Homo Erectus Fabricans
HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF ARTISTS
Polite society entertainments
Avant-gardes and individualism
Art is a game of classes, castes,
clans...
Cultivate one's cultural garden
Community of creators
Artistic novations will be social
Enough cult-culture
Alive art has no conservatory function
Art is not formative by it self
The emergence of new creative process
The vertical daydreaming
The artist as a producer in social
relationship acting
Debates on art have to enter in a larger perspective than those proposed
by activities of art themselves. Debates on art must essentially focuse
on the evolution of our hominization process.
Art contributes to make evolve ideas that we construct to enrich or impoverish
the concept of humanity.
Creators of art are trapped in their period
and the organization of the society of their time. To create, demands to
them the conscience of their responsibility in a human future. Today, whatever
are their initial intentions and their discipline of application artists
are enclosed in entertainers roles , clowns, trinkets makers whose our social
system based on spectacular events need to relaunch the distribution of
"new" intellectual objects confused with material objects whose
consumption is itself implicitly confused with a blurred progress notion.
It is the basical logical of the renewal of referentials models.
The so-called subversive avant-garde audacity are only formal appearances.
They are polite society entertainments.
Artifices are tolerated as far as their canonical codes, their normative
references can be usefull to show off modernity adventurers the best advantage,
that feed their shivers of intelligence without making themruning any risk.
An art-collector can admire in his office without constricting the art work
of his choice while taking industrial decisions the most abject. The only
presence of this work will confirm it, even so, in a status of an enlighned
man.
A good exemple was shown few years ago in the Museum of modern and contemporary
art, in Nice city, south of France.
They organized a big exhibition to present collections of three local modern
art private collecters.
Good...
One of them is the owner and manager of a big well know local company specialised
in civil engeneering. For years and years his society work on all buiding
sites, we can see its logo every where. He has, with others, actively contribute
to transform this pretty part of France in quite a huge very ugly concrete
block. With so much work, this man became rich.
Good, nothing to say about it...
And he bought some modern art works.
Bien, bien, up to there, nothing wrong.
But in the exhibition catalogue preface this man is presented as a great
lover of contemporary art, living artists and a very wise man in the choice
of the quality of the works in his collection.
Then there is problem.
If he is so, why, all around in all the places where his company worked
and made money, there is no beautiful bridge, no particular aesthetic highway
road embankment, nowhere a sign of art cleverness and so on. In contrary
we can easily make a very long, long list of ghastly constructions which
make ugly many of our daily places.
This lover of art made these awfull constructions.
So that is the real problem, a modern and contemporary art museum is not
the modernity of contemporary life. We do not go to museum every day. But
every day we go on or under bridges, ride along roads and so on.
This lover of art made nothing there.
While integrating contributions of avant-gardes,
we can no more longer consider openings of the thought as being in itself
factors of progress for the only reason that they are projections of the
free exercise of the mind.
Individualistic creator innovations of modern art and western avant-gardes
have developed jointly to the conquering liberalism.
They are its expression.
They have served to reveal audacity of the free enterprise, and therefore
they have contributed to open inside a same culture, the western culture,
spaces of thought of an unknown diversity until now, otherwise in the historical
diversity of all cultures.
But contents and speeches that dominate the modern and contemporary art,
fruits learned from a selective evolution, while widening the fields of
prospectives mind and by enriching our sensitivities, confirm foundations
of our social system and maintain its invariably reproduction.
We have sufficiently passing on the art history of this century, so fertile
in formal innovations, to understand how the apparent artistic transgressions
when they are no more than esthetes games emphasize cultural voids of a
civilization whith trends excessively too materialistic and how they can
generate the social fractures despite generous and universal speeches that
come with them, exactly as the arrogant economic liberalism, extreme vision
of enterprising activity without other intention that its self reproduction,
emphasizes social fractures.
Art is not as universal as protagonists of consensual
idealism please to proclaim.
Art is a game of classes, castes, clans that rival in the conquest of territories
of domination.
