Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art, Fillipo Tomasso Marinetti

(English translation)

Originally published June 23, 1931 in Gazzetta del Popolo.

© Translation generously provided by Chris Adams (Estorick Collection) and was published in the exhibition catalog for Piety and Pragmatism (26 September - 23 December 2006, Estorick Collection, London).

Given that it was not essential to practise the Catholic religion in order to create masterpieces of sacred art, and that an art without evolution is destined to die, Futurism - distributor of energy - confronts sacred art with the following choice: either renounce any ambitions to inspire the faithful, or submit to complete regeneration through the principles of synthesis, transfiguration, the dynamism of time-space interpenetration, the simultaneity of states of mind and the geometric splendour of the machine aesthetic.

Necessary Modernisation

The use of electric light to decorate churches with its blue-white brilliance, superior in celestial purity to the carnal, lustful, reddish-yellow of candlelight; the marvellous sacred paintings of Gerardo Dottori, the first Futurist to infuse sacred art with an original intensity; the Futurist frescoes by Gino Severini in various Swiss churches; the many Futurist cathedrals of dynamic forms constructed from reinforced concrete, crystal and steel that have been realised in Germany and Switzerland: all these things represent the first signs of this necessary modernisation of sacred art.

In fact:

Only Futurist artists, being gifted with unlimited imaginations, are able to paint or construct images of Hell capable of terrifying those generations that have heroically endured the infernal bombardments of the Carso and who are accustomed to a mechanised life more dangerous than the weak little flames one finds in the traditional ‘Inferno’.
Only Futurist aeropainters - masters at rendering aerial perspectives and accustomed to painting from the skies - are able to express in plastic terms the abyssal charm and heavenly transparencies of infinity. Indeed, this is not attainable for traditional painters, all of whom are more or less bound to an obsessive, inescapably terrestrial realism and therefore incapable of rising to the heights of mystical abstraction.
Only Futurist aeropainters are able to make the multiform and swift, aerial life of angels and saints sing on canvas.
Only Futurist artists - anxious for originality at all costs and hating, on principle, that which has already been seen - are able to endow the painting, fresco or plastic complex with the power of magical surprise necessary for expressing the miraculous.
Only Futurist artists, who for twenty years have addressed the complex matter of simultaneity, are able to express clearly, with suitable interpenetrations of time and space, the simultaneous dogmas of the Catholic faith, such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and Christ’s Calvary.
Only Futurist artists, fired by optimism, colour and imagination, such as Balla, Belli, Benedetta, Caviglioni, Cocchia, Corona, Depero, Diulgheroff, Dottori, Duse, Fillia, Pepe Diaz, Lepore, Marasco, Munari, Pozzo, Prampolini, Rosso, Tato, Thayaht, etc., are able today to define in a work of sacred art the bliss of Paradise, which surpasses Catholic soldiers’ heavenly joy at our great victory of Vittorio Veneto.
Examples

Only Futurism - the urgent and swift artistic ‘beyond’ - is able to picture and shape all that lies beyond life itself.

Examples of Futurist sacred art:

Gerardo Dottori’s Crucifixion is distinguished by the charming fluidity of the figures of the weeping women at the foot of the Cross. These seem to be the dolorous extensions of Christ’s own body, illuminated by an otherworldly light that constitutes the dominant feature of the work.

Fillia’s Nativity-Death-Eternity depicts the Madonna seated in the foreground of a landscape rendered unreal by the presence of a large dematerialised Cross - that is, one formed of the purest sky - which glows through the fluid body of the Madonna with a soft, submarine phosphorescence. This image is enclosed within the sphere of the world, on the surface of which are gathered together representations of churches down the ages: from the vaults of the catacombs to buildings of Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and, finally, Futurist design. The figure of the Madonna is animated by the radiant line defining the form of the Christ Child. This continues in the rhythm of His mother’s body, recalling the architectural qualities of the churches. The picture contains a great simultaneity of very diverse elements. It is an impressive amalgamation of the concrete and the abstract; a synthesis of the long development of Catholicism through the centuries.

Fillia’s Adoration depicts a praying Madonna, the elements of whose body have been distilled to the point at which it no longer bears human characteristics, being transformed into an abstract representation of prayer at the foot of a Cross refined from the ether.

Oriani’s Ascent to Calvary is characterised by the dramatisation of the entire environment - its evocation of sorrow, captured in a hundred different ways, dominating the grief expressed by the figure of Christ Himself.

Mino Rosso’s plastic complex The Nativity displays the absolute, plastic obedience of all the figures and objects surrounding the Christ Child, which appear as if mystically magnetised by Him.

The other works of Futurist sacred art exhibited at Padua by the Futurists Dottori, Fillia, Oriani, Pozzo, Pogoletti [sic], Rosso, Saladin, Severini and Vignazia are equally significant.

Futurist Innovation

Futurism - the movement of proud Italian innovation, firmly anti-Masonic and anticlerical - prophesised twenty years ago the advent of Fascism, has created and led artistic avant-gardes throughout the world, enlivened literature with words-in-freedom and the simultaneous style, emptied the theatre of considerations of time and psychology by means of surprising, illogical, simultaneous syntheses and the drama of objects, enriched the plastic arts with its anti-realism and plastic dynamism, invented the art of noises, the noise-harmonium and the concept of tactilism, introduced a machine aesthetic into music and initiated the movement for more dynamic forms of nutrition, endowed photography with rich creative possibilities, inspired the marvellous Aeropainting of tomorrow and launched the new architecture of iron, cement, agility and colour, cleansed of decoration and rich in a stark geometric splendour that Antonio Sant’Elia has bequeathed to the Italian Rationalists - who are now forced to acknowledge its Italian origin if they do not wish to be passed off as imitators of Sant’Elia’s own northern European plagiarists.

And now, twenty of the hundred best painters belonging to the Italian Futurist movement are to present a room of Futurist sacred art at the great exhibition in Padua.

A tireless movement for the renovation, acceleration, beautification and intensification of the world, Futurism intervenes everywhere - whether expectedly or unexpectedly - as a simple demonstration of its typically Italian and Fascist strength.

This manifesto, conceived and written in collaboration with the Futurist painter Fillia, is in perfect agreement with the creative activity of Enrico Prampolini, which shines today in the front lines of the avant-garde at the exhibition of the 1940 Group in Paris, and with that of Fortunato Depero, currently preparing his great New York Exhibition of Dynamisms.

F. T. Marinetti

Gazzetta del Popolo, 23 June 1931

Above copied from: http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/manifesto-of-sacred-art-english/

M A N I F E S T O FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES

Proposal for an exhibition CARE

______________________________________________________

I. IDEAS

A.The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change.The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.

B. Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance.

The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy keep the home fires burning

Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change.
Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.

C. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)

The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.

The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.

clean you desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.

D. Art:

Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying).

Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials.

Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.

E.

The exhibition of Maintenance Art, “CARE,” would zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.

II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION:“CARE”

Three parts: Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance.

A. Part One: Personal

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap- sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse.

The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

B. Part Two: General

Everyone does a hell of a lot of noodling maintenance work. The general part of the exhibition would consist of interviews of two kinds.

1. Previous individual interviews, typed and exhibited.

Interviewees come from, say, 50 different classes and kinds of occupations that run a gamut from maintenance “man,” maid, sanitation “man,” mail “man,” union “man,” construction worker, librarian, grocerystore “man,” nurse, doctor, teacher, museum director, baseball player, sales”man,” child, criminal, bank president, mayor, moviestar, artist, etc., about:

”-what you think maintenance is;
-how you feel about spending whatever parts of your life you spend on maintenance activities;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and life’s dreams.

2. Interview Room—for spectators at the Exhibition:

A room of desks and chairs where professional (?) interviewers will interview the spectators at the exhibition along same questions as typed interviews. The responses should be personal.

These interviews are taped and replayed throughout the exhibition area.

C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:

purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists.

These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.

above copied from: http://www.moca.org/wack/?p=301

Constructing audiences, defining art. Public Art and social research, Larissa Buchholz and Ulf Wuggenig

1. Social theory and conceptual art

In her book "De la valeur de l'Art", Raymonde Moulin remarks that the relations between visual artists and sociologists are constant and changing as well. [1] In the late 'sixties "avant-garde" artists were interested in critical sociology as a weapon against the art market and the museum. Subsequently philosophy again - especially in different variants of poststructuralism - was the privileged partner in the discourses of the artistic field. Sociologists in the 'eighties again could write, that art and sociology do not go together. [2] Raymonde Moulin, however, mentions, that in the 'nineties, certain "avant-garde"-artists did show a critical attitude similar to sociology and were investigating the economical and social conditions of the construction of the value of art.

We want to elaborate on that observation, because these developments make diagnoses from the 'eighties like those of Pierre Bourdieu or Vera Zolberg as obsolete as the idea that the struggle between sociology and visual art is any longer about the question of autonomy vs. reduction. Many critics in the artworld - influenced by postmodernist writers like Fredric Jameson or by authors working in the fields of Cultural, Visual or Postcolonial studies - today argue even in a more reductionist way than sociologists, who in the Weberian tradition of the differentiation theory of modernity stress the autonomoy of the system of art (Niklas Luhmann) or the relative autonomy of the artistic field (Pierre Bourdieu). Of course we are referring to a special sub-field of the system of art - the generation of younger artists with "high visibility" in the sense of Raymonde Moulin. [3] This is the field where the discursive struggle for a position in art history is taking place in an international and partly global space, still dominated by western and especially US-American actors and institutions.

