaping, and judgement from both. Unfortunately, these
romantic images of mass utopian spontaneity and community are just as likely to be used
by totalitarian regimes as they are by old hippies. Elements of these ideas can be found in
mass political demonstrations, although usually to elicit longings for unity and
togetherness, not to enforce them.
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Rousseau’s spontaneous celebration, where art is sublated to community,
radically breaches the autonomy of art. In a different way, for the more direct socially
engaged community art, the instrumentalization of art is more obvious. Art as a “tool”,
whether for education, for community building, or for developing self-esteem, is still a
tool, and is not art in any way that we understand it. There is a definite purpose to using
the tool, which is often outside of the artistic process or outcome. This purpose is often
defined by someone other than the given community: the artist, an institution, or the
funding criteria. “Giving each person a voice is what builds community and makes art
socially responsive” (Gablik, Mapping 82). But it is this assumption of “giving”
someone their own voice that demonstrates the risks of instrumentalizing art. There is not
a big stretch between “giving” people their voice, and “fixing” deficient communities.
Both goals fit easily into the dominant paradigm, and worse, can be tools to reinforce
oppressive power relations rather than challenge them. As noted earlier by Marcuse and
others, art and culture have already been instrumentalized as ‘tools’ for the affirmation of
the dominant ideology; artists walk a fine line when they instrumentalize art, “since
demonstrable outcomes are rapidly co-opted by the state”. To the question “which was
worse: to be instrumentalized by the state or by the art market?” Claire Bishop answers:
“I’m afraid I think it’s the former”(4). She elaborates:
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My view is inevitably influenced by living in the U.K., where New Labour
have for the last nine years instrumentalised art to fulfill policies of social
inclusion - a cost-effective way of justifying public spending on the arts
while diverting attention away from the structural causes of decreased
social participation, which are political and economic (3).
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Since the Romantics, our concept of art as the un-violent synthesis between form
and sense represents a utopian ideal that has an “antithetical relationship to the world of
the instrumental spirit; that is the origin of [its] inherent negativity” (Wellmer 5).
Accordingly, there would seem to be an implicit contradiction in the idea of
instrumentalizing art for political, social or individual purposes. Not only is it
unnecessary – if art is inherently healing and oppositional– but by introducing the
instrumental spirit into the aesthetic sphere, we have entered what Schiller calls the
“absolute”, cancelling out the freedom necessary to the creative process of the play drive
and the work of art itself. Even if we allow that there is no ‘pure’ work of art, or even that
all art has ideological intent, we still judge art based on the success of the necessary
fusion of form and content that a particular work of art calls for. Community art confuses
the idea of “necessity”. Understood as the interplay between the artist and the work of art,
the inclusion of non-artists in the creation process expands the necessity beyond the work
of art. There is consequently a balance between what is necessary for the participants or
co-creators and what is necessary for the work of art, and the ideological premise in most
community art seems to be that the participants’s needs prevail.
But our modern understanding of art, according to Kester and others is also to
“consistently define the aesthetic through its difference from dominant cultural
forms”(89). As we’ve seen, this is art’s opposition to instrumental logic extended with a
critique of capitalism, hegemony and affirmative culture. Although the turn to
collaborative work for many artists was another experiment in staking out art’s difference
from “dominant cultural forms”, Bishop feels that the practice has violated some basic
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principles of our modern definitions of art. She allows that “for supporters of socially
engaged art, the creative energy of participatory practices re-humanizes – or at least dealienates – a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of
capitalism”. She is sympathetic to these goals; however, she sees serious problems with
defining this work as art:
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The urgency of this political task has led to a situation in which such
collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important
artistic gestures of resistance: there can be no failed, unsuccessful,
unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally
essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. (2)
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Initially, collaboration’s unusual and original approaches were enough to
differentiate the work from dominant cultural forms, and symbolized an implicit
resistance to atomism and fragmentation. However, the focus on the collaborative process
eventually took the emphasis off of the art work itself and its reception by an audience.
Lacy’s idea that the artwork is a metaphor for relationship is an idea that is prevalent in
these practices. This can mean that the art itself is not that interesting, that it has been
sacrificed to the relational ethics of social ties. This raises many questions, not the least
of which is whether art can survive when sublated to the need to strengthen social bonds,
particularly if those bonds themselves are defined by dominant power. When these
practices are inspired by the romantic notion of bringing aesthetic reconciliation into the
community, this presents a direct threat to the autonomy of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’.
This turn is precipitated by a moral impulse, as expressed by Màjozo: “To search for the
good and make it matter: this is the real challenge for the artist. Not simply to transform
ideas or revelations into matter, but to make those revelations actually matter” (88). By
putting the moral at the foundation of the work, these practices seem to breach all of our
expectations for modern art.
We’ve seen that the tensions between community art’s romantic aspirations and
its instrumental aspirations can tend to weaken both its potential as art and as cultural
intervention. The problem seems most acute when the aspirations themselves are
focussed on creating community as the final outcome. It is neither aesthetically nor
rationally possible to ‘create community’, although it is perhaps possible to create
conditions that facilitate the possibility of community. These “imagined communities”
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are often imagined by dominant power, and usually involve marginalised people who
have no power to name themselves. Social relations function according to different
logics than aesthetics, and the theoretical connection between community art and social
change seems to rely on a magical idea of the transformation of the non-artists
participating in the creative process, and to a lesser extent, to the audiences of the
artworks. If the goal of happy communities through expressive freedom is romantically
unrealistic and inherently, even if unintentionally, affirmative of oppressive structures,
community artists need to reevaluate, clarify or re-articulate their language and their
goals. According to the romantic and critical paradigms that we’ve been looking at, these
practices could be shifting art towards the worst of romantic utopianism, while
contaminating the idea of authenticity and the autonomy of art. If these practices are
instrumentalizing art for another purpose, whether education, healing or social change,
then they have left the realm of aesthetics. If they maintain the autonomy of art, they
seem to contradict their activist goals. In each case, the inclusion of non-artists in artistic
production threatens to impose an intention that the participants themselves have no voice
in establishing. If we are to salvage any radical function for community art in political
practice, it is necessary to rethink and clarify the ties between aesthetic autonomy and the
social function of art. In Chapter Three, I will look at another paradigm that is implicit in
community art practice, that both rejects and resolves some of these problems, while still
struggling with others.
