H O M E E X H I B I T I O N S G A L L E R Y M A N I F E S T O A R T  T H E O R Y L I N K S

ARMANDO ALEMDAR - A DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART ART & SOCIETY The dialectics of art history are not necessarily seen in terms of contradictions within phenomena and social movements themselves, but in terms of a struggle between two relatively timeless conceptualisations of art, reality and idealism. Marx said that in communist society there would be no painters but everybody could paint. Hegel insinuates that the history of development of art would cease with the perfection of state. In a communist society art would integrate and become life. This does not mean that artistic creativity would die out but on the contrary, the human mind would yet be able to develop its capacity in a different form. Yes, anybody would be able to paint if they wanted so, but also if they could. It is difficult for us to imagine that prehistoric man was conscious of the aesthetic value of his cave paintings nor should we suppose that it was his need to create a world after his own hearts desire - to create something from nothing - that spawned what we now call to as art. Recent archaeological theory suggests that these cave paintings had a very practical purpose indeed because they were an indispensable magical tool for the hunt and it follows an acknowledgement of spiritual life. For almost 30 000 years man's creative will has been linked to his spiritual consciousness. We have had to wait until 1873, a decade later than Clement Greenberg would have it, for Manet’s Gare Saint Lazare, (plate II) a picture that discards its links with the past and without any other purpose then its own existence - art for art's sake. From the present art historical vantage point there is a tendency to separate man's creative impulses from their source of inspiration and in so doing consider the cave paintings in the Ardeche valley and Damien Hirst's Away From the Flock in a crude, mechanical context, as if the only purpose of a work of art was to record the material conditions in which it was created. Conversely if we assume a Hegelian perspective (prior to the industrial revolution) with the spiritual dimension of a work of art our primary consideration, the post-modern artist shows us the current state of spiritual values and social mores, in some instances, indirectly and unintentionally. Janus-like our Marxist head will tell us that a post-modern work of art reflects our daily life in the same way that cave man's paintings reflected his. Our Hegelian head will reason that a post-modern work of art is the mirror of late capitalist spirituality alienated from the Idea. Both heads would concur that art is not merely the mirror but also one of the necessary components of reality essential to the dialectical processes of that reality. In the first years of the Soviet Union, an uncorrupted Marxism recognised the powerful allure of art’s potential to change reality. "First of all, art is the cognition of life...Art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings'. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality."32 Conversely Hegel says that painting “can be seen in two ways, as visual appearance and as a representation of something other than itself, but both are ultimately understandable as manifestations of the Spirit - painting as representation and as painting is pure appearance of the spirit contemplating itself.” 33 What determines the content of the work of art is subjectivity aware of itself. Hegel calls for a work of art that presses on “to the extreme of pure appearance, i.e. to the point where the content does not matter and where the chief interest is the artistic creation of that appearance.”34 For Hegel the Ideal treads into the sensuous but remains self - contained. For example the nude is indifferent to the spectators gaze, male or female. Its symbolic gestures are emblematic rather then psychological. Its step into the sensuality of its own time does not disturb the autonomy of the absolute idealism. The Ideal is genuinely beautiful. To enliven our argument let us look at Eduard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863 Louvre, Paris) (plate III) with the same detachment that the female nude in Manet’s picture looks at us. In fact, we remember that she is a sex change, based on a male nude that we know through Marcantonio Raimondi’s famous engraving after a lost cartoon by Raphael (circa 1525-1530). (plate IV) Clearly she is genuinely beautiful, perhaps the latest embodiment of Hegel’s concept of the Ideal, a fact that her two clothed male companions (also nude, one a river god in Raphael’s design) acknowledge by their indifference to her erotic possibilities. Her confident mein and considered glance alert us to her 16th century origins. This homage to Raphael cannot be the dawning of modernist art but a gauche tentative link to all the works of art that preceded it, which were based on the nude. We will return to the subject of the predominance of the nude as the humanisation of the Ideal in the chapter Et in Arcadia Ego and discover a picture with a dominant new millennium nude based on one of the reclining figures from the east pediment of the Parthenon, the so-called Ilissus - unknown to Michelangelo and Raphael - that re-establishes links with Hegelian principles. However a Marxist art historian like Plekhanov thought that there was no place left for the Idea: “All ideologies have one common root: the psychology of a given era”. This maxim reminds us that for a Marxist art historian art primarily reflects the material conditions in