In this field an obsession with the "social" came up in the late 'eighties and the early 'nineties, which took different shape in the USA and Europe. In the USA it was connected with multiculturalism, AIDS activism and with identity politics in general. The marginalised approaches of "Public Art", "Art for Communities", "Art in the Public Interest" and "New Genre Public Art" gained a kind of popularity in the art field as perhaps never seen before. On a theoretical level in the US-context anthropology, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies were influential, whereas sociology and social research were more popular in the European context. In Europe the movement, including travelling US-American artists, was characterised by its institutional analysis and critique of the field of art and by the reflexive exploration of the conditions of producing, distributing and consuming art. New labels for these approaches were soon invented like "contextual art", "post-conceptual art" or "neo-institutional critique". [4]

Contextual art had a peak of visibility in the years 1990 to 1995. The first part of the consecration cycle was finished in 1995 with exhibitions all over Europe, from the 45th Venice Biennale of 1993 via such places as Soonsbeek in the Netherlands and Firminy in France to important art institutions especially in Germany (Cologne based art galleries) and Austria (e. g. Generali-Foundation in Vienna, Neue Galerie, Graz). [5] With the consecration of contextual art, however, the attention in the art world shifted to new tendencies. The interest in sociology and social theory in general waned, when counter-movements like "ambient art" or the Saatchi sponsored and media-hyped "young British artists" emerged. [6] On the other hand sociological theory seemed not political and radical enough for some younger artistic movements who in the second half of the nineties turned to social and political activism.

It was "contextual art" in the European context especially in the first part of the nineties, that brought sociology and visual art closer together than at any time before, including cooperation in exhibitions, projects and in research. In that period sociologists published and were discussed in art journals, the difference to the past being that not only marxist theory was of interest, but also critical sociology (such as Bourdieus field theory) and traditional academic sociology, especially systems theory as represented by the Luhmann school in the German context. Some indicators of the changes in the relations between art and sociology can be easily listed. In that time sociological notions like "cultural" and "symbolic capital", "artistic field", "autopoiesis", "observer of the second order" etc. became part of the jargon of advanced art criticism. Sociologists were invited to the then popular art world panels and to lectures in art institutions. The status of artists of an older generation, who at an earlier time had shown an interest in sociology was redefined, the most prominent example being German-American artist Hans Haacke, with his polls in the Museum of Modern Art, N. Y. and at documenta 5 in Kassel 1972 a pioneer of a quasi-sociological artistic approach in the early seventies. Haacke - riding on the wave of "contextual art" as one of its main precursors - was nominated as Germanys representative at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, where he offered a critical comment on the reunification of Germany. After cooperating in the 'seventies with Howard S. Becker, one of the main representatives of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism in sociology, Hans Haacke published a book-long dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu in 1994. [7] Conceptual artists Clegg & Guttmann edited a whole book with sociological and anthropological texts on film and photography, with contributions for example by Harold Garfinkel or Douglas Harper, who is known for his "visual sociology". [8] American artist Andrea Fraser and Swiss artist Christian Philipp Müller, who in spite of their non-Austrian origin were Austrian representatives at the 45th Venice Biennale, appropriated sociological research tools (especially the interview and the questionnaire) exemplifying the notion of the "artist researcher".

The art market crisis of the early 'nineties, that Moulin seems to suggest as an explanation for this change, was perhaps a facilitating condition, but certainly not a sufficient one. The contextual art movement had already started in the late eighties before the market crisis could be felt. Paul DiMaggios theory about the reduction of boundary ritualization in the arts might be applied [9], together with considerations concerning the internal history of the art discourse [10] and cultural and political factors of a more general kind, because the tendencies were not the same in different countries. In France for instance the contextual art movement had only weak visibility, whereas it was an important tendency in the artworlds of Austria and Germany. Instead of enlarging on the topic of explanation we will report and discuss one of those transgressions of the conventional borders between art and sociology typical of the first part of the 'nineties.

2. Continuities between sociology and contextual art

In the title of one of his books Howard S. Becker expresses the interactionist understanding of the social in one single sentence: "Doing things together". [11] In this book one also finds a chapter on Hans Haacke. What Becker and Haacke "did together", however, was not social research but publishing a catalogue. [12] The artistic work of Haacke also inspired Becker to some more general reflections about the relation of art and social science. The position he took is basically that: We customarily distinguish between science and art, seeing the one as the discovery of the truth about the world and the other as the aesthetic expression of someone's unique vision. But many artist's vision are of the truth about the world, and scientists discoveries of truth often contain strong elements of personal vision. The two enterprises are confounded in ways that cannot be disentangled. They can be treated as complementary rather than opposed. There are elements of overlap and continuity between the aims of social science and art. [13] Thus Becker made a plea for breaking down the boundaries between art and sociology. The developments especially in the 'nineties showed that such a continuity between aims and even methods of certain kinds of art and certain kinds of social science is not merely a figment of imagination.

The conceptual artists Clegg & Guttmann were among the first of a group of artists (i. a. Christian Boltanski, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Fabrice Hybert, Dan Peterman, Thomas Locher, Peter Zimmermann, Renée Green, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Weibel, Martin Krenn, Oliver Ressler) that we collaborated with in the last years at the Department of Cultural Studies and the Kunstraum of the University of Lüneburg. [14]

Based on the approach of Howard S. Becker, the work of the Kunstraum of the University of Lüneburg is grounded on the idea of the continuity of certain forms of social science and certain strategies of art, whether this relates to cognitive or social perspectives. Therefore the Kunstraum favours the cooperation with project-oriented artists who are interested in an interdisciplinary exchange with persons, who typically work in the context of an University - scientists, teachers and students. Furthermore this kind of cooperation is orientated towards the opening of art and science towards life. This means that projects often are located in the public sphere and on the campus where a non-art specialised audience can be met.

3. The Open Public Libraries of Clegg & Guttmann in Hamburg

In the early nineties Clegg & Guttmann were invited by the city of Hamburg for an art project in the public space. Clegg & Guttman base their work on some fundamental concepts, among them the concept of portraiture. In the 'eighties for example they were famous for their photo-portraits of industrialised landscapes as well as for their portraits referring to the construction of images of power. In some cases these portraits of individuals, families, corporate managers etc. were rejected by those portrayed.

For the project in Hamburg Clegg & Guttmann tried to extend the idea of the portrait: "In our own past work we have portrayed individuals and groups of individuals as well as the context in which we live, that is to say, portraits of a landscape. We conceive this project as a portrait of a community." It was this idea of a portrait of a community that they thought especially might interest sociologists and students of cultural studies.

The basic idea was to get such a portrait by installing small libraries filled with books - without guard and librarians - outdoors in three parts of Hamburg, and look at its social use. There should only be displayed a notice on each library encouraging their active use: "You can take a limited number of books for a limited time. Contribution of books is welcome". The only indication that there was some connection with the art world was a plaque which directed people to the two art institutions which were involved, the Kunstverein and the Cultural Administration of Hamburg, including their telephone numbers. In contrast to a conventional library the Open Public Library lacks any formal mechanisms of "surveiller et punir" (Michel Foucault). The Open Public Library is seen as an utopian alternative to the bureaucratic institutions of the disciplinary society, to the "trivial machines" (Heinz von Foerster) that control the behaviour meticulously and more or less automatically react to deviance with sanctions. [15] "How will people react", the artists questioned, "to such an utopian proposition? People are very opinionated about questions like that. But they have no data to rely on. We wanted to find out what the real situation was."

The participation of the audience - its self-organization - was part of the project. At the same time it was expected that the social use of the Open Public Libraries would produce a kind of a self-portrait of the social system involved.

The artists' decision to transform power boxes of the local electricity board in Hamburg into libraries for housing the books was obviously based on the idea of the ready made in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. With the concentration on the audience and its participation, however, the artists also tried to give a new interpretation of the ready made concept: not only the de-contextualisation of an ordinary object, but the self-constitution of the audience as an art audience should constitute the art object as well. [16]

The inclusion of the audience "as the main goal of art production" [17] also implies an extended definition of site-specificity. "Functional site" is James Meyer's term for social and discursive aspects of sites, that transcend the physical and phenomenological parameters, that were of main interest for early site-specific art in the sixties like minimalism. [18]

The expansion of the notion of "site-specificity", also as a method, and not just as an effect of artistic practices [19] was supported by the provision of social area maps of Hamburg. The maps - collected by the research group at the Lüneburg University - informed the artists' choice of the three locations for the libraries. They were situated along the city's north-south axis according to criteria of social stratification - high status (but not in one of the most privileged upper class areas), middle and low. The fourth location, that played an important part in the project, was the Hamburg Kunstverein. In intervening in the public sphere and in the traditional context of an art institution at the same time, Clegg & Guttmann - in distinction to much of the community orientated "New Genre Public Art" of the nineties [20] - did not construct "art in the public interest" as the democratic other of traditional art.

An installation of Clegg & Guttmann referring to the outdoor libraries was therefore part of the group show "Backstage", an exhibition conceived for the opening of the new building of the Kunstverein. Figure 1 (see appendix) reproduces one of the decisive social area maps of Hamburg as a kind of sociological portrait of its "collective personality" (Durkheim), based on a factorial ecology approach. The darker, the more privileged the area in terms of the conventional demographic indicators. It shows the three areas selected - Volksdorf in the North, Barmbek in the middle and Kirchdorf, a part of Wilhelmsburg in the South. The location of the Kunstverein is depicted in the centre of the town. Thus the installation directly referred to the Open Public Library and could also function as an invitation for the art public to visit the three outdoor libraries.

In the research group we decided to draw a random sample for a survey in the art public of Hamburg including some items referring to Clegg & Guttmann's Open Public Library project. Apart from "Backstage" in the Kunstverein, the public of the "Broken Mirror" show (curated by Kasper König and Hans Ulrich Obrist) at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, an exhibition space for international contemporary art in the immediate neighbourhood of the Kunstverein was included.

In the Kunstverein the room with the Clegg & Guttmann installation in "Backstage" showed large-scale pictures (photos) of the outdoor locations. It also included a reproduction of one of the power boxes, as it could be recognized before the opening of the Open Public Library, with graffiti and political posters. Further questionnaires, diagrams and texts of the field research done were made available to the public on three tables.

Attached to the glass wall in the exhibition room there were about ten social area maps and figures - correspondence analyses as well as more conventional representations - of the first results of the research in the neighbourhoods of the libraries copied onto transparent foils.