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Chapter 3
RECLAIMING UTOPIA, ART AND DEMOCRACY
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In this fraught historical moment, the situation of art may seem a
relatively minor concern.
Grant Kester, 2001
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A Hopeless Paradox?
The Romantic binary notion of the world as a corrupted, confining construct that
we must escape from, and of community as the utopian promise of an aesthetic state of
individual and social reconciliation, has in some ways been resolved by the
deconstruction of the affirmative and potentially totalitarian function of the utopian
vision of community. But once we give up the utopian possibility of revolutionary or
aesthetic transformation this paradigm leaves us stranded in the margins of the divided,
corrupt world, where we left Adorno in the first chapter. In this view, since there is no
hope for reconciliation in the real world, such hope can only result in kitsch and
affirmative romantic longing. Utopian reconciliation can only be found in art, but even
there, only in the representation of its opposite “the negation of ‘objectively binding
meaning’ - the epitome of the emancipatory potential of modern art” (Wellmer 18). This
emancipation of our perception of the world may open our eyes to the “chasm between
praxis and happiness”, but this is not the responsibility of the artist, and anyway, “the
happiness that it promises is not of this world” (12). Buck-Morss confesses that the
“disintegration of the discursive unity of Marxism” since the end of the cold war elicits
“not a small bit of nostalgia” (7). Without a utopian possibility of social resolution,
Adorno’s prescription for art seems inevitable.
Art still has significance in our culture precisely because the play involved
between form and content in the creative process determines the end result. The act of
creation demands a free space, an autonomy that is vigorously defended by artworld, and
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acknowledged, if not always supported by society. As we’ve seen in the last chapter, if
the artist’s intention transcends the work of art, for example, to build community, or to
develop self-esteem in the participants, or even to instigate social change, she risks
denying art’s necessity for free play. A pre-determined end result for the creative
process, whether it is for the betterment of the participants or of the audience, tends either
towards an advertising aesthetic to “sell” an idea, or towards models for “fixing” people,
certainly not a vision of expressive freedom. These transcendent goals tend to flatten
differences and limit possibilities, creating false consensus, false art and false
community. The importance of the Kantian notion of aesthetics as an autonomous sphere
of knowing and communicating remains perhaps more relevant than ever, as we long for
a space that is free of commodification and propaganda. So those who call for the
dismantling of the separation of art and life through the sublation of art to community or
through the instrumentalization of art, risk losing not only this autonomy, but the very
nature of the aesthetic experience that is oppositional: its non-instrumental free play. But
as we’ve also seen, the idea of authentic expressive freedom as necessarily disengaged
from any interest outside of itself, also threatens to render both art and authenticity
meaningless.
The Ties That Bind Us
We remain stuck with these tensions as long as we stay within the romantic
binaries of authentic artist-individual/inauthentic world or authentic community/
inauthentic, oppressive world, or pure art/contaminating corrupted world. Opposition to
and criticism of instrumentalism, capitalism and other systems of oppression are of
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course valid and necessary. But it is our concept of authentic expressive freedom that is
itself flawed and that prevents us from seeing other possibilities. The problem was raised
in the last chapter: the artist’s freedom, the very ideal of individual authenticity, is based
on a radical schism between the individual and society. In order to be free, the artist must
denounce the world and its corruption, must turn inward to find his true self, and must be
unencumbered from all outside interests.
However, Taylor argues that these conditions can actually subvert the moral ideal
of authenticity:
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To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress
the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization...To
bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything
but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what
matters....Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from
beyond the self; it supposes such demands. (Malaise 4)
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He agrees that true individual authenticity involves the tenets we’ve already outlined in
Romantic expressivism: the first tenet includes “discovery, construction and creation”,
the second “originality”, and the third, “frequent opposition to the rules of society and
even morality”. However he argues that authenticity also requires an “openness to
horizons of significance”, as well as “a self-definition in dialogue” (66). These last two
crucial ideas have been lost from our modern notions of expressive freedom. Taylor
maintains that the seeds for this disconnect from the context of authenticity can be found
in Kant and Schiller’s aesthetic theories. As we’ve seen, Kant’s practical morality, based
on the individual’s choice of duty over inclination, implies both the openness to horizons
of significance and some elements of self-definition in dialogue; it is the only one of his
logics that acknowledges a real connection with the Other. However, his aesthetic theory
relies on inclination’s free play outside of duty, and the ties that bind us to practical
morality are rejected for the transcendental ideal of the “common sense” we share in the
aesthetic sphere. And once Schiller seemed to set the aesthetic above the moral, “because
it engages us totally in a way that morality cannot” (65), the way was opened to the
contrasting of the two from each other. Although for Schiller, “aesthetic wholeness” was
the path to the moral, it didn’t originate from the moral, rather it was its own independent
goal, outside of morality. Since aesthetic wholeness demands an opposition to
instrumental constructs, Taylor notes “ it is easy to see how standard morality itself can
come to be seen as inseparable from stifling convention...So there develops a branch of
the search for authenticity that pits it against the moral” (65). Once morality is
diminished as just another inhibiting human construct, we are released from any illusion
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of solidarity in the real world and reconciliation is only possible in the aesthetic sphere of
the imagination. This tendency has been reinforced throughout the history of Western
thought. The Romantics, who couldn’t reconcile the utopian to the instrumental world,
ended up by rejecting the world as emphatically as Descartes, but left the door open for
the possibility of an aesthetic transformation. Nietzsche’s radical autonomy strengthened
the divide by vilifying all human constructs as obstacles created by the ‘herd’,
specifically to restrict man’s will to power. Marx maintained a negative critical stance to
all the constructs of the bourgeois world, in anticipation of the utopia that never came.
