Bonjour Monsieur Abad or the rise of the social artist (1)
The role of the artist as citizen, and the socio-political nature of art and its institutions, have been key factors in defining how artists have worked since the inception of Modernism right through to contemporary practice. The question of artistic autonomy and of the individual versus the collective was an essential parameter forging the activites of the avant-gardes from the muralists of the Mexican Revolution, to the Russian Constructivists and the Bauhaus movement. Indeed, these issues are still of great importance to artists today, and in particular to an analysis of the historical context with which the practice of the Catalan artist Antoni Abad operates today.
To fully comprehend the question of social engagement versus artistic autonomy one must go back to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century Europe. With the liberation of the artist from aristocratic or religious patronage, a new freedom was enjoyed to develop an art for art’s sake. This modern freedom, however, depended upon the institutions and mechanisms that supported it, economically and politically.
In Britain William Morris perceived this development as a commercial trap set by the rising bourgeoisie and aimed at obtaining a niche market for artworks. Morris argued that art should be an integral part of daily life, tied to industry and craft, and available to all members of society instead of being a luxury product for the educated few. His objective was to unite the arts and crafts, and few decades later his ideas were inspirational to the Bauhaus movement. In France, Gustave Courbet became a key player in the upheavals of the Paris Commune. He believed that artists could activate real social change through their practice (which he insisted, however, should be free from political co-opting by government forces) and their position in society (he held various important political posts and advocated for total autonomy in art institutions, that is, artist run schools and academies)
During these early stages of the Modernist era, therefore, Morris and Courbet independently developed the notion that art is inextricably linked with its social context and that socio-political activism forms a legitimate part of an artist’s practice. Both found it necessary to break with the dominant modern art institutions, opening a terrain of conflict between the artist and the art’s infrastructure that was to become a central subject amongst the early 20th century avant-gardes (2).
Much could be mentioned regarding this schism in the practice of Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists and Surrealists yet such a discussion is, unfortunately, beyond the reach of this text. Of greater pertinence to the nature of today’s practice, and that of Antoni Abad in particular, is the 20th century’s post-war period, a time during which the question of artistic engagement with society rose strongly to the fore. In particular, during the 1960s and the early 1970s artists attempted to either transform institutional and political infrastructures, or exist outside them. In order to do so many took directly to the streets.
The extraordinary wide network of revolutionary European artists that briefly coalesced around 1960 into the Situationist International was a case in point. Their practice of hijacking commercial images (détournement) with their cartographies of urban drift (dérive) attempted to subvert the daily life of consumer societies. Around a similar time the Argentine collective Arde Tucumán, consisting of some 30 artists and sociologists, developed what is best described as a tactical media art practice. Working in alliance with the local workers’ syndicates, they protested against the economic military government crackdown in the Tucumán region. Street action was also at the heart of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded by Ronald G. Davis. They produced politicized theatre performances, as part of an emerging post-Beatnik counter-culture. Their free outdoor shows gave birth to the notion of “guerilla theatre”. Rejection of the current political system was, similarly, at the core of Josef Beuys’ ‘Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum’ (1971). Based in Cologne Beuys disseminated political information through a series of street actions and public demonstrations. From Europe to South America to the USA, therefore, artists sought to take their activities far from the reach of the artistic or governmental infrastructures in which they had lost faith (3)
The rise of technology lent an unexpected twist to the possibilities for a social arts practice described above. An interesting example is the rise of a video collective movement began to take shape in the USA in the 1970s even before video had been accepted by art institutions. A space for artistic action emerged, which was free from official infrastructures. Film makers, artists, activists and hardware hackers became involved in this new medium and developed a practice concerned as much with aesthetics as with information sharing. The possibilities of an accessible means of production so closely related to the domestic environment, via television, were also central. In parallel to the earliest development of the Internet, this movement and the New York based journal Radical Software, envisaged a non-hierarchical, two-way, participatory and educational communications system that could free itself from the corporate-state domination of the media. The ultimate ambition of the movement, in fact, was to replace the whole idea of the media with an open, direct, electronic mass-medium that served no pre-set agendas, and reflected a new society. (3)
A decade later, these utopian dreams were subsumed by a culture dominated by a booming economy. Yet, in the transition to the new millennium technology (the Internet and the new systems of telephony) has once again opened up a field of operation in which the modernist sphere of art cannot not be replicated, and which enables new modes of organization, knowledge production and distribution. Today a practice exists in which visual production, media activism, political theory, research and protest combine to give viable forms of counter-organisation. Whilst in 1960s artists disrupted and operated outside the approved boundaries of the art world in an effort to engage with society and politics, the situation today has been to some extent reversed. Practitioners of these new hybrid forms, have found that institutions of art can be a useful source of material support, and viceversa. Within this new moment of opportunity, many artists such as Antoni Abad, are working as social brokers, mediating between worlds.