Some results of this research based on about 100 interviews in the neighbourhoods of the Open Public Libraries, where the books for the libraries were collected, and on responses given by about 660 visitors of the two art institutions in Hamburg are listed below:

a) "Avant-garde" art has often been offensive to people outside the artworld, with and without the intention of the artists. This was not the case with the Open Public Library, which exemplifies the "double-coding" and "plurifunctionality" characteristic of a certain strand of postmodern art. The evaluations of the idea of the Open Public Library in general were very positive and even slightly more positive outside the art world than within.

b) Even in a specialised art public moral evaluations of art are important. A multiple regression analysis was based on a model with 16 explanatory variables. It turned out that in the art public the anticipation of success and failure of the libraries, defined in the moral terms of expected vandalism or disappearance of the books, alone explained about 19% of the variance of the evaluation of The Open Public Library project as a whole. This leads to a more general point. If moral evaluation has such an importance for the reception of art in a highly specialised public of contemporary art, some aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's famous descriptions of the modernist "aesthetic attitude", which according to his model is characterised by "moral agnosticism", no longer applies to art consumption in a general way. [21]

c) Since the installation in "Backstage" included both aesthetic artefacts and results of scientific research, it also symbolised the cooperation between art and sociology. The hybrid installation provided an opportunity to see how the art public would react to the transgression of the conventional boundaries of art and sociology. One of the questions asked in the survey was: "The Clegg & Guttmann project is based on a collaboration between artists and scientists - social area analysis, surveys of the population etc. Does collaboration of this kind a) enhance the project, b) endanger the project's artistic aspects?"

The majority of the art audience thought that the research enhanced the project and rejected the idea that it might endanger the project's artistic aspects. In this respect nearly no differences between the professional centre and the periphery of the field of art could be observed.

Slightly less than one third of the art public thought that social scientific involvement might potentially be a threat. Those, however, who strongly rejected the participation of sociology were limited to a minority smaller than 10 %. The subgroup professionally involved in art did not reject the cooperation of art and sociology any more strongly, though they did not see the positive aspects of this cooperation as frequently as the visitors barely integrated in the field of art.

d) The Clegg & Guttman installation in Backstage was one of the most highly rated ones in the art public, independently of social position - i. e. the extent of involvement in the field of art (professional centre vs. periphery). Together with results that showed the relative independence of the evaluation of the works of art from general social position (such as economic and educational capital, gender and age) this data supported the notion of the Open Public Library as a multi-coded or "plurifunctional" project, appealing to extremely divergent taste cultures. [22]

Research on the use of the libraries followed. It was based on observations of the "traces" of the social use of the libraries and on open-ended interviews with users and non-users, partly recorded on video and CD-ROM.

At the outdoor libraries observations were performed on a total of 20 occasions over a three month period. In Barmbek-Nord and Kirchdorf, the libraries had started out with an initial stock of approx. 300 books, and the one in Volksdorf, the most privileged area, with around 500. The subsequent developments varied greatly. Clegg & Guttmann had conceived the libraries not as permanent but as temporary institutions. In Kirchdorf, the project was terminated before the planned date, in Barmbek-Nord it ran for the foreseen period, and in Volksdorf it was continued even longer.

Already the simple indicator of the amount of books in the libraries made clear that the social context was by no means irrelevant. The developments in a certain way reproduced the social ranking of the areas. In contrast to the rather pessimistic expectations regarding the social survival of the libraries - much more widespread in the art public than in the neighbourhoods -, no problems occurred at two of the three locations. Quite the contrary: the libraries were so popular that citizens' initiatives developed spontaneously in both locations: the initiatives supported the libraries and sought to have their period of operation continued. Thus the project not only yielded a social portrait in a static manner, but also initiated collective action and even constituted social communities in two neighbourhoods by means of participation - communities not as essential categories or as referential signs, but as actors pursuing collective practices. This aspect of collective action as an inherent part of a provisional and open community might also be interpreted as an example for "participatory communitarism". [23]

In the underprivileged area the books disappeared quickly and the first damage to the library was noticed at the third stocktaking. The results of the project in the various locations thus ranged from vandalism via moderate to high collective support with plenty of books in the privileged North.

It transpired that the more privileged the urban social space in which an library was installed, the longer the duration of its social survival, the larger the number, not only of books donated, but also of books to be found in the library, the larger the number of people involved in indirect exchange processes - solidarity producing according to structuralist sociology [24] - and the stronger the tendency towards collective participation and support. From a more general sociological point of view, the field study provided a "portrait of the community" (Clegg & Guttmann) which corresponds to theoretical descriptions of central parameters and reproduction mechanisms of hierarchic social systems: with social cohesion being higher at the top and with difficulties in creating solidarity at the bottom, in view of the structural tendencies towards fragmentation, division and self-hatred. [25]

There were various critical reactions in the art discourse towards the project. One argued for instance with early conceptual art against the idea of a portraiture in the sense of an objectified representation of a social system. The project was interpreted as purely immaterial, as art evoking and revealing aspects of the social. However, it was interpreted not as revealing social structures and collective behaviour but rather the "freedom of individual choice" of books. It was argued that process art of that kind does need not be registered or documented and objectified in art objects.

Another kind of critique was articulated from the perspective of the more politically orientated activist art movement that in Germany followed contextual art in the next artistic generation. One of the main arguments was the accusation, that the experiment in self-organisation had been initiated in a paternalist way by artists not living in the town and not genuinely locally involved.

The stress upon the local authenticity of a community with the idea of the artist as a kind of local organic intellectual can easily be linked to the romantic and conservative conception of "integrative communitarism" (Benhabib). Clegg & Guttmann did not treat the different audiences in Hamburg in a paternalistic manner, or try to create or rely on predefined communities. It was rather the attempt at providing a model for the idea of a cultural institution without hierarchies and rules, which enabled the self constitution of different audiences.

On the level of "surface interpretations", which according to Arthur Danto should coincide as closely as possible with the artists' own description of their practices and intentions [26], the first kind of critique was perhaps partly wrong and partly right. It was wrong insofar as the idea of the project was not only to initiate an immaterial social process. Clegg & Guttmann explicitly proposed a permanent installation that would include research results and aesthetic artefacts (such as posters) in the sense of an objectified portrait of Hamburg. This proposal was rejected by the City of Hamburg, perhaps because the portrait did show backstage features of the city that it prefers to hide. The material collected - research results on paper, video and CD-ROM etc. - thus became part of Clegg & Guttmann's collection of rejected portraits. Clegg & Guttamnn did not present it in Hamburg, but in the context of a new project ("The Transformation of Data into Portraiture") at the Kunstraum at Lüneburg University in 1995. This installation was also part of the 46th Venice Biennale of the same year.

The allusion to process art and "praxis" in the Aristotelian sense (as distinguished from "poiesis"), however, was accurate in that sense that one of the main interests of the artists was in a self-reflexive experiment regarding the definition of art. In one of their texts that followed the project in Hamburg they expressed this interest in the following way: "Many people implicitly accept a rather simplistic version of the institutional definition of art. They think that relatively stable art institutions are necessary for the very definition of art. We wanted to experiment with a much looser framework. The idea was to take a non-art entity like an outdoor library and to connect to an art project without physically removing it from its non-art environment. Our point was, the necessary ingredient is a self conscient art audience and not a stable art institution." [27]

The "institutional definition of art" the artists are referring to originally was developed in philosophy by George Dickie. [28] It is highly disputed in philosophy. In sociology it is more widely accepted because of its affinities with assumptions of the labelling theory developed in symbolic interactionism. Thus Clegg & Guttmann's sentences might be interpreted as an implicit critique of sociology. While stronger versions of the institutional definition of art than the one invoked by the artists seem to exist in sociology [29] this critique should be welcome, because the "institutional definition of art" does not seem to have been sufficiently discussed in the field of sociology of art in the past.

Thanks to Russel West (University of Lüneburg) for helpful suggestions.



[1] Raymonde Moulin (1995). De la valeur de l'Art. Paris, p. 13.
[2] Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Questions de sociologie, Paris, p. 207; Vera Zolberg (1989). Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge, UK, p. 1.
[3] Raymonde Moulin (1996). Heirs. The sociological identity of artists. In: Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller & Ulf Wuggenig (eds.). Games, Fights and Collaborations. The Game of Boundary and Transgression. Art and Cultural Studies in the 90ies. Ostfildern, pp. 169-172.
[4] Cf. e. g. Peter Weibel (1994) (ed.), Kontext Kunst. Köln.
[5] The approach of contextual art is documented for instance in the Austrian and German art journals - "Texte zur Kunst", "springer" and "springerin" since 1990 and in catalogues and books like Weibel (1994), op. cit. and Bismarck et al. (1996), op. cit.
[6] Cf. Rita Hatton & John Walker (2000). Supercollector. A Critique of Saatchi. London.
[7] Pierre Bourdieu & Hans Haacke (1994). Libre-Échange. Paris.
[8] Clegg & Guttmann (1996) (eds.), The Sick Soul. Durch 10. Graz (Kunstverein).
[9] Cf. Paul DiMaggio (1987). Classification in Art. American Sociological Review, 52, pp. 440-455.
[10] Cf. Hans Bertens (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern. A History. London.
[11] Howard Becker (1986). Doing Things Together. Evanston.
[12] Cf. Hans Haacke (1976). Framing and Being Framed: 7 works, 1970-75. Halifax (with contributions of Jack Burnham, Howard S. Becker and John Walton).
[13] Cf. Howard S. Becker (1981). Exploring Society Photographically. Evanston, pp. 10.
[14] The interdisciplinary approach of the Kunstraum of the University of Lüneburg is documented in Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (1996). op. cit. and Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (2001) (eds.). Branding the Campus. Düsseldorf.
[15] Michel Foucault (1975). Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris 1975; Heinz von Foerster (1993), Wissen und Gewissen. Frankfurt / Main, pp. 245ff.
[16] Clegg & Guttmann (1995). Avantgarde Practice and Democratic Theory. Vienna (basis Wien), pp. 24.
[17] Mary Jane Jacob (1996). Unfashionable audience, In: Suzanne Lazy (ed.). Mapping the terrain. Bay Press, pp. 50
[18] James Meyer (2000). The Functional Site, or, The Transformation of Site Specificity. In: Erika Suderburg (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention. Situating installation art. University of Minnesota press, pp. 25.
[19] Miwon Kwon (1997). For Hamburg: Public Art and Urban Identities. In: Christian Phillip Müller (1997) Kunst auf Schritt und Tritt. Hamburg. p.103.
[20] Suzan Lacey (1995) (ed.). Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art. Seattle.
[21] Pierre Bourdieu (1979). La Distinction. Paris, p. 49.
[22] Cf. the data in Ulf Wuggenig, Vera Kockot & Kathrin Symens (1994). The Plurifunctionality of the Open Public Library. Observations from a Sociological Perspective. In: Achim Könneke (ed.). Clegg & Guttmann. The Open Public Library. Ostfildern b. Stuttgart, pp. 57-114.
[23] Cf. Sheyla Benhabib (1994). Self in Context. New York.
[24] Cf. Peter Ekeh (1975). Social Exchange Theory and the Two Sociological Traditions. Cambridge, Mass., pp. 49ff.
[25] Cf. Johan Galtung (1978). Feudal Systems, Structural Violence and the Structural Theory of Revolution. Johan Galtung. Peace and Social Structure. Copenhagen, pp. 197-267; Collins, Randall (1984), Non-Obvious Sociology. N. Y. pp. 103ff.
[26] Cf. Arthur Danto (1986). The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York, p. 45.
[27] Clegg & Guttmann (1996). The Sick Soul, op. cit. p. 6.
[28] Cf. Robert Yanal (ed.) (1994). Institutions of Art. Reconsiderations of George Dickie's Philosophy. Pennsylvania.
[29] Cf. Howard Becker (1982). Art Worlds. London, pp. 145ff; Ulf Wuggenig (1995). Rivalität, Konflikt, Freiheit. Ein Vergleich von Pierre Bourdieus Feldtheorie und Arthur C. Dantos Philosophie der (Geschichte) der Kunst. In: Texte zur Kunst, 5, Nr. 20, pp. 86-107.