And post-modernism deconstructed any remaining horizons of significance as contingent,
oppressive or both. Morality, along with the rest of it, was either corrupted by ideology,
a method of social control and/or a barrier to freedom. Our modern concepts of
authenticity and aesthetics pit us against the ties that bind us to others.
As we have seen, the aesthetic is closely associated with the demands of
authenticity, and Taylor argues that both are diminished when they are understood as
their own goals outside of any other interests. Authenticity comes not only from a selfdetermining freedom to express the individual’s unique identity, although it is that. But
that identity is unique only when it is up against other identities. Without a background of
things that matter, both art and authenticity lose their significance. It is precisely within
the dialogical setting which binds us to others that we find meaning in authenticity and in
art. This view rejects the idea of an autonomous, fixed subject defined only through a
monological articulation of her inner moral self. The individual self cannot create an
identity outside of the world, rather our identities are shaped by the world, initially
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through “significant others”, but also through our social, economic and political contexts.
The whole point of expressivism is not the wanton expression of our irrational authentic
selves; even Nietzsche wasn’t advocating for an inarticulate primal scream. Rather it is
the articulation of our inner emotions and perceptions through languages of expression
that are actually and potentially shared with others, giving meaning to our experience.
“No one acquires the languages of self-definition on their own. We are introduced to
them through exchanges with others who matter to us...The genesis of the human mind is
in this sense not ‘monological’, not something each accomplishes on his or her own, but
dialogical” (33).
Neither art nor revolution can spontaneously liberate our essential true selves.
Without the assumption of an ‘essentially good’ inner self, the romantic notion of a
universal “common sense” or of a naturally benevolent community falls apart. Rather,
our identities and our understanding of the world are negotiated through the power
relationships of the communities we nurture or find ourselves in. A person’s idea of
herself is dependant on social recognition, even if she defines herself in opposition to that
society; the denial of recognition is perceived as oppressive specifically because it
renders the individual’s identity meaningless, implicitly denying freedom. It is only
through our inter-actions with others that we interpret and understand the world and what
matters, and it is with and against this background, not outside of it, that we develop
authenticity. We can be in opposition to oppressive power, but it is an illusion to think
that we can be separate from the world, no matter how corrupt it is.
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Taylor argues that the pursuit of authenticity, “a child of the Romantic period”,
was originally a reaction to a disengaged rationality “that did not recognize the ties of
community”(25). For Taylor, authenticity is essentially a moral pursuit that originates
with a moral impulse. Therefore, to deny the ties of community is to deny any meaning to
authenticity, to refuse the moral impulse that makes individuality matter. And by
extension, to deny the ties of community is also to deny any meaning to art. A situation
that avant-guardists have been only too happy to confirm.
Longing for Meaning
This paradigm offers us another way of looking at the impulse behind community
based art. When community artists state that “meaning is to be found in community”, this
is not necessarily a romantic idealization of a consensual community. Rather, it can be
seen as a longing for the conditions of true authenticity and expressive freedom. From
this point of view, Gablik’s proposal that “connective aesthetics” is “art after
individualism”(Connective 1), would be essentially flawed. Taylor argues that it is not
individual authenticity which is the problem, rather it is our narrowed concept of a
monologic amoral individualism that has no interests outside of itself, resulting in social
disengagement, moral relativism and meaninglessness. This impoverished definition of
individual authenticity tends to result in superficial solutions to complex problems,
which, as we have seen, are easily co-opted by dominant power. We have already looked
at community art’s romantic tendency to extend the idealistic view of the essential
individual to the essential community. But in an atomistic, alienated society, the impulse
to “create meaning” in community could also be interpreted as a movement towards more
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significant concepts of authenticity that could matter, and possibly have real social and
political repercussions. This is different from the idea of “liberating” the authentic
individual, as defined as pre-existing and in opposition to an inauthentic society, through
aesthetic experience. This is also different from resolving the separations between nature
and reason and the divisions between each other through the creation of the ideal
community. Rather, this turn is an acknowledgement of the inter-subjective, dialogical
nature of authenticity and of art, as well as of the pursuit of truth and justice within a
context that makes these pursuits matter.
Our Dysfunctional Community
If community remains the context, we must still address the real problems we’ve
identified with this concept, to see if there is anything worth salvaging. The simple
solution is to reject the binary view of the corrupt world versus the romantic ideal
community. But rejecting a critical understanding of the affirmative function of
community leads inevitably back to its reification, if only through its “warmly
persuasive” connotations.
In her book One Place After Another; Site Specific Art and Locational Identity,
Miwon Kwon says that the challenge is “to figure out a way beyond and through the
impossibility of community”(154). She argues that particularly once the concept has been
appropriated by the state, true community is impossible. Institutionalized ideas of
community are the root of the “central complication plaguing community-based art: the
conversion of attempts at a participatory model of art practice, engaging local concerns
and people, into yet another form of acquiescence to the powers of capital and the state”
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(152). She suggests that rooting out the idea of community and redefining this work as
“collective artistic praxis, may be the only way to imagine past the burden of
affirmational siting of community to its critical unsiting” (155).
The term collective artistic praxis presupposes a set of negotiations between
people, not between an artist and a mythical coherent entity. Without the pressure to
embody ‘community’, the focus remains on the inter-subjective creation and reception of
art. The participants in this process are determined by the circumstances of each project;
they choose to enter as individuals, not as “community members”. As a consequence,
difference is assumed rather than homogeneity. Without a community to fix, heal or
educate, the free play of artistic creation takes priority and the artistic results are
unpredictable. Whereas community implies a refuge from atomism, alienation and fear,
collective praxis is actually a subversive act in these same circumstances; it invites
people together in an unadministered space, without a predetermined result, to participate
in free play around an idea. Anything could happen.
