THE ARTIST AS SOMETHING ELSE

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.” ― Marcel Duchamp

Art as it is known today is not art as it was known in the past. It can be safely surmised that while, in our futures, painting, music, sculpture and other modes of expression will continue to exist, how they are thought about and what their purpose is will have changed. They have not remained static any more than other activities have, even if a thread runs through them in the form of basic and common shared practices.

            Going back to ancient times, it would seem that every type of  art was fused with magic. Cave paintings of animals may have aided tribal peoples in their hunts. Songs were used by the first healers to cure the sick[1]. Poetry was fused with music, and these were chanted to enchant. The dance that accompanied those songs invited the spirits to come and participate. Masks were crafted to let the wearer don certain personas or deities in ritual, and the work of certain artisans was associated with various beings of power. Weavers and weaving were related to the Fates, for example, and blacksmiths were associated with the Magyar god Hadúr and the Irish goddess Brigid, among many, many other associations. Magic, which can often be thought of as dealing with the unseen, is made visible through the creation of images and objects, enactment, and the use of utterance and the voice. It’s hard to find an art that can’t be traced back to the practice of magic. This even includes fields that are now considered sciences, but were considered arts in times gone.

            The professor of art history Simon Shaw-Miller noted in his book Visible Deeds of Music  how the classical Greek word mousike, which comes down to us as music, was related directly to the “art of the Muses,” and how this word “was first a concept signifying any art form over which the Muses presided: poetry, song, dance, astronomy.”[2] It did not have the same categorical use for just one type of creative expression that it does now. Shaw-Miller goes on to write about how sculpture, painting and architecture were not considered to be a unified group based around what we now call aesthetics until the fifth century A.D.. All culture that we now consider specifically visual was, for centuries, just considered to be part of craftsmanship.

            Plato and Aristotle worked on classifying the arts, but mostly focused on the age-old relationship between music and speech. In medieval times up through the Renaissance there were considered to be seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. All of these except music have now lost their identity as arts and are instead thought of as relating to science or language. In those times scientia meant something closer to the body of knowledge around a specific area of study.

            The word art itself wasn’t even really used for what it is now used for until the early nineteenth century, when it was separated from craft, and artisans started to be thought of as different from the artiste.

            Even these brief remarks have been confined to just how art has been thought of from a Western point of view, not even scratching the surface of how other cultures think or thought about the broad umbrella of the arts and their history. All this is to say that what is considered an art now may not be considered so in our futures, and things that are kept separate now may join together (as some did in the past) to become something new in the myriad cultures of our futures. It is, however, with this brief and limited historical perspective in mind that I wish to devote this iteration of Cheap Thrills to an exploration of possible roles for the artist in deindustrial society when art and the artist might become something else altogether.

THE ARTIST AS PRANKSTER AND CONCEPTUALIST

This edition of Cheap Thrills started off as an article on pranks and the spirit of the trickster, but the more I tried to work on it, the trickier it became. Perhaps my subconscious was trying to pull one over on me as I drafted my notes, because I only made headway when I abandoned the idea in frustration and started working on something else. I was soon led back to the enigmatic world of Marcel Duchamp, who like a trickster, seems to turn up when least expected.  So, in one sense, this article might be considered as a rumination on one of the great pranks played on the art world of the twentieth century. I am of course talking about Duchamp’s masterstroke of sheisty shenanigans when he signed the name R. Mutt on a common urinal, gave it the title “Fountain,” and installed it in art gallery.

            This act of taking the piss  out of the art scene can alternatively be looked at as a kind of logistical chess move that liberated painters and sculptors from the prison of the canvas and marble block to make a then-new kind of work out of concepts and ideas. Another name for the trickster is the changer, and Duchamp’s antics changed the way art was viewed as he called into question whether or not a manufactured object could be considered worthy of the same kind of aesthetic respect typically given to creators of traditional works.