above copied from: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/buchholzwuggenig/en

Against Competition, Marc Fischer

Blunt Art Text (B.A.T.) #2, April 2006

Recently I received an email from a student in Ireland. He had discovered an interview in which I discussed an old project that sounded extremely similar to something he had been working on for a year and was about to exhibit. This discovery sent him into a “mini-crisis” and he wrote to see if I might share my thoughts on the situation.

I sent this student printed materials from my work, as I strongly feel that artists who are doing similar work should make an effort to know each other, share knowledge and perhaps even work together. There is no reason why two variations of the same idea can’t happily co-exist. So much of the way that the art world is structured favors competition. Grants are competitive. Art schools stage student competitions. Students compete for funding. Hundreds compete for a single art school teaching position. Professors compete with other professors. Artists compete with artists – stealing ideas instead of sharing them, or using copyright laws to guard against thoughtful re-use. Artists compete for shows in a limited number of exhibition spaces instead of finding their own ways to exhibit outside of these competitive venues. Artists conceal opportunities from their friends as a way of getting an edge up on the capital-driven competition. Gallerists compete with other gallerists and curators compete with curators. Artists who sell their work compete for the attention of a limited number of collectors. Collectors compete with other collectors to acquire the work of artists.

This is a treadmill made from decomposing shit that is so devoid of nutrients that even its compost won’t allow anything fresh to grow. We need something better to run on. Some artists are bypassing competitive approaches in their practice, suggesting possibilities for a different cultural climate. Since the 1960’s, numerous artists have made works that take the form of strategies, proposals, gestures and instructions. While these works are not usually presented as invitations for others to reinterpret, making variations in a similar spirit still has the potential to yield rewarding results. Ideas are not necessarily used up just because they have entered the art historical canon (and many good projects remain unfamiliar to most audiences). This older soil remains fertile for new plantings.

More art projects could be created with the built-in understanding that they can be freely re-made or given a new twist by others in the future – like classical music compositions that still get played two hundred years after the composer died. Take the example of the late composer John Cage’s three movement composition “4’ 33””. It was first performed by David Tudor in 1952. This work has since been given many reinterpretations over the years by artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, The BBC Symphony Orchestra and The Melvins. The work finds new meaning with different performers, contexts, times and places. Redundancies, repetitions and overlaps are often neglected because they complicate the bigger picture and show art to be the much larger social mess that it really is. We don’t have to run away from repetitions.

Since 2001, the Philadelphia-based collaborative group Basekamp has been doing lectures, discussions, events and project planning around the theme of redundancy in the visual arts. Late last year they co-organized an event series titled “Making Room for Redundancy” with Lars Fischer (no relation to the author). They have been dreaming up and building models for terminals where the viewer could enter an idea and see all of the overlapping permutations of how it has been explored before. Basekamp recently gave a lecture titled simply “I am a Collaborative Artist” at the Infest: Artist-Run Culture conference in Vancouver. For artists who are open to working with others, such conferences can be a good place to strengthen or develop new friendships, fueling new collaborations or broader inclusion in pre-existing projects.

Another mutually-supportive practice: the French artist Céline Duval enjoys a prolific collaboration with the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, who is about thirty years her senior. This began when Céline contacted him wanting to help with raw material for his work and now they publish books together. They collaborate on equal footing despite large differences in age, experience and success in the art world. The viewer must untangle the mingling voices in these co-authored works, ask questions, or just accept the hybrid and enjoy the resulting complexity.

Making participatory artworks can open up your practice and build a loose community in the process. Since 1997, Chicago-based artist Melinda Fries has been running the website ausgang.com. Ausgang is essentially an artwork in web form that contains the work of various contributors (many of whom are not artists). Melinda creates categories that are of personal interest (examples: “Living Situations”, “Things In The Road”, “Bus Stories”). Contributors then flesh out these themes by submitting stories, images, or projects that are suitable for the web. The site is updated seasonally. Melinda’s project is enriched and expanded by others and the contributors get a platform for their work that will be seen by many viewers. The people who participate often send out emails promoting the site and their contributions that are included. The site is not a flimsy catch-all for anything and everything. Melinda functions as an editor, but she allows a very broad range of ways for one to participate. In the interest of disclosure, I contribute to ausgang.com regularly, but perhaps you should too?

While there is a joy in finding people with shared affinities, establishing communication and friendships with artists who have shared interests and ideas is not a retreat from the challenge of making tough critical art. Who better to kick your ass a little than your collaborators? The disposable, vague, or one-liner qualities in so much recent art reveals a lack of sufficient peer-to-peer ass-kicking. Collaborative projects by their nature insist on constant feedback and criticism
Arguing against competition is not necessarily a vote in favor of an idealized world of shiny happy people holding hands - some of the most productive collaborations can have a lot of tension and disagreement. The fascinating documentary “Some Kind of Monster” shows Metallica band members and co-founders James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich in exchanges that are sometimes so lacking in civility that at one point Ulrich is reduced to getting in Hetfield’s face and screaming: “FUUUUCCCKKKK!!!” In an additional scene on the DVD, Ulrich admits: “I’m afraid of changing what has worked. Twenty years of hatred sold one hundred million records.” One of the great tempestuous working relationships in film history was that of director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski. In Herzog’s documentary “My Best Fiend”, Kinski’s behavior on the set during one film was so angering that the director seriously contemplated murdering him. When Klaus Kinski wrote his autobiography, he reportedly gave Herzog advance notice that he was going to trash the director in the book because he felt that attacking his friend would lead to increased sales. The two even collaborated in their mutual infuriation with each other but clearly, and more importantly, they pushed each other to perform better and make more ambitious and passionate films.
How can we build a stronger network among people with shared interests and values? In a recent talk that we hosted at Mess Hall in Chicago, curator Nato Thompson brought up the impressive and widespread networks that the hardcore punk music scene has crafted, where a band has a place to play and crash in nearly every major town. This is something he longs to see happen for experimental art and cultural practices in every part of the U.S. - particularly those areas that are culturally under-served. An audience member noted, however, that part of what enabled the hardcore scene to do this so effectively is that there is a shared language that is easier to understand. People seem able to grasp the terms and aesthetics more easily. Music can circulate quickly and simply. It often has a bracing, visceral and emotional power; heady forms of art and critical theory are generally a little less catchy. You could listen to eight hardcore songs in the time it takes to read this essay.

Some online communities show promise. For the past couple years I’ve been frequenting a particularly hyperactive online music discussion group for obscure loud rock. The number of times the distant feel of the Internet breaks out into the real world on some of these sites is uncountable. When people attend concerts together often the next morning one person will write about it and another will post the photos they took and it all gets shared with thousands who couldn’t be there. I’ve been offered places to stay in numerous cities based purely on my taste in music, received un-requested packages of CDs and have been loaned books through the mail. A band had their van and equipment stolen, so one forum member named Foetuscide quickly set up a Paypal account that people could donate to. When Foetuscide was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, people started sending her money at the Paypal account she originally created for the band. There has been endless support for a board member named EvilFanny who had to undergo brain surgery. A discussion thread about the merits of old Slayer and Celtic Frost records can happily share space with a thread where EvilFanny asks other board members if they know anything about going on Long Term Disability.

While these big online communities are messy and filled with more than their share of knuckle-draggers, sexists, homophobes and right wing morons, the generosity of participants can be breathtaking. The challenge for artists who want to build supportive networks like this is to find communication strategies that can help them connect to each other with the passion that music fans across the globe excel at. We need to make our emails to strangers whose art and ideas we care about resonate with that obsessive nerdy excitement that music geeks generate in their sleep. Art blogs are popping up all over Chicago but I have yet to see any become a truly action packed, socially dynamic online community where artists, curators, viewers, writers and every other kind of participant mixes it up and generates ideas that take real hold in the world. One of the oldest Chicago-centric discussion forums, Othergroup.net, sometimes goes for a month without a single post.