If we want to progress more on the way of our humanity we have to invent
new social relationships for creation.
The action of thought takes its whole sense while its diffuse in all the
society to mix to daily life.
The future real artistic novations will not be aesthetic but social, they
will come from a creation integrated in the day to day life.
The length of work reduction, as that the
lengthening of the duration of life, will liberate creatives capacities
of millions women and men that will find in plastic arts an expression area
of their experiences and their personal visions.
Each will cultivate his cultural garden.
These new creators are not only going to feed the merchant circuits that
will exploit as much easily this vein of massive artistic trinklets production
that their producers will not be very demanding on conditions of collaboration,
since that will be to them second or ultimate activity, moreover an enhancing
one. Merchants will know to pull out from this context a new source of speculatives
profits. This has already begun on the American market. The small world
of experts in contemporary art is going to discover fo us a genious creator
behind each streets corners, just the time of an exhibition in a gallery
or a contemporary art center up to date. Then they will switch to the following,
subject and servant to other art factual events...
This large creative activity, therefore, is not going to have as only effect
an overproduction of trivial art objects as supports of merchant process,
it is going to generate a new relationship to art.
Through an extent practical of action to create, lived and thought, the
"Whole is art" of Duchamp goes to meet the "Whole is holy"
of Aristote.
Art gist, that are perception, thought and intention in materialized movement,
is going to internalize in larges stratums of our society.
The status of artist is going therefore to be rapidly upset.
The comprehension of the role of the creator is going to be modified and
to rejoin others evolution of consciences and social practice.
We are going to discover the community of
creators from all disciplines to make their actions better converge : Some
deciders (leaders, firms managers, political men, academics) that have already
observed that their social function reaches the roots of the classical idea
of the creator considered as an individual capable of synthesize sparse
data apparently incoherent, to connect them and to transform them into relevant
acts for all of us, efficient because coherent, are logically going to perceive
better the idea of usefulness to integrate an artist in their decision process.
No as the optional "flirtatiousness of a supplement of soul "
as told André Malraux, but as an indispensable operative function
to all decision, pragmatic role of the antique" poetical thought ".
Henceforth artistic novations no longer can be only of an order formally
aesthetic, because the aesthetical aesthetics has no more qualities for
our human evolution that the politician politicy or the technocratical technique.
Artistic novations will be social because they
will derive from social relations changes, and in return they will contribute
to there changes. That will have to be applied to all attitudes that commit
our future. Id est almost everywhere. Creators are going to refresh themselves
in the organization of new community social relationships space, to refound
their creativity by connecting it to the life of all days and by organizing
it no more according only to their individual impulse, but in connecting
their creative mobility to those of others individuals. News relationships
are to be invented into the heart of the city as in the private life, out
of purely speculative attitudes, so intellectual that financial, to which
art contemporary has been engaged. New social initiatives are going to emerge
to conceive collectively and to produce locally significant objects of art
to show about the desires to better live, an art to integrate a secular
spirituality in the daily life, and a capacity to mean founding real ideas
to better be.
And that, that is not only "déco" art to make pretty, it
is all, absolutely all of our life which is concerned.
And that, is sacred.
Specifically that implies the deciders are no longer in their great majority
the deficient of a culture considered by them as the cherry on the cake,
having an opinion on all without having the ethics to deepen the knowledge
of it, alienating their options to advice of experts. That implies in apart
the fact that artists, ceasing to be sales representant of the narcissist
individualism, discover that their deep individuality accomplishes all its
potential wealth in a creative sociability, mixed with the daily life, creation
themes and created objects confused.
Enough cult-culture!
In France institutions have strengthened a cultural centralization hidden
behind a geographical decentralization:
"We assist currently to the proliferation of the expertise and the
recourse to experts as a mode phenomenon. Political superintendents are
surrounded with experts, they leave up to competence of specialists. But
concerning the contemporary art, the notion of expertise is difficult to
control...It is not forbidden to question the training and the certification
of specialists of the contemporary art... Raymonde Moulin. L'art
aujourd'hui (Art to day).1993.