Changing the language to eradicate the idea of community from these practices
frees them from the constraints and contradictions of instrumentalization and of
romanticism. However, as necessary as this may seem, a complete denial of community
leaves us no where to belong, and negates the ties that we are willingly or unwillingly
bound to. Grant Kester finds that Kwon’s approach suggests that the only goal of
community art practice is “to challenge or unsettle the viewer’s reliance on such forms of
identification” (159). He argues that this view follows Lyotard, who “in contrast to
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Schiller’s classic formulation of the aesthetic as a mode of experience that can restore
ontological wholeness and integrity to a humanity torn asunder by the forces of
modernity, [...] advocates ‘ontological dislocation’ as a therapeutic antidote to a centered
and dominative Cartesian identity” (86). Although Kwon’s argument for purging
community from the vocabulary of art is well founded, there remains in this view the idea
of the radical autonomy of the individual and of art that will be corrupted by any sense of
belonging.
Taylor reminds us that “the nature of a free society is that it will always be the
locus of a struggle between higher and lower forms of freedom”(78). Negative freedom
“where I am free to do what I want without interference by others because that is
compatible with my being shaped and influenced by society and its laws of conformity”
is always in tension with “self determining freedom [which] demands that I break the
hold of all such external impositions, and decide for myself alone” (27). This dynamic
view of the shifting tensions within community releases us from the paralysing notion of
static constructs that are always inherently oppressive. Both forms of freedom are
necessary: self-determining freedom only has meaning as a release from social
impositions; and negative freedom only makes sense if self-determining freedom is a real
possibility. “Ontological dislocation” is an inherent part of these tensions as our
identities are continuously jostled and reshaped in the struggle.
As we have seen, when “healing” is the stated goal, the project veers into the
instrumental or romantic. But when the challenge to identity is the only allowable goal,
the project is necessarily and only negative. Both are considered inherent possibilities in
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art and in inter-subjectivity, but when one is priorized over all other effects, it becomes
an extreme that inhibits the free play of both. The focus on healing tends toward
affirmation; but a purely negative focus is actually antithetical to the dialogic
assumptions of these approaches, and is therefore inconceivable in practice. We may
accept that we should eradicate community from definitions of the practice and from our
imaginations, but it is more difficult to eradicate it from our lives.
A relational aesthetic
As new languages develop to interpret and analyse this work, some theorists are
bypassing the problematic idea of community altogether, and instead are focussing on the
aesthetic implications of the practice. Nicolas Bourriaud uses the concept of ‘relational
aesthetics’ to explain this turn:
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Relational art is not the revival of any movement, nor is it the comeback
of any style. It arises from an observation of the present and from a line of
thinking about the fate of artistic activity. Its basic claim, – the sphere of
human relations as artwork venue – has no prior example in art history,
even if it appears, after the fact as the obvious backdrop of all aesthetic
praxis, and as a modernist theme to cap all modernist themes...This
generation of artists considers inter-subjectivity and interaction neither as
fashionable theoretical gadgets, nor as additives of a traditional artistic
practice. It takes them as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief,
as the main informers of their activity. (44)
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For Bourriaud, this turn signals a new aesthetic that is based on dialogue, discussion and
“that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the co-efficient of
art”(41). “[These artists] are motivated neither by an aesthetic militancy, nor by a
mannerist refusal to create objects. They display and explore the process that leads to
objects and meanings” (54). This relational aesthetic is assumed in the creation of the
work, as well as in the reception of the work. Whether it’s in the collective creation and
public performance of a Boal style forum-theatre, where the audience is invited to join
the actors on stage to try out possible tactics to challenge the oppression in the play, or in
a collectively created downtown mural, these works have a clear communicative, dialogic
intent. This does not mean that a negative aesthetic cannot inform a collectively created
artwork. But the very act of creating collectively implies that the creators have something
to say, first to each other, and then to their audience. Pure formalism and a resistance to
the communicability of art is antithetical to these practices. The focus on a collective
process that “leads to objects and meanings” in art relies on audience identification with
both the content and the form. Shaped by a dialogic intent, form in community art is most
often deliberately accessible.
Identification and accessibility are comfortable within Kant and Schiller’s ideas
about the communicability of art, but present problems if we follow Adorno’s idea that
the project of modern art is the negation of ‘objectively binding meaning’. Most
politically engaged community artists would claim that they are continuing this project,
and that their goal is to deconstruct the false meaning of affirmative culture through
collaborative creative explorations. But the difference is that community artists are
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involved in a dialogic reconstruction of meaning, and bind that meaning into the
resulting artwork and its receptional process. We have already looked at the romantic
longings that could drive this impulse. But Buck-Morss offers us another interpretation.
Since the disintegration of the Left’s utopian vision of social resolution, a purely critical
response to the world seems pointless if the chasm between praxis and happiness can
never be resolved in this world. But instead of Adorno’s pessimism, Buck-Morss sees an
opening for a more practical vision of utopia: “If the language of the global Left is not
presumed, but struggled for in open communication, if the Leftist project is itself this
struggle, then democracy defines its very core”(7). Collective art practice is the dialogic
reconstruction of meaning as a democratic project. Community artists can be seen as
actively engaging in this struggle of open communication as part of an ongoing larger
project. Bourriaud states: “What strikes us in the work of this generation of artists is, first
and foremost, the democratic concern that informs it” (57). This is not a rejection of the
critical function of art, rather it could be seen as the practice’s rejection of criticism as
ideology - the idea that the only valid position is a negative, critical one. Once outside of
artworld, the spaces created by inter-subjective dialogue necessarily open up other
possibilities, contradictions and tensions that are just as quickly shut down by critical
ideology as they are trivialized by affirmative ideology. Relational aesthetics is, to some
political artists’ dismay, relinquishing the critical as the only function of art. These
practices instead use the critical as a means of inquiry that informs rather than determines
the results.
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Missing from this view is the despair from the realization that true reconciliation
can only take place in the aesthetic sphere, since we are not seeking true reconciliation.