            Duchamp had grown up in a family devoted to culture and was himself a skilled painter and chess player. But he was quick to become bored with painting and what he called “retinal art.” Instead, he conceived putting industrially made objects to use as a way of stimulating the intellect and not just making pleasant shapes for the eye. The term readymade had already been in use in the United States at the time to refer to products made by manufacturing, as opposed to handmade goods created by artisans. Duchamp adopted the term for a class of objects, like his urinal, taken out of context, and designated as art. This move ushered in the idea of concept art, which owes as much to philosophy as it does to aesthetics. Duchamp later pretended that he abandoned making art altogether in favor of playing chess, which he did on a world-class level, while for twenty years, in secret, he worked on his mysterious sculptural masterpiece the “Étant donnés,” only revealed towards the end of his life.

            Some people might think of conceptual art as a joke in itself, made at the expense of the audience. It’s an understandable view. Art in the twentieth century was dominated by people who often preened themselves on their supposed intellectual superiority while making things that people who hadn’t spent a small fortune going to art school couldn’t give two hoots about. Beauty was absent, abstraction was in, much of it abhorrent to the masses, but praised by a small and self-satisfied elite. Yet the chain of events Duchamp set in motion with his “Fountain” and other readymades led to later flowerings of concept art, manifesting in the “anti-movement” of Fluxus, and many stunts, pranks and hoaxes that wouldn’t have been called art at all in previous centuries.

            Duchamp prized the intellectual exactitude developed by playing chess, and he wanted to bring that same rousing rigor of the mind to bear in the art world. Concepts might seem of vague use in a future dark age, yet they are incredibly mighty. If the material resources needed to make art become scarce, concepts can still be played with when there is little else. A concept, by not being fixed to the material plane (though often embodied in pieces of art) is more fluid and able to permeate into the background radiation of life itself. When concepts become infused with symbols, they may take on even more life. Becoming a conceptual artist, then, could prove to have vast implications across the ragged slope of decline, especially if the concepts themselves spread and are adopted by others.

Granted, paper, ink, paint, and some dyes,  are all well within the realm of possibility to produce locally and low-tech. There will also be a plethora of discarded readymades readily available just by combing through the ruins. But what is more low-tech than a concept itself? It seems to me that concept art can continue to exist and inform our futures alongside the resurgence of traditional ateliers where the mastery of skills needed to make great retinal art are being taught and revived.

             When the new and the old are brought into sympathetic symbiosis amidst the camaraderie of survival, something else will be born.

This Mentat is a human synthesist.

THE ARTIST AS SYNTHESIST

In the grand scope of history, Oswald Spengler  thought that an "age of synthesis" follows the dark age after the fall of a civilization. During a time of synthesis anything still of value that remains from the fallen civilization gets woven together into new strands of meaning, connection and invention to be passed on to those who follow.  As society retroverts back towards modes adapted for living on a lower resource base, the boundaries between the specialized arts that emerged roughly during the Enlightenment, as discussed above, may now once again overlap and merge to create a synthesis of activities previously held as separate. However, those with the inclination to synthesize don’t need to wait for the current stage of decline to finish running its course, but can help carry things along by practicing my new slogan “Synthesis Now.”

            Synthesis is a healthy reaction to the pervasive influence of post-modernist deconstruction. Tearing things down can only go so far before all that is left is a bunch of shattered and disconnected pieces. It may yet be possible to create a beautiful mosaic that expresses truth and transmits useful knowledge to the future out of the shards in this scrap heap, merging them together and blending their influences. The artist as synthesist looks to what worked in the past and what is still useful in the present, and brings them together. They rake through the coals of a variety of burned-out disciplines whose less useful features have already been self-cannibalized as dirty fuel for today’s culture wars.  The things that get saved and synthesized will be those things each individual artist is drawn to from their own love and interest of that particular concept, object, subject, practice or philosophy. Others with different interests will be drawn to different materials to save and synthesize. In this manner, certainty will be de-prioritized in favor of serendipity. Polarization and dogmatism can be checked at the door to make way for pragmatism and the putting together of an eclectic mix of tools that produce results. 