These purposes confirm observations made on the terrain by artists, by all
artists, whatever are their commitments. The relationship between the contemporary
artistic thought of these 20 last years and the population of every days
undergos ominous effects of various standardizing strategies exerted by
experts of the contemporary art, or so-called. These organizers of museum,
gallery, municipal center of contemporary art, these artistic counselors
of DRAC or FRAC ( Which are french national and regional
art organisms in charge of the financials resources allocated to culture
by the nation,which they share out with the most opaqueness ) show by the nature of their programming, by sameness
of their speeches and their behaviors that they are more preoccupied with
their personal recognition in the tribe of the art, perhaps their posterity,
that the real coherence of their action with the social reality of the city
or the region that employs them.
The cult-culture worsens tares of our society, it occults remedies.
It is necessary now to admit with lucidity that the elected members, the
private partners, artists and organizers, salaried employees or unpaids,
of the artistic institution that are concerned to produce spectacular events
in cities, apply nothing else that the problematical of media promotion
In this case programs improvements of a local collectivity are only the
pretext to the development of a notoriety strategy, which can have a promotional
interest for the one and others, perhaps some cultural beneficial and economic
fallouts for the locality.
But by the way these systematic practices determine creative choice, through
the selection of artists that submit to these objectives, they envelop questions
of the presence of the art in the life and in the city of cloudy considerations
that have nothing to do with reasons in order citizens would have locally
interest to live harmoniously together.
It is necessary to reintegrate art in a processof society linked locally
to the variety of activities of the daily life.
The artistic poetics have a real plug on the real, they are concrete spiritual
acts that can act on material environment and the manner how it is perceived.
But while, therefore what can think elected of the Republic who work, reflect
and take their decisions in Louis XV or Napoléon furniture?.
Justly, what reflect-they?
Art especially if itis not consensual, contributed
grandly, when it is integrated in the daily life, to our capacity to evolve,
id est to be at the best, so little when it is in the museum...
Alive art has no conservatory function but dynamically renewed functions
to mean the human spiritual multiplicity, which is a constitutive dimension
of the happiness, which is basically our reason to be. This contradictory
spirituality that requests our intelligence, that fertiles and regenerates
it, is unfortunately transformed into relic, inserted in closed places of
the cult of the culture by priests and cultural institutional gurus.
All deciders, all political categories confused, responsible for the lack
of art in the daily life are guilty of this human resources waste.
They must cease to tell us the stupidities on the fatal economic constraints
fluctuations that would prevent them to assume totally the totality of their
responsabilties face to the incoming future of the civilization to the construction
of which they are supposed to participate.
All the deciders currently having political power since and after the2nd
world war could make otherwise in France, it is urgent they admit their
defaults, to be open to new generating attitudes of human progress and happiness.
If they do not make it spontaneously, and it is allowed to doubt about it,
it is urgent that we tell them.
We, this are peoples of all days beside artists if the media want to contribute
to it, in a way those willingness people.
Art is not formative by it self, on the contrary
it can contribute to the society decay.
Contemporary art exhibitions reply to a necessary distribution of the knowledge.
But this is not a formative school that would learn to read, write and count.
Laïc school, public and
obligatory expresses a project of society, it inculcates the necessary ideology
for the reproduction of the republican system, we would like that the deciders
that decide sat in the LouisXV style seats give it really the ways to make
it, and it transmits to all (or almost) chances, indeed unequal, to access
to the mastery of knowledge and by this ways to the methods of intervention
on the around social reality . Laïc school, public and obligatory distributes
therefore a knowledge inevitably generating progress, because critic.
Contemporary art demonstration places are not neither laïc, nor public
neither obligatory: They are contemplative. And it is very well so, it is
even necessary that they remain so.
But this is unsufficient to our evolution.