In order for critical and experimental art networks to become stronger, and for audiences to grow, artists need to expand the range of ways we operate. When artists work with others, they complicate their practice and these collaborations often enrich everything they do. They organize shows and events that include other artists, write about other people’s work and assist people with their creative endeavors. There is no reason why more artists – including those who have comparatively solitary studio practices, can’t cultivate those skills in order to work more effectively with other people. In the process, they learn to write, organize, publish, curate, educate and do anything else necessary to bolster support and dialogue for the ideas they value. More than anything, they learn to take the initiative and build something larger than themselves. In the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s, artists could do this work on the government’s dime at NEA-funded not-for-profit Alternative spaces. Now that the money is gone and most of those spaces are no longer in existence, new methodologies need to be worked out. We need each other more than ever.

Working with others not only opens the individual artist to the resources, skills, criticisms, and ideas of their collaborator(s), but also frequently to those of the collaborator’s peer group or network. This inevitably creates a larger audience for the finished work and sows the seeds for future collaborations with an even greater variety of people. Creating opportunities for others always results in more personal opportunities. When it becomes clear that you operate from a place of generosity, people become more generous with you -- sometimes offering things like free use of equipment, huge discounts on printing and even free use of a storefront in Rogers Park (the location and arrangement that has kept Mess Hall going for over two years now). This approach may not result in a vacation home in Malibu or the opportunity to snort lines of coke off of prostitutes’ asses with Jörg Immendorf, but is that really the reason you became an artist in the first place?

Working toward a global network where one creates opportunities and, in turn, can respond to limitless opportunities without the pressure to compete, allows for a more generous, diverse and open art practice. In these ways, one can break the isolation of being alone, defending a head-full of secret studio realizations that some kid in Ireland has probably already figured out anyway.

Note: In the spirit of this essay, a number of collaborators provided feedback. Thanks to: Brett Bloom, Melinda Fries, Terence Hannum, Brennan McGaffey, Scott Rigby and Dan S. Wang.

Above copied from: http://www.temporaryservices.org/against_competition_mf.pdf

ANTI-ART AND OUTLAW-ART, Gregory Battcock

in: Lurie, Boris; Krim, Seymour: NO!art, Cologne 1988

1. New Art must recognize the importance of restructuralizing the sensibility.

2. The new art form that is required is one of "anti-art".

3. Prevailing artistic conceptions are inadequate for many reasons.

4. Existent criteria are not applicable to "anti-art" statements.

5. Existent criteria must be overthrown; resistance will come from unexpected places.

6. Lurie-Good-man-Fisher (March Gallery) represented an important and hitherto-now
unrecognized artistic direction.

7. What was happening? Prevailing trends were opposed; the formal mechanizations of
art production and consumption were provoked.

8. March Gallery activities were prophetic; they turn out to have predicted recent
aesthetic and conceptual problems in New art.

9. Writings of contemporary critics and philosophers serve to belatedly acknowledge
certain 10th Street trends of the early '60s.

10. Pronouncements, both philosophical and critical, by Herbert Marcuse, Barbara Rose,
David Lee, Frederick Castle, Marshall McLuhan, Lucy Lippard, John Perrault, and others,
lend support and authority to the anarchistic, anti-authoritarian "anti-art" movement
referred to herein.
The early Sixties

Nobody paid much attention to the activities presented at the March Gallery down on Tenth Street and later at the Gertrude Stein uptown, during the years 1959 and 1964. Now, when we look back at and contemplate the mainstream of modern art during the 1960's we may find that much of what the decade was all about was predicted by the artistic presentations of the March Gallery group-which included, more or less, Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman, Stanley Fisher, Yaoi Kusama, Ferro, Jean-Jacques Lebel and from time to time other artists.
In Allegiance with the Establishment

There is Iittle indication that the Pop-artists were, in the main, completely aware of the very real repressive nature of the capitalist military and industrial alliance. An easy and superficial claim for the relevance of Pop is to present it as a form of social protest. But most of the artists denied that their movement was specifically one of social criticism. They appear to hove claimed simply that they were engaged within the artist's traditional function as witness to the actualities of the social and material environment. Pop art, therefor, is seen as less a movement of social protest than a style well within the mainstream of Western art and the Western artistic heritage. Minimal art, the other major art style of the decade, remains like pop art an "establishment" art form.
Deritualization

What the March group NO!artists of the early sixties did was to introduce and begin the deritualization process in art. Deritualization is a modern cultural process that deserves some consideration, as it is acknowledged in numerous modern phenomena. Sometimes the clothing we wear is indicative of the deritualization process. Certainly the form and subject of some new art works beginning in the visual arts with the works by Duchamp, continuing through the March Gallery NO!artists group up to present, acknowledges this process.

The uniform no longer offers security, prestige, or anything else really. Modern man is concerned with the deritualization. Kids today wear fragments of military uniforms, fatigue jackets, bomber coats with military insignia, sailor pants, pea coats, U.S. Army labels, etc. And why? For the same reason the NO!artists' group gathered up and used a hoocjepodge of artistic materials. Smears and drips from the Abstract Expressionists, bits of junk like the Assemblage and Junk sculptors, mixtures of materials like the happening artists, poster and "pop" images.

The young today have fragmented the military uniform in a way the NO!artists fragmented aesthetic coherence and integrity. The uniform only counts when it is complete, un-violated, polished, clear and intact. It must be neatly pressed and the buttons must be shining (both an art style as well as a military uniform), if it is to have any message. Otherwise, it is "anti", it is a travesty, an affront and it becomes a protest statement. At the March group we found Lurie offering dead animals, specifically chicken heads encased in plastic brick, and Goodman presenting novelty-type excrement incorporated into box sculpture, to mention only two instances.
Anti-Art

NO!artists made the mistakes of calling the aesthetic provocation offered there in "Art" . We can put up with almost anything-garbage all over the place, cops carrying and using guns and clubs, nice buildings torn down in the interest of urban disembowelment, school teachers who hate teaching even more than they hate kids, fascists in high positions hell-bent on imposing their visions on the world-almost anything except someone tampering with our notions of God, Country and Art. And little else need tampering with more than these, in whatever order you chose. This is exactly what was happening during those early years of the decade. Our notions of Art were seriously challenged. And the results of those early, sometime crude, yet always integral efforts to subvert the prevailing aesthetic climate are being felt today more strongly than ever before.

Herbert Marcuse pointed out that the graffiti of the Paris May Rebellion in 1968 was anti-art because it was entirely spontaneous and was not conceived with a deliberate artistic intent. The anti-art works offered by the March gallery pioneers may or may have not been conceived with deliberate artistic intent-at any rate the artistic intent did not correspond to formal aesthetic conditions prevailing during the period. Herbert Marcuse has written in "An Essay on Liberation": "... in its negativity, the desublimating art and anti-art of today 'anticipate' a stage where society's capacity to produce may be akin to the creative capacity of art ... the disorderly, uncivil, farcical, artistic de-sublimation of culture constitutes an essential element of radical politics; of subverting forces in transition." Therefore it may be necessary to search for significant anti-art works outside the realm of formal-art, and that is exactly the attitude that distinguishes the art works of the March group from the mainstream of art. At the same time, to be considered as art of any kind, these works must "... have become a productive force in the material as well as cultural transformation ... in shaping the quality and 'appearance' of things, in shaping reality, the way of life." Some critics will argue that art has always done this, at least to a degree. But Marcuse explains that in order for art to become a truly productive force it would require the "... end of the segregation of the aesthetic from the real ... the commercial unification of business and beauty, exploitation and pleasure." We find that the March artists began an aesthetic indicating the activation of imagination within the new morality as reflected within the new (underground) press, and more generally within the New Left, which has apparently broken through the rigid framework of capitalist repression.

The March Gallery NO!artists demanded a change in the prevailing receptive capabilities of the period, and mainly for this reason can they be awarded the anti-art label. Anti-art must not only be difficult to accept as art, but it must be unacceptable as art.

The assumption is that only the work that is unacceptable is capable of forcing a readjustment, a change, a disruption, a revolution of those capacities and faculties that ultimately determine the meaning and effectiveness for the individual of all information received.
Technology of Freedom

During the early sixties numerous artists were utilizing various technological discoveries as material for their art; and frequently the technology became the very subject, the content of the art. The March gallery artists noticeably avoided overt technological displays. And once again, as things seem to have turned out, they were right. Marcuse tells us "... freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition; in order to become a vehicle of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility ..." Unless the artist, who is handed awesome responsibility by Marcuse-the responsibility to structure the new sensibility-meets his new role of technological, cultural and political subversion thoroughly and with keen understanding of the dangers and criticisms that will inevitably fall his way, he cannot hope to remain a relevant factor determining the direction of the revolution and the very environment for real freedom. It is this fact that the March group seems to have understood thoroughly. Their art reminds us that that very nature is empty-art essentially preconditions confusion, negative reaction, and misunderstanding. The March Artists did not equivocate. Nor can there be any equivocation at this time. As Marcuse warns, "Capitalist progress ... not only reduced the environment of freedom, the 'open space' of the human existence, but also the 'open longing,' the need for such an environment."
Commodity Status of Art

Lastly, one notices that the NO!artists seemed to go a considerable distance toward a rejection of the commodity status of art. Numerous artists today have arrived at a similar viewpoint. The "earth" artists are an example. Another example was demonstrated at the "Anti-Illusion" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in the summer of 1969. The "conceptual" artists go even further and make it clear that we can no longer define art as a commodity or even a physical fact of any commercial value. The new direction is a logical continuation of ideas implanted by the March gallery several years ago. They also coincide with Marcuse's thoughts. He points out that: "The so-called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling, and constantly renewing gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a biological need ..." The March gallery NO!artists initiated an art of freedom that is only now surfacing and appearing upon the aesthetic conscience. They objected to and avoided the elitism of the art marketplace-a market that has, up until recently, been one of exploitation and "... thereby of domination, insuring the class structure of society".
Gregory Battcock was a painter, lecturer in art history and criticism, and editor of The New Art: A Critical Anthology and The New American Cinema. He was a frequent contributor to Arts Magazine, Art and Literature, College Art Journal, and Film Culture.