Also missing is the angst of approaching the Other; in this dialogical worldview the Other
is assumed. Once we know that a reconciled utopia is not an option in the real world, we
need other forms to help us get on with the practical struggles of closing the chasms
between praxis and happiness. “ It is nevertheless quite clear that the age of the New
Man, future-oriented manifestos, and calls for a better world all ready to be walked into
and lived in is well and truly over. These days, utopia is being lived on a subjective,
everyday basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary experiments”
(45).
Longing for Utopia
This insistence on utopian aspirations is not due to stubborn romanticism. Miguel
Abensour argues that without a utopian spirit, democracy itself wouldn’t exist, and
without democracy, utopia will remain as the purview of a small elite separated from the
rest of the world, or will repeat the process of alienation from alienation (246). He argues
that the idea of utopia does not inevitably lead to an essentializing totalitarianism. Rather
it is the romantic ideal of utopia that is mythologized as a final state of reconciliation, that
is both undemocratic and oppressive. This mythic ideal must be purged and its
temptations guarded against. What is then needed, he says, is to bring the faculty of play
to utopia. This utopian play drive should engage with the enigma of a history that will
never be resolved, that will go on interminably, that resists any final solution and that
makes the problematic nature of history its element (248).
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Abensour’s utopian play has strong elements of Schiller’s play drive, and there is
a temptation to put it into the aesthetic sphere following in the tradition of utopian
projects since the Romantics. It also makes similar claims to aesthetic autonomy;
however, autonomy not from all outside interests, but rather all essentializing interests.
Outside interests feed the necessity of the democratic project; absolute interests have
already lost it. The crucial difference from Schiller, is that Abensour’s utopian project
can never have a final resolution and is grounded in the necessities of real time, history
and community. It is the mythologizing of the absolute idea of a final resolution as the
only utopian ideal that is false, because it is antithetical to democracy, and thus to utopia
itself. The myths of a reconciliation, of the return to the homeland or the promised land
(248) have to be relinquished from our consciousness and replaced with ideas of
community that are based on difference and an active, informed engagement with
difference. The myths of the promised land need to be mined and interrogated from
within community, opening up spaces to explore the possible links between the new
utopian spirit and democratic revolution (248).
Community is not to be shunned, for it is necessary to both democracy and to the
exploration of utopian potential. But neither is it to be idealized as the solution. Abensour
avoids the binary of the affirmative nature of community and the critical rejection of any
social construct, by listing the criteria for community not as group identity at all, but
rather as friendship, which he argues is a fundamentally political principle. Friendship is,
among all the passions, one of the most sublimated and rational human connections, the
least likely to inspire romantic idealism. Friendship involves a moment of judgement and
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conjures both individual egotism as well as the tendency toward the solidarity of
community. In particular, friendship instills a connection in separation, or a tie that knots
us together, while preserving the separation between the members of the community
(250). The community is held together through individuals’ relationships to each other,
and not to an imagined group identity, unless they choose it.
Abensour believes that this democratic age demands that we replace ‘utopian
substitutionism’ – the substitution of an inspired conscience instead of a social
movement – by a political inter-subjectivity (250). Following the work of Claude Lefort,
he advocates for a ‘savage democracy’, a democracy that is paradoxically against the
State and its mystifying, affirmative aura of reconciliation and false integration. Savage
democracy feeds itself on a permanent interrogation of the social, of the limits of the
political and in an exploration that has no established paths or directions. A ‘savage
democracy’ is savage towards the state and its affirmative myths, not towards the human.
For Abensour, what utopia and democracy have in common is their connection to
the human. The idea of democracy respects the human element and does not do it
violence, whereas totalitarianism is a historic enterprise that pretends to create the human
or organizes her as if she was malleable material. Once the human element is treated as
matter, instrumental bureaucracy is in control and democracy is lost (255). Unlike
Romanticism, this aversion to the instrumental doesn’t extend to civilization itself.
Rather, it is in the messiness and complications of the human element that we find any
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true potential of democracy and utopia, and it is because of human unpredictability that
both must be neverending, imperfect projects, constantly in need of renewal.
The Art of Democracy
What these writers are suggesting is a fundamental turn towards the ties that bind
us, as both subject and medium for our human project. The state needs to be consistently
interrogated from within a free space of inter-subjective inquiry. However, this intersubjectivity is not defined as solidarity, harmony and consensus, nor as a purely critical
project to discredit any idea of itself, not even by a political coherent identity; rather it is
held together by the very human sphere of friendship. Expressive freedom happens
within a dialogical context against horizons of significance but not as an affirmation of
them, nor as an escape from them. Rather, expressive freedom is necessarily part of a
dialogue that implies a responsibility to understand, critique and challenge the horizons,
not to idealize or deny them. This is a democratic and utopian project that cannot be
finished with an end result, but this doesn’t mean that consensus is never reached, only
that when it is reached, consensus is always contingent and tentative. The constant play
between inter-subjective utopia and reality implies that both are open to transformation,
which are never final because both are ongoing projects.
Abensour claims that utopia doesn’t belong in the realm of the understanding - the
laws of society - or in the realm of knowledge - the laws of history. But he doesn’t follow
the Romantic’s path to situate utopia in the aesthetic realm. Rather, utopia belongs to the
realm of human encounters, within the relations between people. Not in the assumption
of a predetermined idealized ‘common sense’, but rather in the unknown, undetermined
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territory between people as they are as individuals. Removed from the realm of
knowledge and reason and situated in the relations between humans, Abensour concludes
that utopia is necessarily an ethical project.
Aesthetics is notable for its absence, and Abensour does not mention art at all.
However, there are two openings that he offers us. The first could be interpreted as an
indictment of art through the insistence on the ‘purging’ of all ideas of reconciliation, of
synthesis, in particular in the seductive mythologizing of this ideal. Since the Romantics,
art is the synthesis between reason and nature, matter and form, the resolution of the
dualism that haunts us. Even negative aesthetics is intended to make us painfully aware
of the lack of harmony and unity in the real world, a unity which is assumed to be the
natural and/or ideal state of affairs. In this sense, the most oppositional,
uncommunicative, pessimistic, nihilist, avant-garde anti-art, is just as guilty of
mythologizing this ideal of wholeness and unity as the kitsch and affirmative culture that
it despises. Awakening this utopian longing is supposed to be the subversive potential of
art; however, Abensour dismisses the inspired conscience as utopian substitutionism.