In relation to this new development in the arts, Peter Burger’s ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’, 1972, stands today as a key theoretical approach to the problem of autonomy and the avant-garde (4). Burger argued for a critical yet autonomous practice. He wrote against the collapse of difference found in work ranging from the Constructivists, to the Situationists to that of Josef Beuys, by saying that as long as the bourgeois social order remains, artistic autonomy (art’s independence from social praxis) cannot be willed away. If art is totally indistinct from the praxis of life, Burger argued, it is totally absorbed by it and so cannot have the capacity to criticise. Yet, he insisted that art does has have a responsability to criticise society, not by engaging with its politics but standing aside from society and politics in order to highlight its flaws.
One could argue that the situation today is, perhaps, more Burger than Beuys, in the sense that artists don’t seem interested in heroic fights aimed, for example, at obtaining direct forms of political empowerment for the people. Instead artists today prefer to provide their public with new forums for expression; a demophony of sorts (5). This position permits art to maintain a certain aesthetic autonomy, by remaining separate from politics it can perhaps retain critical power. It is a position which is a little closer to Courbet’s willingness to commit politically whilst retaining his artistic independence, rather than Morris’ desire to root creation deep within society, within the logistics of industry and design.
This generation of artists practice is therefore social and aesthetic but not directly political. Mostly they tend to engage with and facilitate discussion with a wider audience than that normally found in the art world context. The autonomy they attempt to redress is not political but social, they intend to bypass hardened political structures of existing democracies, to bypass the question of power and to deal with what Lars Bang Larssen has described as the ‘aesthetic of the social’:
“One could rather call it a cultural struggle, where artists integrate the art institution’s modes of operation into an expanded artistic praxis, and attempts to prevent the art works mere implosion in the art world. Here, art, work and everyday life supplement one another in a determined manner; and the presence of the aesthetic in the social can be understood as a qualitative prerequisite for reconsidering circumstances and conditions, in the real and imagined space which is our historical reality” (6)
It seems as if the objective is no longer to implement, literally, an ideological line such as was the case of the Russian Constructivists, the Futurists and many other Manifesto writers of the Modern. Today there is a concern regarding how to retain the autonomy of art (the critical distance of the aesthetic) whilst simultaneously engage with their audience. From this perspective it seems Antoni Abad, and other artists of his generation, are interested in devising methodologies to transform the problem rather than repeating the avant-garde gestures of the past.
His is a generation of artists concerned with creating productive and reciprocal relationships with their collaborators, which at times go some way to undermine the status of the artist as individual creator. More importantly their practice attempts to overcome the active / passive opposition between artist and audience, demanding active participation. Artists such as Antoni Abad are not however attempting to efface the line between artist and audience, but assume instead the role of ‘catalysts’. In so doing they set in motion a social forum or discussion arena which evolves with its engagement with society. This is a time in which many emerging politically engaged cultural groups, artists included, are increasingly focused on the ideals of independence from the existing state or market related structures. They choose their tools pragmatically, and build networks across disciplinary boundaries. The central question in the context of these kind of practices, and the work of Antoni Abad in particular, is no longer one of breaking with the institution of art, but how to constitute an active alternative to it today.
Katya García-Antón
zexe.net:un cartographie numérique du monde
Published by the Centre d'Art Comtemporain de Genève and Seacex, Geneva 2008
(1) The title of this essay is borrowed from Gustave Courbet’s painting Le rencontre or ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’, oil on canvas, 129x149 cm, 1854
(2) The first part of this essay is much indebted to Will Bradley, “Introduction”, Art and Social Change. A Critical Reader, Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds.), Tate publishing in association with Afterall, London 2007.
(3) Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1992, p.50
(4) Emma Mahony, ‘On Democracy and Demophony’, Democracy!, Royal College of Art, London 2000, p40
(5) Lars Bang Larsen, ‘Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down, Sometimes I’m Underground: Making Social Aesthetics operative’, Like Virginity Once Lost: Five Views on Nordic Art Now, Daniel Birnbaum and John Peter Nilsson (eds.), Propexus, Sweden 1999, p59