EDITORIAL
It was Piet Mondrian who, before World War II, shared
the longing for fundamental change with many colleagues on the left,
such as the Surrealists in France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and radical
socialists in various countries, not only in Europe. Like those on the
left, he embraced the vision of “the new man.” “When he thinks, he feels,
and when he feels he thinks”, he exclaimed. The deep split that characterized
modern man in societies characterized by production undertaken for the
sake of profit was deeper than many on the left thought it was. Alienation
had many facets. The divide between the emotional and the intellectual
sphere was all too obvious to Mondrian. Art, as he saw it and as he tried
to create it, was to assume a healing function, contributing to an awareness
of man’s “incomplete”, amputated existence. And it would, perhaps, contribute
to efforts to overcome the split. Making man whole again.
Today it is clear that all the attempts made so far to
create new, just societies as a prerequiste to the appearance of “the new
man” have failed in many respects; they failed to overcome hierarchy; they
failed to activate the direct and autonomous participation of the subaltern
classes in the “running” of society – in the debate of relevant social
issues and in the decision making process, that is, Everywhere, a new “elite”
representing (or at least claiming to represent) “the working class” took
over from the old, ousted ruling class. The focus, thereafter, was on production,
on fast-track industrialization. Direct producers found themselves exposed
to demands urging them “to make sacrifices” in order to achieve stepped-up
industrialization. At best, their material circumstances were somewhat
improved. When an arms race ensued, such gains were eaten up. New forms
of social security in the form of free health services, public education,
abolition of lock-outs and mass unemployment were overshadowed by the new
insecurity built into an internal repressive apparatus mobilized against
“counter-revolutionaries” or “dissidents” and by the threat of a new world
war and nuclear annihilation.
We know that consumerist desires, conformism, careerism,
the growth of a vast bureaucratic apparatus (“the modern state”), unchecked
productivism and ecologically devastative practices, unleashed by the industrial
sector, by “industralized” agriculture, by the transport sector,
by consumers and, thanks to irrational town planning, by builders, characterized
the “real socialism” of the 20th century as much as “free market” economies
in the West and the so-called Third World. Everywhere, “advances”
in development, modernization, etc. contributed to hypertrophic specialization,
increased “differentiation” or “social stratification” (in other words,
supposedly blind social dynamics in line with the “divide and rule”
politics of the hegemonial block), and the one-sided development of
human potentials. The vision once expressed by Marx that in a free society,
every individual could choose to be an engineer or natural scientist in
the morning, a poet or painter in the afternoon, and a sports-fisher in
the evening (to paraphrase him, in a slightly updated, more contemporary
way), came to nought, both in the modern world that embraced the “American
way of life” and the opposite, now largely defunct camp where the “new
elite” dreamed of “overtaking the U.S.”
Can it be said therefore that Mondrian had to teach something
to the Left? Just as Paul Klee who, marvelling at the invention of the
tape recorder, shouted: Look, “matter hears! And the time is not far away
when our hands will move through solid bodies as if they were made of air.”
Today, the most aware among us realize very well that matter “does not
forget”: the concrete and steel of suspension bridges “remembers” excessive
stress and accumulates such “memories” until the breaking point is reached.
And the human body, overexploited, “remembers”, as well. And so do animals,
so do vast overexploited farm areas, so do forests, so does the atmosphere,
and so do the oceans. Our dreams dry up when we are overexposed to the
sterile images and the buzz of the mass media. Our intelligence withers
when hypertrophous instrumentalization of such a potential reaches a certain
threshold. Does it make sense to point to Mondrian, the painter of interlocked
squares and rectangles, produced by using black, white and pure, monochrome
colors? I would say, we are still unable to ascertain the positive effects
of confronting such works of art. Is it true that they speak, at once,
to the emotions and the intellect? Is it true that they help create a balance
between the two, and more than a balance: a simultaneous, interrelated
activity of both faculties of the human mind? I can neither confirm it
fully nor can I rule it out, in any scientific, empirically proven sense.
But I can rely on my own experience: seeing his works of art, but also
that of other artists I care for, I sense that both thoughts and feelings
are triggered, and perhaps both at the same time. Confronting relevant
art, including that of Klee, of Mondrian and other seemingly “non-political”
artists, intuition as well as reflection are involved. And, as certain
thinkers (especially on the Left) have pointed out, practice (práxis)
helps develop and thus “heighten” or “increase” (in a qualitative way)
the human faculties involved in the process. The actual use of the human
hand, that is to say, manual práxis, in the course of history,
was exactly what brought about the evolution of the concretely differentiated
faculties tied to this organ – if not in vast, noticeable ways in
the concrete individual, then at least in a phylogenetic way in the human
species. But even in the concrete history of individuals, practice (práxis)
has effects on individual capacities, on abilities. Being confronted
with music early on, children tend to develop a greater musical sensibility.
Being confronted with visual art, with aesthetically sensitive (or “art”)
cinema, with theater performances, a child or an adult develops certain
capacities and sensitivities, as well. Or has a certain chance to do so.
I know that a sense of justice is not necessarily sharpened
in any direct, traceable way by a square done by Joseph Albers ( – to take
this example). But confronting paintings of Albers may increase our sensitivity
– certainly much more than a mediocre, or worse yet, a mass-produced “naturalist”
painting sold by an “art” hawker to the aesthetically unaware and “underdeveloped”
consumer. At the Black Mountain College where Albers taught, his paintings
may have influenced the sensitivity of students who became fine poets and
in some, perhaps even in quite a few cases, critical, socially aware poets
who protested against the war in Vietnam and the lot of the working class
in American society.
Today, in Belgium as elsewhere, artists keep working in
meaningful ways to create art that speaks to the heart and the intellect,
touching our emotions and fanning our thoughts. Some work in the
‘tradition’ of Mondrian, others in that of Magritte, still others take
up the thread spun by the COBRA artists, still others are in touch with
a post-war U.S. experience that gave birth to happenings and to installations
while simultaneously integrating a bit of the spirit of Surrealism, the
Surrealists’ enchantment with chance, the surprising, and their breath-taking
awareness of the beauty incorporated in the ordinary, the objets trouvés
found in unsuspected places, in everyday life.
Perhaps, to further a certain sensibility and to de-automatize
customary ways of seeing is already a lot. If other critics and among them,
truly progressive ones, clamor for more, for interventions by searching
artists that sharpen our consciousness and help us discover our desire
to change our life and the world we live in, hoping to make it better,
more just, more rational, more democratic, I cannot contradict them.
- Andreas Weiland
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