Contained within the aesthetic dimension so as to avoid any contamination from the
world, resolution is inevitably mythologized because it is unattainable, and the chasm
between practice and happiness remains irreconcilable.
Situating the utopian project within the realm of human relations is a fundamental
rejection of the aesthetic claim to all things utopian. Grounding the utopian spirit in the
real world while purging the myths of social resolution and unity seems to widen the
distance between democracy and the aesthetic. However, the insistence on utopia as a
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play drive and as another way of knowing outside of any predetermined laws resonates
with aesthetic aspirations. The free play of utopia with history and social context
assumes the exploration and interrogation for traces of possibilities as well as traces of
oppression. There are significant echoes of Schiller’s classic assertion that we “only play
when we are in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and we are only fully human
when we play”. However, the inter-subjective nature of this play implies the tensions
between the ties that bind us and individual self-determining freedom.
Situating art and utopia in the human, particularly in the open spaces of
possibilities that lie in the relations between us, means that ethics and morality are at the
centre of the project. Following the democratic ideal of respecting the human element and
not doing it violence, much of the focus in the earlier writings on community art’s
process was actually outlining ethical principles for working with others. The Ontario
Arts Council published a Community Arts Workbook when they launched their funding
program, in which they outlined four principles for working in community: mutual
respect, process and consensus, inclusivity and generosity of spirit (Lee 9). In her 1997
book, The Lure of the Local, curator and critic Lucy Lippard presents an eight-point
"place ethic" for artists who work with communities (284). As we have already seen, the
concept of community carries so many political and ideological traps, that artists have
been critically sensitive to the appearance of imposing their views or expertise on the
groups they work with. Claire Bishop outlines why she finds this ‘ethical turn’ troubling:
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The discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from
a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian "good soul." In
this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should renounce
authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him
or her. This self-sacrifice is accompanied by the idea that art should
extract itself from the "useless" domain of the aesthetic and be fused with
social praxis. (5)
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She claims that the ethical imperative has meant that artists are judged more on how they
work with communities, rather than on the aesthetic merits of the art. Bishop worries that
instead of bringing the aesthetic together with the political/social, community art is
“subsuming both within the ethical” (7).
These comments reflect key concerns that artworld has with these practices,
which as we’ve seen are straining the boundaries of the “aesthetic regime of art”. Moral
and ethical concerns can tend to reinforce the romantic tendencies of community art
when the intention is to create ‘ethical community’, which also, like any predetermined
goal, can sacrifice the free play of art and democracy to the expected results. The initial,
almost puritanical focus on the ethics of group process, inclusive practice and consensual
decision making, with the repeated chorus that ‘the process is more important than the
product’ seems to confirm Bishop’s view that the aesthetic and the political are subsumed
to the ethical. This can result in boring, safe work, if the focus is only on the creating
participants. However, a focus on engendering a savage democracy rather than creating
an ethical community, can create art that is just as provocative as more traditional art
practices. Like most art, it is the intention that will guide the creative process; in these
practices, a relational ethics shapes the project, giving the participants a free place to
play.
This ethical turn is also what distinguishes the work, and although it is confusing
to artworld, over the past few years it is shaping a new aesthetic, rather than destroying
aesthetics altogether. Bourriaud’s ideas about ‘relational aesthetics’ and Grant Kester’s
‘dialogic aesthetics’ assume an ethical approach. Community art is essentially an ethical
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project whose impulse can be traced to a moral source: the desire for an engaged radical
democracy. The idea that an ethical imperative would necessarily infect or lessen art
relies on the same ideas of authenticity that we’ve looked at: the false assumption that the
aesthetic is outside of and separate from the moral and ethical. Bishop’s denigration of
the ethical as the “self-sacrifice” of a “good Christian soul” reinforces the tradition that
pits the aesthetic and the authentic against the moral. The assumption is that morality and
ethics are false, inhibiting constructs, and even if they begin as sincere impulses, they are
inevitably co-opted by affirmative culture and liberal power. Relational ethics in
particular will automatically soften and weaken the critical edge and negative aesthetic
necessary to subversive art. But these assumptions are problematic for a few reasons,
some of which we’ve already looked at. The amoral claims for both authenticity and art
are not monolithic, as many aesthetic impulses can be traced to a moral source. But by
denying that there is a moral source, we effectively exclude morality from the discourse,
leaving it unacknowledged and unexamined. In Taylor’s language, by cutting ourselves
off from these human goods, we are participating in a form of “mutilation”. To resist
moral and ethical goods because they are so easily incorporated by dominant power
seems to be counter-productive if the goal is democracy. Challenges to oppression must
appeal to some notion of morality and ethics. And as we’ve seen, this resistance is also
antithetical to any meaningful notions of authenticity and free expression. “Our normal
understanding of self realization presupposes that some things are important beyond the
self” (Sources 507). This is a basic assumption of Abensour’s new utopian spirit, as well
as many community art practices.
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However, the idea of being ‘in service’ to a community for a higher ideal carries
within it many of the affirmative tendencies that we’ve identified, and the temptation to
equate this approach with missionary work is obvious. We can look both to Abensour and
to Schiller to help us understand some of the ethical issues of working with others,
whether the project is democracy, utopia or art. By making the relationships between
people the site for art making, we are grounding the project in the human, in the unstable,
messy and unreliable reality that art has always shunned, except as observer or critic.