These places be claim dedicated to a universal thought, if we believes some
of their zealous commentators. But analysis of contents shows that they
transmit nothing else that an ambient factual and superficial ideology,
very often devoided of project of society whose clearness of terms could
have emancipate a debate on ideas, always accompanied and justified by a
mystical speech on the creator act, declining to the infinity the pyramydal
vision of the world to the summit of which situates god, or monarch, or
artist.
The citizens visitors come in to see again and again the incarnate Spirit
in the Work, then they exit the cultural sanctuary, as if they exited temples
or palace, to live their inescapable dispossessions day to day renewed.
Spent of money and energy efforts to displace the pilgrins of the cult-culture
is like singing a mass of submission to the fate of the social inequalities.
It is necessary to invent new relationships to the creation on the fundamental
existent cultural structures, by making them evolve. It is necessary to
develop creative capacities of everyone, to promote the artistic function
in the daily life and to favor creation process integrated in necessities
of the city where the artist would play a spaces of thought developer role
in collaboration with peoples of everydays.
It is so much possible to day with the help of new communication technologies
and thinking with computers methods.
To day, it is vain and an immeasurable pretension
to accumulate supposed objects" of art " for the only satisfaction
of aesthetics ways of thinking and the bargains dynamics. This is not so
purchase of art work that the institution has to promote that the emergence
of new creative process. That means to tell specifically that mayors, elected
and their technicians, architects, entrepreneurs and their engineers that
are the responsible deciders every time they take a decision having an impact
on environment or the multiplication of objects, have to make the effort
of a qualitative advanced that distances them from the monkey by exceeding
the purely fonctionnalist and mécanist idea of their action to be
preoccupied with the senses and the meanings of the role of this action.
Each time they act to the only reason of sacrosanct pragmatic and economic
realism criteria they behave some barbarous that ignore millennia evolution
of our culture and our thinks.
They act as médiocrats of the collectivity and they are the real
generators of decadence, not the claimed loss of moral values that remains
to be demonstrated.
Examples:
It does not suffice that the blossom is abundant in the multitude roundabouts
that were fitted in France these last twenty years. Rare are the builders
that have recognize in these privileged places the imperative necessity
to mean a mark of the city. This proliferation of insignificant sites is
certainly the most evident mark of cultural stupidity, despite the pretentious
speech, and weakness of the deciders in face to their civilization responsibilities.
The argument of the lesser cost is a mask, because it is a lie. The artistic
contribution is inexpensive, when we bother to avoid the star-system, every
one know it very well long ago.
The same is for any construction (piles and coats of bridge, grooves, rims
of sidewalks, benches and bogs...etc) whose materialization it is limited
to the only functional aspect of its design and its textures dries regenerating
sources of our cultural references. Similarly the production of industrial
objects whose the basic idea is now realized on the same 3D projection software
that are conceived as well to be adapted to fonctionnalist rules of productic
or marketing multiplies also contemporary examples of poorest banalization.
The result is that sport shoes, hair-dryers, sailboats or automobiles resemble
each-other because their forms are modelised with tensions of relation into
the volume/ matter/ function processed trough similar conceptual softs and
that they mean indifferently the same relations formal references to speed,
to power, to comfort (openings, closing downs, bonds, curves, anecdotes..etc).
As if there was only that!!!
Whole is henceforth built on the same diagrams, supposed consensual, when
it is the merchant aspect which dominate the choices.
We are far away from the "culture of materials" invented by Tatline
in1910/ 1920, that would teach us that each functional object must incarnate
a culture of usage by materials effects which shape it in form! And nevertheless
all technologies of creation and communication assisted with computer could
give us the possibility to diversify the systems of representation, instead
of standardizing them, often without overcost.
In all areas we have therefore to reinvent new
conceptual process, by appointing them new finalities. The recent infatuation
for the philosophy confirms this need, because it demonstrates a research
of global conceptual abilities development.