            Another way to think about synthesis is as an absence of specialism and a re-embrace of a generalist mindset. Synthesizers become jacks of all trades and are helpful to their communities because they have made a habit of becoming comfortable looking at things from many perspectives, and like a magpie, hang on tight to useful bits and bobs of lore. The results of synthesis are like a thick mulligan stew where many different ingredients are all swimming in the same collective gravy, made tasty by their skillful combination. The artist in this respect is playing the role of a penny-pinching alchemist, separating some things and bringing others together.
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            Related to artistic synthesis is the concept of intermedia. The word was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1812. The term didn’t really catch on, but it got resurrected by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in his essay on the subject first published by him in 1966 in a newsletter for his Something Else Press. According to Higgins both he and Coleridge used it as a way to “define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known.”
           
Higgins was keen to point out the way the arts had become specialized in the Renaissance, writing, “The concept of the separation of media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that a painting could be made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought, categorizing and dividing society.”[1] Not only did this division of media lead to greater specialization, it also further contributed to the division of the senses. The arts in the West, and perhaps in general around the world, have long been predisposed towards the visual and the auditory. Paintings are for the eye, as is the written word, whereas music, stories and recited poetry are for the ear. The senses of touch, taste and smell tend to get sidelined in most art. Intermedia occupies the liminal spaces between media, and often in the zones where two or more senses overlap. Our current culture has fragmented in part because we have fragmented ourselves through the neglect of touch, smell and taste.
            “Happenings” were the prime vehicle for intermedia works, as well as Fluxus art in general.  With roots in the deep soil of Dada and Surrealism, the Happenings involved a heady mixture of sound, light, slides or projected film, and sculptural elements, with audience participation that brought a tactile element to the proceedings. Sometimes these Happenings were called an Event.          

 Writer and art historian Hannah Higgins[2] writes on the intermingling of senses in intermedia that:
           
            Far from being limited to the traditional realms of painting and sculpture, the  categorising             behaviour of the modern era established the hierarchy of the senses in the modern period, at least in the cultural mainstream. Perhaps for this reason, hierarchies both in the fine arts and relating to the sensory system run roughly parallel to each other: from the visual as painting and as the sensory basis for the literary arts (as read),  through sound as music to the baser art forms of movement (dance), taste (gourmet         cooking) and scent (perfumery). Intermedia work, it could be said, occurs between media  categories and perceptual categories. Understanding the power of intermedia work in  general, and the Event in particular, calls for a cross-modal aesthetics of all senses as   based in the interactions of hearing, touch, smell, taste and sight. The consideration of intermedial (and therefore intersensory) art therefore requires a simultaneously   physiological and cultural framework for each sense as a cross-modal perceptual  system.[3]

 To me the locus of ritual suggests such a cultural framework. Movement, sound, visualization, and smell are all brought together in ritual. Ritual also links us to the distant past and will be practiced by humans well into the future. Industrial society does not lack ritual, even if, for some, the rituals themselves have changed. The potential to create new rituals around emergent symbols exists, and one way people might enjoy them in non-dogmatic, no-particular-belief-required modes, might first be on an aesthetic level, through a revival of Happenings and Events which are their own kind of ritual.

            Another avenue to approach artistic synthesis is the gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work” of Richard Wagner. This is perhaps a more useful line of inquiry to those with a traditionalist mindset with regards to the arts. For Wagner the art of the future was to be based on the art of the  distant past, helped along with a healthy dose of philosophical underpinning from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner’s mind had cast back to a time when poetry, dance and music were all a part of drama and were closely akin to religious celebrations. The two key essays that lay out his theoretical position are “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future” both from 1849. Later the term  gesamtkunstwerk was used to describe the many modes of activity engaged by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, another vein rich for the mining by artistic synthesizers.
          