Above copied from: http://text.no-art.info/en/battcock_anti-art.html

Nancy Roth, Collaboration and Originality

Most of us live in families, work and play in teams, form clubs and join societies with abandon. We collaborate. Many kinds of artists, too, work in groups as a matter of course, e.g. musicians, actors, dancers, filmmakers, architects. In fact it is almost exclusively in the visual arts that collaboration has recently—since the late 1960s—arisen as an issue. It may seem as though the discussion marks the overdue demise of an obsolete model of creativity that is most deeply entrenched in the visual arts. For although the notion of a self-sufficient genius, creating from his (or her) own inner resources, is by no means exclusive to visual art, the painter-in-the-studio may well remain that model’s most familiar representation. In any case, I very much doubt whether the idea of individual creativity is being replaced by models of collaboration and interactivity any more than, say, print is being replaced by digital electronic communication. Digital technology is affecting everything about print, from who publishes to what and how much is published to how it all looks and who buys it and who reads it. In analogous fashion, collaborative models of creativity, in part because they seem implicit in these same technologies, are reconfiguring visual art. Rather than being replaced, however, the old model remains recognizable, operable as a kind of palimpsest, below the surface of a quite different aesthetic.
In a recent anthology of writing about drawing, John Wood raised a question about whether a drawing could draw itself, whether it would be possible to think of ourselves being sketched by a drawing in an act of self-creation, or autopoesis that no longer recognizes a firm distinction between the drawer, the drawn, and the viewer. Drawing, as arguably the oldest, most immediate and intimate creative activity, is no doubt the best possible place to begin articulating such a framework. But the discussion moves to other media as well—language, for example, and music. It sketches us, the readers, as participants in a universe of constant creation, a dynamic interaction in which the origin of something new can’t be traced to a single person, and perhaps can’t be located in any one time and place at all.
It takes a certain courage to write as Wood does. For despite what has by now become quite a rich history of work—artistic collaborations, theoretical constructs—undertaken with deliberate intent to relocate the origin of innovation somewhere outside a single discreet consciousness, contemporary English resists such concepts. Wood’s essay, unusually, frames the issue closely enough to give a reader the glimpse of how he or she might be ‘redrawn’ in the context of different model of originality. The language seems to favour a neat reversal of the usual syntactic order: “The drawing made him,” instead of “He made the drawing.” But the thought is more accurately presented in more awkward terms, such as “They, he and the drawing, remade themselves,” or if I may paraphrase Wood, “The drawing, which includes him, draws itself.”
I hope I am not distorting Wood’s meaning unduly in reading the essay as a sensitive, close-up meditation on a key moment in Vilém Flusser’s “communicology,” a theory of human communication. The main thing I need to add to what Wood has proposed is that the moment of creation involves not only a human being and material stuff, but also other human beings, not necessarily present at the time. For media, including drawing materials, are storage sites. They are, further, invested with the energies of many. As the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky once remarked, when you hand a child a rectangular sheet of smooth, white paper on which to draw, you’re handing her 400 years of art history.
Flusser describes communication as a peculiarly human artifice. Only through the generation, storage and distribution of information, he writes, are human beings able to make their lives meaningful and overcome their “natural” condition of loneliness and inevitable death. In order to achieve this goal, a given person needs a fairly even balance between “dialogue” and “discourse.” “Dialogue” here refers to an exchange of stored information that has the potential to create, that is, to generate genuinely new information (the kind of achievement he later refers to as art); “Discourse” refers to the distribution of this information—critical to its preservation. At one time, paintings or sculptures or speeches were the means of discourse. In our own context, it takes television, radio, and print. When there is a radical imbalance between dialogue and discourse, as there is for most of those living in post-industrial societies today, a crisis arises, somewhat ironically, a sense of being unable to communicate. The problem is certainly not that there isn’t enough communication. Of the common contemporary complaint about feeling isolated, Flusser writes:
What people mean is obviously not that they suffer from a lack of communication. Never before in history has communication functioned so well, so intensively and extensively as it does today. What people mean is the difficulty in establishing a genuine dialogue, that is, in exchanging information in the interest of new information. And this difficulty can be traced back to just that communication that functions so perfectly today, namely that superb, omnipresent discourse that renders every dialogue at once impossible and unnecessary…
When discourse prevails, as it does today, human beings feel lonely, even though they are in almost continual contact with so-called “information sources.” If the village dialogue prevails, as it did before the communications revolution, people feel lonely despite dialogue because they feel ‘detached from history’.

In her justly celebrated study The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge found it difficult, if not impossible to construct a history of drawing, detached from the painting or sculpture or architecture it often serves. The essential “frame” of drawing, comprising human hand, the material (graphite or ink or charcoal) and the supporting surface, has changed so little in such a very long time, she suggested, that a drawing made centuries ago can and often does look as fresh and surprising as a sketch made yesterday. Petherbridge defines “drawing,” that is, in much the same way Flusser defined a “dialogue,” namely as an exchange of information in the interest of new information, a quite intimate exchange between the drawer’s memory and the information—structures, possibilities, limitations—inherent in a medium.
Drawing is rarely if ever the result of artistic collaboration. In fact drawing, as Petherbridge frames it, coincides historically with the idea of the individual gifted with the power to originate—the idea that autopoesis seeks to dislodge. A start date is certainly difficult to pinpoint, but one could do worse than to link the originary genius model to the introduction of print in the mid-15th century. Certainly medieval artists made drawings. A few survive. But before the advent of print, the making of images was undertaken not to distinguish an individual, but to articulate the narratives—biblical and historical—that made the world meaningful. God was in charge of origins, and the sense of satisfaction one might have felt in having accomplished a particularly fine carving or illumination was surely understood as a sign of His favour rather than a personal achievement. Print, with all its attendant social and intellectual changes, relocated the site of origin to the gifted individual, validated his “signature” in a radically more systematic and precise way than had ever been possible or desirable before. Through the keeping and distributing of records—of exhibitions and sales, engraved or etched reproductions, sometimes conversations and opinions, the idea of an individual as origin quickly became naturalized. Simultaneously a gap opened between the print-mediated persona, represented as “originator”, and the actual experience of making something new, something more like a dialogue. Drawing remains the medium in which that kind of experience is most likely to have been stored. Drawing and print, then, emerge as complementary aspects of the same event. As if in reply to the first really powerful discursive medium, drawing absorbed the evidence of image-making as intimate dialogue. Other media were clearly used in the same way sometimes, but drawing has proved most effective in resisting the new powers of discourse, the link to ‘history’.
As long as artists could sustain a balance between working alone and participating in the historical discourse mediated through exhibition or print, the idea of the originary genius could go unchallenged. One thinks of the celebrated French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) as an example, perhaps primarily because he left a journal rich in evidence of diverse and very stimulating dialogue. At dinner parties, theatrical and musical performances, exhibitions, Delacroix regularly met France’s literary, political, scientific, social and artistic elite, informally exchanging views with them on topics of mutual interest. These were likely to include art. Many prominent politicians in mid-19th-century France had entered public life as art critics, honing their skills in political argument for an audience that understood image-making in terms of political discourse. A dialogue of such depth and diversity as Delacroix’s perhaps does not render long hours working in heroic isolation in the studio less admirable, nor the resulting images any less deserving of their immediate and durable place in historical discourse. But it does raise a legitimate question about where Delacroix’s work originated.
Delacroix’s career was apparently not affected by the advent of photography. Unlike some of his colleagues, he was optimistic about its potential, “if used to best advantage by ‘men of genius’”. He did not predict that photography would in time prove the single most effective force in dismantling the very idea of a “man of genius.” For “photogenic drawing” did confuse the issue of “origin.” Unlike hand drawing, photography most definitely does have a history, in fact one that may be understood to trace the emigration of “origin” out of the interstices of the exceptional mind and into a field of information exchange. New technologies, as one recent observer has pointed out, make it difficult not to collaborate.
Avant garde practice among visual artists—particularly in Futurism and Dada—drew models of collaboration from music, theatre and dance from the turn of the twentieth century. But it seems that collaboration was not discussed as a choice, a method or approach with quite specific opportunities and implications, until around 1970. At the time, the American sculptor Claes Oldenburg contrasted the “artist in the studio” as “rigid, violent and destructive (especially of self), and drunk or high (looking for sublimity),” with the “artist in collaborative situation, ”flexible, restrained, constructive, and sober (indifferent to sublimity, like airplane pilots)”
The list remains telling and provocative now, not least for its availability to other kinds of oppositions, such as infantile and mature, or masculine and feminine. But if artists ever really did imagine themselves actually facing such a choice, they are unlikely to have done so for long. To an extent we may be able to answer Wood’s question about “being drawn” positively, and so think of “creativity” in terms of flow of information that no one really possesses, the question can no longer be whether or not to collaborate. At most, it could be a decision to test and reshape one’s own memory in conjunction with the information stored in a given medium, or to engage with another human memory and allow the resulting decisions to dictate the medium. There are good reasons for doing either—or both, as many artists do. And there are good reasons to think that it isn’t precisely a choice in any case. One can not exactly go shopping for a way to make art. Some art is concerned with the possibilities and limitations of a single embodied consciousness. This is what determines its scope, and to a large extent its organization. To attempt to do such work collaboratively would be a kind of oxymoron. But many other kinds of practice—and Oldenburg’s long and very public engagement with sculptural scale clearly belongs in this category—fairly asks to be shared. For such projects, collaboration means that the practice can be more ambitious, complex, diverse, possibly even more stable than would be possible for an artist working alone.
In addition to such tactical advantages, collaboration represents one way of bridging the worsening disjunction between dialogue and discourse. Artists who have established themselves as artists are invariably people who know “dialogue” well. Able as they are to generate new information in exchange with a medium, they are no doubt more fortunate than those who, in the presence of powerful mass media discourses, are thrown back on dialogue at the level of local gossip. Still, the question of distribution persists. Without regular opportunities to exhibit or publish to preserve the achievement, the activity is closed-off in comparable manner. “People feel lonely despite dialogue because they feel ‘detached from history’.” Collaboration with other people potentially welds dialogue—the exchange that sparks something new—with something of discourse, for in a collaboration there will be at least one receiver, one reliable witness that something new has occurred.
But recent artistic collaborations also seem to articulate an aesthetic that values exchange and flow and this, I think, is the dimension that is genuinely new. For in this work neither the formal qualities of material nor the conceptual ambitions of its organization seem as significant as the dynamics of the particular relationships it mediates, whether these be between artists and work, work and viewers, or all of the above. The possibility that art might actually be about relationships was raised some time ago in the essay “Mass Culture and the Visual Arts,” There, in the context of his now-famous suggestion that the avant-garde might actually function as “the research and development arm of the culture industry,” Thomas Crow proposed that groups of avant garde artists, e.g. Futurists or Dadaists, had inadvertently modeled new kinds of group organization that were later important to the mainstream commercial structures, e.g. international corporations. This was surely very far from any Dadaist’s intention. The exhibition or performance of a particular kind of relationship was not the specific intention of most of the collaborating teams that Charles Green analyzed for his study The Third Hand, either. But in tracing changing forms of collaboration through the 1970s, Green also suggests that the shift from collaboration as a strategy is relocating the meaning of the resulting work, to a deepening interest in relationship per se. The collaborative performance work of Marina Abramovicz and Ulay, which concludes the book, also seem to be the most closely focused on the possibilities and limitations of a relationship between two specific “embodied subjects.”
Critical Art Ensemble, a collaborating team formed more recently, make this interest quite explicit.
[Since it was formed…in 1987] CAE has had a sustained interest in the variety of organizational possibilities from which artistic practice can emerge. Of particular interest have been the types of collectives that intersect artistic and activist practice. It is only through an understanding of this particular branch of sociology that the group believes it can refine and improve its own structure and dynamics, which makes thoughtful cultural production possible