Ethics and morality, like identity and authenticity, originate in the inter-subjective realm
of human relations. So by first assuming that community art is an ethical project, we can
interrogate the intentions and the process more deeply. Many of the ethical issues raised
by the practice can be framed in the same way that Abensour distinguishes between
democracy and totalitarianism: democracy respects the human element and does not do it
violence, whereas totalitarianism pretends to create the human or organizes her as if she
was malleable material. Once the human is seen as malleable material, the free play
necessary to art, democracy and utopia is lost. The only approach possible to intersubjective collective work has to be an ethical one that focusses on the free play of a
democratic process and not on the end result. This does not mean that the artistic result
doesn’t matter, it means it is determined by the democratic process. A collective art
project can be, in Buck-Morss’ words “a performative act. It aims to bring about that
which it presumes”(22).
Morality, like utopia, has totalitarian tendencies, and there are valid reasons for
resisting its admission into the public discourse. But since community art practices are
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already so entangled in moral and ethical issues, there are possibilities for approaches that
follow Abensour’s ideas of savage democracy and utopian spirit to open up these taboo
longings. To humbly echo Taylor’s intention of “retrieval, an attempt to uncover buried
goods through rearticulation-and therefore to make these sources again empower, to bring
the air back again into the half-collapsed lungs of spirit”(520). Morality is less
threatening when there is an assumption that moral claims will be challenged in a critical
democratic process, subject to criticism, examination and scrutiny. As well, a utopian
spirit allows the assumption that moral claims will be also be examined for traces of the
moral sources that underlie and are important to our real struggles for justice.
It is important to distinguish between artistic intention, and the
instrumentalization of art. All artists begin with an inspiration or an impulse that we
understand as their intentions for the work, and, despite the amoral claims of artworld, we
accept that there is often a moral source for the impulse. It is at the point of execution, or
in the creation process, that the work’s necessity will determine the final results, which
may or may not coincide with the original inspiration. This process is different from
instrumentalizing art, because the artistic intention implies the intention for free play.
Artists explore, interrogate and play with their inspirations, ideas, images and forms.
Bureaucrats set out measurable outcomes. As we’ve seen, community artists should be
very sensitive to the difference, since institutional pressures for outcomes can insidiously
instrumentalize the practice. But these artists also need to be allowed the same intentional
impulses as other artists without automatically being accused of instrumentalism. An
artist whose intention is to explore, interrogate and play with an idea or a theme with
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others, within the sphere of human relationships, without a predetermined result or
outcome, should not have to subsume either the political or the aesthetic to the ethical.
But then, what is the role of the artist is this process?
Bishop says that the work is developing an “ethics of authorial renunciation” ( 2).
Susan Buck-Morss has a different view. After being invited to co-curate inSITE2000, a
biennial on the border between Tijuana and San Diego, she expressed bemusement at the
choices of the artists, most of whom initiated community art projects:
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There was a similarity in the artists’ ways of working... It had to do with
positioning rather than pronouncements. In a surprising number of
projects, the artistic gesture was disappearance. Rather than disrupting
traffic flows, they joined them; rather than mapping new urban landscapes,
they blended in; rather than interrupting the syntax of everyday life, they
sequestered their art within it. (82)
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Buck-Morss finds this turn fascinating, rather than a threat to art. “Public art as harboring
strangers, an underground more than an avant-garde” (83). Artists as refugees, conomads, co-creators, ‘learning escape tactics”, “joining acts of resistance”. Artists as
followers rather than leaders, listeners rather than talkers, facilitators rather than creators.
Artists exploring the domain of human interactions and relationships. These are still
tentative, exploratory experiments, testing the grounds of democracy, freedom, utopia
and art.
Artists turning to communities to help, to heal or to fix people face clear moral
and ethical challenges. Do the community members share these goals? Who has decided
they need to be fixed? But these concerns are already outside of the realms of art and
democracy, since the end for the malleable human is pre-determined. Artists who turn to
communities with the intention of entering into a dialogue and creative process where
everyone can play cannot ignore the ideological, oppressive and affirmative functions of
community that we have already looked at. Communities are always imagined; the reality
lies in the relationships between people, not in an mythical ideal. Therefore, listening,
facilitating and following are not examples of artists’ self-sacrifices, rather they can
reveal an intention to engage in exchange, dialogue and human relationship. They are
signs of a post-modern humility and a curiosity about exploring new forms of utopia,
democracy and art. If the artist disappears in the process, it is not because she is gone.
The artist is interrogating and shaping along with the rest; sometimes her voice
dominates, sometimes other voices are loudest. In this way we can understand Suzanne
Lacy’s claim that the artwork itself is a metaphor for relationship; the work represents
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where the conversation ended, but is never complete. Relational or dialogic aesthetics
assume that the dialogue will then get picked up again through the audience interaction
with the artwork, which is “not the illusory presence of a condition that doesn’t yet exist,
but the provocative latency of a process which begins with the ‘transposition of aesthetic
experience into symbolic or communicative action’ “(Wellmer, quoting Jauss 21).
A provocative latency for democracy and utopia is inherent in both the dialogical
creative process and in the art work. Particularly in the collective practices influenced by
Freirian theory, there is an assumption that there is a dialogical function of both the
process and the artwork, that the creators and audience are subjects, co-intent on the task
of unveiling reality, knowing it critically and recreating knowledge. Wellmer helps us
understand the distinctiveness of this collective approach with his critique of the avantgarde’s ideas “that art ‘reveals’, ‘discloses’, ‘shows’ reality in an outstanding fashion”
(25). He argues that this epiphanic expectation for art is misleading for we can “only
recognize the essence (truth) which appears if we already know it” and “our experience
becomes experiencable”(25). Many collective art practices, like Freirian popular
education, begin with the lived experience of the participants in the creation process with
the intention of connecting with the experiences of the audience. Working from within
the unstable, messy realm of human experience, the work is meant to communicate
directly and to have an effect. This relational, democratic assumption is what shapes its
aesthetic; it is inherent in the point of reception with its audience, or rather the point of
reception is itself democratic. The role of the artist in these practices is no different than
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in other artistic practice: to ensure that the moment of reception is interesting,
provocative and aesthetically successful.