which it was created.35 "Works of Leonardo were conditioned by the social milieu of Florence, and later those of Titian by the altogether different development of Venice. Raphael, like any other artist, was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and finally by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality maintained relations. Whether... (he AB)... is able to develop his talent depends entirely upon demand, which in turn depends upon the division of labour and the consequent educational conditions of men".36 Lifshitz's observation evinces a feisty naiveté about the giants of renaissance art. To equate art with ideology does not present the full circle of dialectics in art history. A work of art has the ability to transcend the circumstances of the material conditions in which it is created by subjectively expressing its objective potential albeit consciously or unconsciously. Relating the laws of Material Dialectics to art Doy speculates that for Marx paintings are not merely symbols but have an “ontological status of their own, and their being made in a 'realistic' way should not alter this fact”.37 This status is unchangeable, whether the works of art are realistic or abstract. Doy should have understood that only realistic art could be acceptable to Marx 38 because in Marx's scheme of things an abstract picture such as Vasiliy Kandinsky's 1913 Study for a Composition VII, Staditche Galerie, Munich, (plate V) would have been inconceivable. Such a pragmatical philosopher would have been drawn to the type of pictures that illustrate literally his universal worker, in Soviet realistic pictures. (plate VI) Doy attempts to support her argument by pointing out that although painting has a social status, it does not need to represent material life. "Dialectical Materialism sees the relationship of the concrete and the abstract as essential, and real, concrete material reality needs to be apprehended also by abstract thought and method, so it is not really the case that Marxist, as materialists and also as dialecticians, would automatically be realists...Nor would they necessarily be opposed to forms of art which abstract from material reality in dialectical relationship to concrete phenomena since this is what the dialectical method is supposed to do anyway..."39 In the chapter Concretising the Abstract Doy notes what she considers the unnecessary tendency by Marxists to avoid the existence of non-figurative abstract art. Discussing Malevich she points out that it is not necessary to move away from Marxism in order to understand abstract art and that it is possible to study philosophical texts (Malevich being interested in philosophy) by a historical method. She argues that just as one should not over-philosophise abstract paintings like Malevich's Black Suprematist Square, (plate VII) one should not search for political meanings in images where they cannot be found. In Representation and Concsiousness Doy questions the relationship of the individual and class to visual culture. Acknowledging the complexity of the question she makes the salient observation that not all images are about class, nor can they change in any way the viewer's awareness of class structure, irregardless of the artist's intentions. In fact, without exception artists have tended to elevate their subjects to the highest status. Carravaggio's depiction of a drowned prostitute as the Virgin Mary in the Louvre masterpiece The Death of the Virgin is a useful example. (plate VIII) Doy thinks that while some images can in some way effect one’s consciousness and aesthetic sense, this does not presuppose that a moved spectator would become class-conscious: "Representations of workers do not equal class consciousness either on the part of the producer or the spectator. Given that one's place in the economic order does not automatically determine class consciousness, then how might such consciousness be represented, or offered as a reading possibility for the viewer of a given image? How do artists become conscious of what they want to visualise and produce as imagery and can we take the finished image as a part of the artist's experience?"40 Doy's obtuse suggestion ignores the almost automatic idealising process we have mentioned above. We could take the finished image as part of the artists personal experience but, at the same time not necessarily reduce its meaning to only the artist's experience. All kind of factors could influence our perception of a work of art. This means that a dialogue, indefeasible by time, is established between the spectator’s inner life and experience and the work of art, a dialogue that becomes its essence and meaning. The dialectical process is a dialogue. We should also bear in mind that while the artist is at work, elements of chance and unconscious surface. For a work of art to alter our consciousness it must draw us into a lively dialogue that could well lead to new insights. At the very least if these insights only produce a class-consciousness in the Marxist sense, certain constricting circumstances must have prevailed for such a limited vision. While Doy searches for her meaning, another spectator, more receptive on other levels may discover a diversity of meanings in the work of art and the animated dialogue thus established becomes both the object and the subject. Gen Doy also addresses other issues that are considered Marxism's shortcomings: "...if you have a separate black or gay or woman's revolutionary party you will not be able to destroy capitalism, because proletarians must take the lead in this. They may be lesbian, black or Jewish