With the possible exception of the later work of Ambramovicz and Ulay, successful collaborating teams seem to fastidiously respect, arguably even to nourish the boundaries of what used to be called “the individual.” Even in rethinking individuals as “embodied subjectivities,” in acknowledging cultural constructedness of subjects, these boundaries still matter. If anything the diversity of our experiences and memory become more precious than ever in the context of collaborative models of originality. For in such models, such gaps are exactly where something new can appear.

In the course of its intergalactic adventures, the crew of the Starship Enterprise occasionally encountered a cybernetic life form known as the Borg. The Borg are—or is—neither singular nor plural. Although they are recognizable bodies that move about and do things, they behave more like cells of a single animal than independent beings. As individuals, they have no convictions, no point of view. If one is sick or injured the relevant energies are reabsorbed into the hive-mind with no apparent regrets.
Within the fictional construct of the Star Trek, Borg are more highly evolved than humans. They don’t waste their energies fighting. They don’t compete. But they are repugnant and profoundly threatening because they do not make anything new. Instead of forging a history through dialogue and discourse as humans do, they parasitically absorb the cultures and technologies of other life forms.
If the crew of the Enterprise represents an idealized collaboration, the Borg articulate a fear that it all could go wrong. And if Star Trek as a whole perpetuates a great many untenable patriarchal and capitalist assumptions about the world, this one fear seems to resonate more deeply. The zeal for technically superb, efficient discourse could smooth out the oddities, peculiar histories and memories that make each human being unique. What would be lost then, it seems, is not riches or even power, but the peculiarly human capacity to make something new.

1. John Wood (2001) “Do Drawings Draw Themselves? Art, Co-poesis and Ecology” 199-210 IN: DrawingTexts, Jim Savage, ed., Occasional Press.
2. Vilem Flusser (2003) Kommunikologie, Mannheim: Bollmann Verlag, 17-18. Translation mine.
3. Deanna Petherbridge (1991) The Primacy of Drawing:an Artist’s View, London: The South Bank Centre. The Surealists’ exquisite corpse drawing is the exception that proves the rule. The serial collage of contributions strain the idea of collaboration as an exchange of information.
4. Eugène Delacroix (1951) The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Hubert Wellington, ed., Oxford: Phaidon. Cited in Aaron Sharf (1986) Art and Photography, New York: Penguin, 121.
5. Claes Oldenburg, in Maurice Tuchman (1971) Art and Technology, New York: Viking Press, 269. IN: Henry Sayre (1989) The Object of Performance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 102.
Since 1976 Oldenburg has worked in collaboration with wife Coosje van Bruggen.
6. Thomas Crow (1983) “Mass Culture and the Visual Arts.” 215-164 IN: Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, 253.
7. Charles Green (2001) The Third Hand:Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Post-Modernism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
8. Critical Art Ensemble (1998) “Observations on Collective Cultural Action,” 73-85 IN: The Art Journal 57:2 (Summer). 73.
9. Paramount Pictures (2005) “Aliens,” StarTrek.com, accessed 27 February


above copied from: http://collabarts.org/?p=198

Estera Milman, NOTES ON THE AESTHETICS OF DOOM

(1995)

A second non-Pop vein, which specializes in social protest, should also be mentioned, if only to dispel confusion by placing it properly outside Pop Art,,, these Assemblage, or 'Doom' artists are the political satirists that Pop artists are not. They are all that Pop is not, and proclaimed themselves 'anti-Pop' in February 1964. They are anguished, angry, and hot where Pop is cool detached and assured. They omit nothing from their conglomerations of trash, paint, collage and objects, whereas the Pop artists omit almost everything from their direct presentation, and they are essentially pessimistic where Pop is optimistic. Belligerently romantic, as a group they come as close to Neo-Dada as is possible today.
—Lucy Lippard, "New York Pop," 19661

In his 1963 introduction to the NO!Show, Seymour Krim, editor of The Beats (an anthology of "Beat Generation" prose and poetry) and fellow iconoclast, had offered a deliberately belligerent, insider's definition of the cultural production of the collective. The statement presaged Lippard's inadvertent reference to NOIart as the embodiment of a set of inverted paradigmatic defining terms for Pop.

They use every handy esthetic device (collage with mixed technique, overprints, what Boris Lurie calls a "simultaneity of attack") that will torpedo the eye and rape your soul of cliches. They are a band of rapists in a sense, impatient, unsparing, open-flied and ready for action - "hot" pop artists out for copulation rather than cool ones doing doodles before a mirror.2

In 1964, an expurgated (and somewhat misunderstood) excerpt of Krim's statement was cited in Edward T. Kelly's Art Journal article, "Neo-Dada: A Critique of Pop," wherein the author was attempting to reinvest diverse forms of neo-Dada (including the specific sub-set that had come to be associated with the redescribed rubric "Pop Art", with what he perceived to be a culturally ethical intentionality that crossed then recently imposed lines of demarcation among the newly canonized and the soon to be historiographically disempowered.3

Although Kelly goes so far as to make brief (and obviously reserved) note of the "Suggestion" that "the Pop Art movement itself was inspired by an attempt to make NO!art a more palatable commodity for a public willing to invest in satiric games,"4 it could convincingly be argued that the author's primary intention in the article was not simply to serve as Champion for the politically engaged collective. As is evidenced by his repeated critique of statements presented during a December 1962 symposium mounted by the Museum of Modern Art (an event which marked the ascendancy to power of the rubric "pop art"),5 Kelly was very much aware that he was participating in a broader cultural debate and that his opponents were the then dominant conservators of hierarchical value and normative idealistic aesthetics.

The extent to which the institution of art initially felt threatened by neo-Dada's critique of its inherently hierarchical, formalist assumptions is evident through perusal of the transcript for MoMA's "Symposium on Pop Art," as well as through review of numerous articles on the new art that appeared in the contemporary art press. For example, the January 1963 issue of Art International was dominated by a set of articles discussing "The New Realists, Neo-Dada, Le nouveau realisme, Pop Art, The New Vulgarians, Common Object Painting, and Know-nothing genre." Barbara Rose opened "Dada Then and Now," the lead essay in the issue, with the observation that, although no one could possibly believe that World War I era European Dada was still a vital "art style (emphasis mine)," the term had been resurrected in an attempt to describe the production of such disparate contemporary artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Whitman, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Wayne Theibaud,6 Rose continues: "Anti-art, anti-war, anti-materialism, Dada, the art of the politically and socially engaged, apparently has little in common with the cool detached art it is supposedly to have spawned.”7 Persistently describing neo-Dada in formalist, "pro-art" terms, the author attempts to correct what she describes as "popular misconceptions" that the "new Dada is an art of social protest" and that it is "anti-art."8 Through its repeated reference to "a cool and detached art," "Dada Then and Now" celebrates the codification of the art establishment's chosen set of defining principles for North American Pop Art. Conversely, through its rejection of a coterminous set of descriptive terms then applied to neo-Dada -- anti-art, anti-war, anti-materialism (in other words, those characteristics prerequisite to an art of social/and or political protest) the essay confirms the initiation of the historical disempowerment of the more overtly radical proponents of what was considered at the time to be a "new humanism," and for which NO!art served as paradigmatic model.

By 1966, Lippard could comfortably close her brief reference to "the old March Gallery group"9 with the assertion that it is "a febrile dispersiveness about Doom productions (irate manifestos, exhibitions titled ‘The Vulgar Show,' 'the Doom Show,’'The Involvement Show,' The No Show'), which fatally weakens them despite their devotion to admirable causes."10 Two years earlier, Kelly had proposed that it was the overt violence evidenced in "NO Art" [sic] that had understandably "thus far (impeded the collective's accrual of the) giddy success enjoyed by Pop Art."11 In his attempt to validate this proposition, the author referenced yet another intentionally combative, in house presentation of the collective's public face.