In this evolution of mentalities, that is a tremendous signs of good health,
the role of the artist mastering computer technologies of communication
and creation while mastering traditional techniques of materials will be
very important.
News technologies because they are necessary for the creative process share
in which the artist will be no longer alone at the middle; the diversity
of mastery of material techniques, because they are the key of creative
and adaptable competences. Deciders honestly turned to the future will need
new partners capable to integrate a spiritual process in a pragmatic project,
so on the point of view of social relation in the production that on the
formal definition of the projected object.
We need dreamers of projects able to shape them in form.
The daydreaming is this human capacity to exceed real space immediately
evident while keeping to mind the experience of material contigencies. Galilée
discovers lunar craters by displacing in its daydreaming of the space his
architect experience who knew how to paint inside and outside shades of
any volume with water colors. Inform stains on the Moon that he reproduced
as he saw them through its primitive telescope were nothing else that the
blurred drawing of the projection of the intern cylinder wall on its base.
His interpretation is the wonderful fruit of a poetical daydreaming based
on the real, not the only knowledge of a scientist.
This vertical daydreaming , because it pulls off a man to the high, as Bachelard
described so well , was gummed during centuries by dominant decisional-making
attitudes founded on the humiliation of the majority maintain pleasures
of a minority. The daydreaming is active, made with perplexity, it is recognized
since antiquity as necessary for all pragmatic and concrete thought. The
learned founders of the western modern science have too rarely admitted
to recognize its presence as a determining partner in their discoveries,
too preoccupied they were to defend the reliability of scientific criteria
against mystical obscurantism of religions.
The daydreaming becomes again a necessary basis for our evolution. The artistic
function can, while integrating them, exceed up to date conjonctural sociological,
technical, economical and strategical data of a project to entail them in
a cosmic dimension, in this senses it concerns "whole the world"
as told Kant, id est an alchemy of signs and marks that can alone give deep
senses to things because it puts in connivance the history of cultures with
immediate preoccupations and with future projections.
That is the artist work, since the night of times, the episode, said as "contemporary"of the marginal and individualist artist confined in an illusory quest universality is nothing but a very short episode of our total history. It is again necessary that the artist strips his egocentric preoccupations whose he has been so heavily loaded all along this century, again it is necessary that he develops his multiple creative capacities by liberating himself from the myth of identity founded on unicity, such that he has been convinced by the monotheist ideology.
To the moment where will be multiplied the number of creators by leisures and by happiness of expansion of their self being who will express their individuality in the plastic creations whose their many practice will generate by masss effect a cosmopolitan cultural development without precedent then will be developped the necessity of a professional artistic creation integrated to all decisional phases of our society.
The artist will be no longer the only organizer of plastic objects, but also a producer in social relationship scene acting amongst other creators in community of thought on projects integrated in a society whose future will be recognized as really and specifically determined by the choice of senses and the symbolic formal attached to each object.
Then we will be allowed to speak about recovered creation in the city, and about modernity, exceeding the elitist sectarism and the populist demagoguery it will bring alternative proposals as much rich of senses for all and shared values that they will not be consensuals.
But for that this dynamics engage we would need necessarily firms managers, political men, deciders decided to open their decision process to the participation of atypical artists to reflect and to project actions beside them, that would be more useful and less expensive that those any kind experts with which they are inefficaciently encumbered.
I know that, here and there, in France and overseas artists share these considerations, the less in this general principle of a greatest sociability of art. A lot are isolated because of the holders of the gloss and the exegis on art and on the role of the artist who are holding on their passed convictions of centralizing authorities.
It is unavoidable that the copulation between deciders and dreamers will be, the earlierst the better for all of us. Some artists are ready, each according to his manner, each in his corner.We wait that some deciders make us signs that would show their examplary courage.
We are "Homo erectus fabricans", to construct our evolution we erect our thought while we develop our ability to shape what we think.
Jean Pierre Lihou. Plastician.
I wrote first this text in 1985, and modified it for this
site in September 1999.
Other developpments will come later to enrich it.
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