proletarians, but proletarians they must be."41 Admitting that there is not a lot of Marx's writings on gender or race - or art for that matter - Doy feels the need to remind us that women also are part of the working class and that Marxists do not have “monolithic notion of politics of gender but attempt to see the contradictions within and between such notions”.42 She argues that it is necessary to address those problems from a position that will encompass the specific historical and economical circumstances which give rise to class as well as gender, or race issues. However in my opinion Doy's attitude towards idealism is short-sighted. Idealism or even philosophy are very much a part of this world. They are the product and therefore the affirmation of their time. Philosophical ideas should be applied in socio-historical manner, not in a merely abstract, a-historical sense. Succinctly, Peter Suchin in Occupational Hazard (1998), points out that art education has not succeeded in integrating the artist into society. The 19th Century image of the artist as an esoteric eccentric outsider prevails in British and American culture. In the art schools today contempt for art theory exists. It is perceived as a restraint for self - expression rather then a civilising discipline. Suchin makes the salient observation that democratisation of higher education has lowered standards of the inborn talent and abilities of applicants interviewed for degree courses. Indeed, technical skills are not promoted any longer in art schools. Matthew Collins notes: "It's true that life drawing in art school is more or less out now. You could easily go through your art school years today without doing one. But it's not true that you would actually be encouraged to never do one, or punished if you secretly did one." 43 This could be a cause for alarm for the art student that just paints. A picture may not appeal to us immediately and is not a novelty. Have we all forgotten what a painting is? Have we forgotten that a picture is to be contemplated - that aesthetic contemplation demands time? Could we have been coerced into forgetting that a work of art should be outside of time and that a picture's dialogue with the spectator continues through the centuries? If this is not so then how is it that an old Greek work of art can still be aesthetically enjoyed today - in material conditions very different from the ones in which it was created. Suchin calls for art organisations curatorialy well informed with an “acute awareness of the demands involved in presenting work within the public domain.” He concludes that Brit art's hyped sense of novelty and originality is the result of the lack of critical distance between the orthodox and alternative theories. The current atmosphere discourages analyses, or as S. Craddock puts it :44 “To have an 'overview' is to 'judge', and judgement similarly carries the inadvisable arrogance of common denominator. Post-history drags judgement into the experience of individual encounter, and away from intangibility.” She points - and rightly so - to the superficial attempts by New British Artists to make art socially or politically concerned. “To “deal with" or "in" subjects is not necessarily political at all.” Cradock demands to know if the attitude summed up by the hackneyed words mundane and banal needs to be repeated so often. Today there is not enough discernment among art historians and academics because the influence of technology and science and the global advance of capitalism in the last decade has produced a bureaucratic, self - seeking culture of mass consumption which produces the the- emperors-new-clothes type of so called artists that lay bricks, erect tents, leave to posterity their soiled unmade beds and pickled sheep. As Damien Hirst declares himself: 'If you can 'do' the art world at 32, it means that there is something wrong with the art world, not that you are a genius'.45 The success of artist - led organisations does not mean for Suchin an artistic success and overall he deplores the fact that British Art is engulfed in a cloud of exaggerated importance. For him, future critics will describe contemporary British art as “a frenzy over an immense spectacle, a vast but transient distraction.” As for museums, their changing role could be construed as a progressive step, because overtly it seeks to be educational. In the New Tate Modern the galleries are themed in an effort to make the art works more comprehensible. While the danger of presenting a curatorial stew prevails, this attempt to make New British Art more accessible to a bewildered public unsympathetic to such elite art works could achieve another desired side effect, tax relief for multinational companies. This cultural opportunism also elevates corporate entities on the New British art pedestal, a consummate media illusion. All attempts to abolish past art for the creation of something new are doomed. Freedom in expression comes out of a historical process. However if the attempt to fast-forward the historical dialectical processes is doomed, it is also necessary. Pure action is not consciously aware of itself. Do we embrace every aspect of a dialectical process and is that making us a merely contemplative, indifferent entities? For Marx art is not in contradiction with the undeveloped social level from which it sprang.46 According to Vygotsky, this does not mean that social conditions do not completely determine the character and the effect of a work of art; it merely shows that they determine it indirectly. The feelings and thoughts aroused by a work of art are socially conditioned. BACK   FORWARD