Writing in the poster-announcement for the 'NO Show,’ Seymour Krim, editorial director of Nugget magazine, cites the essential qualities of NO
as: ‘art that screams, roars, vomits, rages, goes mad, murders, rapes, commits every bloody act it can to express only a shred of the human emotions that lie prisoner beneath the sanitary tiles here in adman's utopia.'12

I would like to turn for a moment to the opening of an admittedly less "febrile," yet adamantly anti-formalist manifesto authored by Claes Oldenburg two years prior to Krim's NO! proclamation. Oldenburg, it should be noted, would later be counted as the fifth "hard-core Pop artist" listed, "in order of their commitment" (alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, and Rosenquist) in Lippard's 1966 compilation of the "New York five."13

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum ... I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top. I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and course and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.14

Oldenburg's manifesto first appeared in print in the catalogue for Martha Jackson Gallery's 1961 Environments, Situations. Spaces exhibition, during which the artist presented his first version of The Store. At that point in time, North American critics could not help but have aligned his artistic production, alongside that of many of his co-participants in what would soon thereafter come to be called American Pop Art, with "happenings," "new realism," "common object art,' and "the new vulgarians," all of which were coterminous with the hotly debated rubric, "neo-Dada." Within a few short years, however, Oldenburg would make an almost seamless transition from his early "messy" experiments with environments and happenings into the ranks of the purportedly cool and a-political newly codified North American Pop Art canon. Nonetheless, it is important to note that he would intermittently maintain his affiliation with the "underground" long after his position in the mainstream was secure.

Although it is generally assumed that rigid lines of demarcation between those artists who entered the contemporary canon and those whose affiliations remained with the artistic counterculture of the period were clear cut, it is not that simple. For example, in 1967 the aforementioned manifesto was reprinted in Store Days (Documents selected by Oldenburg and Fluxus performer and visual poet, Emmett Williams) and published by Something Else Press Inc. (New York/Villefrance-sur-mer/Frankfurt am Main), a prolific, Fluxus affiliated publication project that served as distribution mechanism for works by an international assembling of artists who were attempting to break down the lines of demarcation among media and between art and life.15 Although not a central Member of the Fluxus community, Oldenburg was regularly counted among the movement's participants. So too were Allan Kaprow, whom Lippard would describe in 1966 as the father of "Happenings”16 and Cologne based Wolf Vostell, inventor of Dé-collage. Both Kaprow and Vostell were also counted among the ranks of fellow travellers in NO!art. Vostell would later insist that, in the early sixties, Warhol "ran around New York taking in everything" and subsequently incorporated Fluxus artist Jackson McLow's ideas about me new cinema into his own film production.17

Conversely, during a 1963 interview on the topic, "What is Pop Art," Warhol discussed his own image making in terms that can not help but bring NO!art, and in particular Boris Lurie's pin-ups, directly to mind. When asked by G. R. Swenson to discuss his "Death" pictures, Warhol begins by making reference to cherry bombs, bloody crowds, "Death in America," his Electric Chair series, car wrecks, suicide pictures, decapitations and exploded body parts reproduce … the Enquirer, and plane crashes. The artist then continues: My next series will be pornographic pictures. They will look blank; when you turn on the black lights, then you see them — big breasts and … If a cop came in, you could just flick out the lights or turn on the regular lights -- how could you say that was pornography? But I'm still practicing with these yet.18

Almost a decade after the battle was purportedly over, Emanuel K. Schwartz and Reta Shacknove Schwartz published a somewhat eccentric, yet exceedingly insightful, collaborative essay on "NO-ART" in Leonardo. The psychoanalyst / artist team insisted that (in direct reaction to the McCarthy era) the 1959-64 movement "gave leadership to later cultural developments; such as, unisex; underground films and press; demonstration = confrontation; art of the street and finally, open violence and rebellion in the streets (Paris 1968)."19 Although the authors make brief reference to formal "resemblances" among NO! and Dada, it is to NO! art that they turn when attempting to discuss what they describe as the "aesthetics of protest,” and it is the NO-artist whom they identify as the paradigmatic "social critic."20 After citing a number of venerated examples of art-specific critiques and condemnations of society that had entered the art historical canon, the authors posit that "the NO-art group, however, turns the audience off perhaps because these artists 'act out' the action and esthetic distance between observer and the art object is lost,"21 a proposition that brings to mind Harold Rosenberg's pivotal 1952 anti-formalist essay, "The American Action Painters," wherein the critic insisted that the innovation of Action Painting was to dispense with representation in favor of enactment.22

In 1974, Rosenberg authored a brief essay in support of NO!art which opens with reference to Andy Warhol's "innocuous" disaster images and a less than subtle critique of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg's formalist rival.23 The author describes the NO!artists as the legitimate heirs of Dada, distinguishes their activities from the "post-dada(production) of Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and other housetrained kittens," and insists that Lurie, Sam Goodman, Stanley Fisher, et al anticipated Documents V by a decade.24 The essay closes with a set of belligerent indictments directed against the institution of art, and in particular the discipline of art history.25 Although this statement was presented as an appendix, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the "irate" manifestos that Lucy Lippard had condemned in 1966 as one of NO!art's fatal faults.

1. Will NO! Art be co-opted by art history?

2. Does it seek cooption?

3. Will shit multiples be produced by Marlboro, Pace and Castelli to comInforate this episode
of art history?

4. Will a retrospective shit show be sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the
New York State Council for the Arts? -5. If not, is this omission a falsification of art history?

6. What about other artists who have existed but have been omitted from art history?26

Curiously enough, in response to imperatives of the post-World War II period (and a decade prior to the consolidation of the "old March Gallery group"), Rosenberg had served as spokesman for the a-politicization of North American Art, as is evidenced in a statement that appeared in the editorial preface for the proto-Abstract Expressionist journal, Possibilities I.

Naturally the deadly political situation exerts enormous pressure. The temptation is to conclude that organized social thinking is "more serious" than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which experience has made possible ... Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course to be given up. Whoever genuinely believes he knows how to save humanity from catastrophe has a job before him which is certainly not part time.27
By 1974, Rosenberg's agenda may well have shifted as the critic attempted to respond to his then specific context. It remains to be seen how the imperatives of our own present will inform the current historiographic reinvestigation of the aesthetics of Doom.
1 Lucy R. Lippard, "New York Pop," Pop An, Lacy R. Lippard, ed,, (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1966/88) pp. 102-103.
2 Seymour Krim, "NO! Show, 1963" reproduced in NO!art, Boris Lurie and Seymour Krim, eds., (Berlin/Cologne: Edition Hundertmark, 1988) p. 22.
3 Edward T. Kelly, "Neo-Dada: A Critique of Pop Art," Art Journal XXHI:3,
Spring, 1964, p. 194. Kelly reproduces only the very last clause of this proclamation, and makes the assumption that Krim is here comparing NO!art to Abstract Expressionism rather than to Pop. Of the relationship among NO!art, Pop, and Dada Kelly writes, "As to whether Pop Art 'bears only superficial resemblance to Dada,' I do agree, but solely on formal and iconographic grounds, if we investigate the deeper meanings of Pop and NO, and their more ultimate purposes ... the relationship to dada becomes quite clear." Ibid., p. 196.
4 Ibid., p. 194.
5 An edited transcript of the "MoMA symposium appeared in print some months later. See, "A Symposium on Pop Art," Arts Magazine, 37:7, April 1963. For an indepth analysis of the ramifications of this event see, Estera Milman, "Pop Art/Pop Culture: Neo-Dada and the Politics of Plenty," The Image in Dispute: Visual Cultures in Modernity, Dudley Andrew, ed. (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1995).
6 Barbara Rose, "Dada Then and Now," Art International, 7:1, January, 1963, p. 23.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 24.
9 Lippard, p. 102.
10 Lippard, p. 103.
11 Kelly, p. 194.
12 Krim cited in Kelly, p. 194. In the original version, Krim begins the statement with the insistence that "We need an art..."
13 Lippard, p. 69.
14 Claes Oldenburg, "Store Days," in Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop, (Cambridge, MA/London; MIT Press, 1988) p. 105, Interestingly enough, Kelly reproduces a segment of another of Oldenburg's manifestos in his Spring 1964 Art Journal article. Kelly introduces the citation by describing its author as "one of the most prominent of the Pop artists. Kelly.” pp, 197-8.
15 For an authoritative discussion of the publishing project/gallery, see Dick Higgins, "Two Sides of a Coin: Fluxus and Something Else Press," in Fluxus: A Conceptual Country, Estera Milman, contributing ed. and curator, (Providence: Visible Language, 1992). Higgins, who is counted as one of the founding members of the Fluxus collective concurrently founded the press in 1964.
16 Lippard, p. 74.
17 Wolf Vostell, "No Blood ... Please...," in Lurie/Krim, p. 18. Individuals interested in Warhol's relationship to Fluxus should look, for example, to Jonas Mekas' Film Culture #45 (1968) and to his 1992 film, Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas, which premiered as part of the film festival portion of Fluxus: A Conceptual Country. Conversely, In and Around Fluxus: Film Festival and Fluxfilm Environments (curated by Mekas) recreated a film evening mounted at Maciunas' proto-Fluxus, AG Gallery in 1961, an event which included the screening of the late Ray Wisniewski's Doomshow (1960).
18 Andy Warhol cited in G R. Swenson, "What is Pop Art?," Art News, 62:7,
November 1963, pp. 60-61.
19 Emanuel K. Schwartz and Reta Shacknove Schwartz, "No-Art: An American Psycho-Social Phenomenon," Leonardo? Vol. 4, 1971, p. 248.
20 Ibid., p. 250.
21 Ibid., p. 251.
22 Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News 51/8, December 1952, p. 27.
23 Harold Rosenberg, "Bull by the Horns," in Lurie/Krim, p. 91.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 92.
26 Ibid.
27 Editorial Preface, Possibilities I: An Occasional Review? Winter 1947/48. Although this statement is signed by both Rosenberg and Robert Motherwell, two of the periodical's four editors, it is generally credited to Rosenberg.
Estera Milman curated in 2000/1 the first North American retrospective of early works by the NO!art cooperative of artists active in New York since the early 1960s at Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston.

above copied from: http://text.no-art.info/en/milman_notes-aesthetics.html