The purpose of Wellmer’s essay is to recuperate the communicative function of
art from Adorno’s seemingly closed paradigm, but his conclusions are relevant to
collective practice:
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Works that point to an expansion of the boundaries of communication by
virtue of their effect and not their being do not fulfill their enlightening,
cognitive function at the level of philosophical knowledge, but on that of
the subjects relationships to themselves and to the rest of the world...To
this extent, cognition means an end result which comes closer to being a
capability rather than abstract knowledge, something more like an ability
to speak, to judge, to feel or perceive than the result of cognitive effort.
(Wellmer 22)
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Collective practices are challenging the ontological ground of contemporary art
that Buck-Morss claimed is rendering art meaningless. This art is not happy to just be art,
it wants to have an effect, both on its creators and on its audience. Wellmer’s analysis of
aesthetic reception as a capability seems particularly appropriate to community art
practices. A dialogical approach assumes the “ability to speak, judge, feel or perceive” in
its process and in its effects.
However, community art’s tendency to focus on the purely expressive nature of
art reinforces the liberal idea that “any point of view proposed for agreement is simply
the expression of one’s particular disposition” (Pelletier 12). As such, all points of view
are equally valid and “liberal consensus is achieved through the manipulation of belief
and not through dialogue between intelligent individuals capable of formulating
judgments and convincing others (or not) solely through the validity of supporting
arguments”(12). Free play is necessary, but judgement is what shapes and informs
meaningful dialogue, democracy and art. Buck-Morss claims that art’s “liberation from
judgements of both taste and politics as the criterion for (good) art” precipitated its
trivialization. However she wrestles with the Kantian notion of judgement that would
seem to bring us back to aesthetic assumptions of universal validity, which she rejects.
She finally emphasizes that what we must recover is “the epistemological criterion of
judgement as the basis of artistic practice, and with it, the possibility of aesthetic
experience as critique”(67). This seems to be a particularly important distinction for
collective creation practices: too often the idea of free expression is used to legitimate all
points of view as equally valid in the creation process, and judgement itself is viewed as
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oppressive or inhibiting. Not only does this reinforce liberal ideas of power and
democracy, it can also inhibit the dialogic process by undermining the intelligent ability
of participants and audience to formulate judgements. Creating a space where individual
judgement, as well as free expression, are acknowledged and encouraged will not only
engender a more critical aesthetic experience and democratic discourse, it will probably
result in riskier, more provocative artworks.
Although community art practices are fraught with impossible contradictions and
contradictory possibilities, we’ve identified some major streams that are worth salvaging
and pursuing. A strong resistance to state and institutional instrumentalization and a
healthy suspicion, if not outright rejection, of the romantic notion of community seem to
be essential if these practices are not to become the charity work of the artworld,
apologists for the status quo or affirmations of dominative power. Collective art practices
that are committed to a ‘savage’democracy, dialogue, free play and individual judgement;
inspired by a spirit of utopia that is not intimidated by questions of morals and ethics and
that is grounded in the human element, can help to create spaces for meaningful political
and aesthetic judgement. If the projects are inspired by these notions of free play and
savage democracy, rather than bending themselves to the needs of an ideal of community
solidarity and consensus, the artworks will have a real possibility of challenging
perceptions, revealing oppression, and even, possibly, leading to radical political praxis.
CONCLUSION
147
A Global Counter-Culture
This paper set out to analyse the philosophical and theoretical assumptions
underlying community art practices, to better understand their potential to lead to
political praxis. Along the way, the Romantic tendencies of this work to idealize
community creation have revealed themselves to be counter-productive to any goal of
inspiring the subversive imagination or political activism. These same tendencies invite
the State to instrumentalize art for its own purposes, to affirm dominant power and to
distract from real social, economic or political oppression. For politically engaged artists,
these are some of the traps that automatically de-radicalize their work, further integrating
it into hegemonic cultural practices.
Our analysis of Kant and Schiller’s aesthetic theories have revealed the
sometimes contradictory relationship between the autonomy of art and morality, as well
as the rigid binaries between individual authenticity and a corrupted and corrupting
world. Rejecting this rigidity as essentially flawed in a dialogical worldview, we
nevertheless cannot reject the importance of the autonomy of art from any predetermined
purpose, simply because it is so easily recuperated by the State. From Schiller, we can
preserve the notion of the freedom of the play drive incorporated in a savage democracy;
from Kant we can retrieve the notion of judgement as the basis for artistic practice.
As we began with a look at community arts’ roots in the counter-culture of the
60's and 70s, it is interesting to return to its original definition: “an opposition to
148
hegemony by a utopianist idealism, which promoted an egalitarian ethic through the
advocacy of participative democracy on a localised level”. Of all the different directions
taken by counter-culture movements, community art practices seem the most true to this
original intent. After thirty years of experimentation, the first twenty struggling in the
wilderness, the past ten struggling with the moniker of community art and the pressures
of institutionalization, these practices have survived, adapted and have the potential to
grow into a laboratory for alternative sites of democracy, art and dialogue. These sites,
according to Buck-Morss, can be the seeds for what needs to become a new “grassroots,
globally extended, multiply articulated, radically cosmopolitan and critical counterculture”(73). After the events of 9/11, and the subsequent propaganda and lies about the
global ‘war on terror’, Buck-Morss approaches this project with the same sense of
urgency that motivates most cultural and political movements:
149
If the war is brought to the homeland, let us be the ones who wage it - not
with terrorist violence whereby the ends justify the means, but with divine
violence as Walter Benjamin, a Jew and Marxist conceived it; collective
political action that is lethal not to human beings, but to the humanly
created mythic powers that reign over them. (33)
150
Community art practice can situate democracy, utopia and art as possibilities that
are available to us within the spaces of our relations to each other, possibilities that search
out difference and are advanced through individual agency and judgement. If this work
can resist instrumentalization by the State, as well as its own romantic tendencies, it has
the potential to play a role in developing new cultural forms and inspiring collective
political action that, because it is no longer seduced and distracted by mythical utopias,
can help to dismantle the myths of affirmative culture and imagine other possibilities.
151
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