  Through a greater experience of our entire sensorium, we may come to feel less separated from the natural world in all its vast richness.            

THE ARTIST AS ECOLOGIST

A piece of landscape art by Andy Goldsworthy.

The great anthropologist and systems theory thinker Gregory Bateson thought that all of nature was permeated by mind. Mind and nature are inseparable. Thus, the products of the human mind, our concepts and theories, are just as much a part of nature as anything else. By that same token, the products of culture, our artworks, even our machines, make up parts of the vast number of interconnected systems we all are a part of, all of them infused with mind. The artist is as much a part of these ecologies as anyone or anything else. Yet those who create with the imagination, and inject their creations into the stream of culture, can in some cases have greater effects on the larger systems they are a part of when their work gets amplified and transmitted through information feedback loops.

            In this sense, one of the roles for the artists of our futures may be that of an ecologist. This theme was picked up by Gene Youngblood (who also used the term intermedia) in his book Expanded Cinema. He writes, “For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality.”[1]

            Highlighting our interconnected relationships seems to me to be especially useful in the hours, days, weeks, months and years ahead. Highlighting the way things interact in complex systems could go a long way to fostering a greater understanding of systems thinking among the general public.

            Kim Stanley Robinson picked up on the idea of the artist as ecologist in his novel 2312. Granted, this work of SF is set within the same worlds as his Mars trilogy that focus on the colonization and terraforming of Mars and other planets in our solar system. But for the deindustrial reader who is skeptical of such promises, this does not mean Robinson is any less of a storyteller, or that certain of his ideas are not welcome, and might even be adapted to a world of less high technology. If nothing else his strong imagination rivals the banal wet dreams of Elon Musk. The main character in 2312 is Swan Er Hong, who has made a life for herself designing asteroid terrariums. These are basically hollowed out asteroids that have been terraformed to have different earth-like biomes. Er Hong is also an artist who works on the landscape scale creating what are called Goldsworthies in the book, named after the real-life artist Andy Goldsworthy, one of the more well-known practitioners of land art. These landscape art pieces are touched on throughout his book.[2]

            Land art started off in the 1960s as a corollary to the back-to-the-land and environmental movements then having their day. Land artists decided to ditch the galleries and museums and work directly with the natural materials as their palette. These artists were, paradoxically, also drawing inspiration from conceptual art and certain aspects of minimalism. Another form of inspiration was the ancient land art created by cultures in the distant past, monuments like Stonehenge, Serpent Mound, the Nazca Lines and the Liffington White Horse.[1] . Much of the material for land art is gathered on site in the form of rocks, soil, trees, and branches. There is a tendency for land art to change and shift over time with the landscape, subject to the same elements as any other part of the land. Wind, rain, rising waters and the growth of new plant life, and the activity of animals all cause land art to be engulfed by the nature out of which it was made. Sometimes these works are only documented by photographs, especially those created in remote locations. 

            Andy Goldsworthy has been part of this movement as a sculptor and photographer, creating stunning works that involve minimal intervention in the land, using materials that are able to be moved around, rather than things he would have to destroy to make a work out of. He said that, “I am reluctant to carve into or break off solid living rock…I feel a difference between large, deep rooted stones and the debris lying at the foot of a cliff, pebbles on a beach…These are loose and unsettled, as if on a journey, and I can work with them in ways I couldn’t with a long resting stone.”[3] Using mostly his hands and body, Goldsworthy works with the materials at a site to create pieces of flitting and evanescent beauty that he then documents with his camera.

            Pieces of land art and sculpture modeled on his work are certainly within the realm of the achievable for those working with a lower resource base, and they’re another fertile area for future artists to continue working. Goldsworthy is only one of a number of artists who have been involved in making this kind of work, which itself is not well defined, and is only one of many possible ways the artist may take on the role of ecologist. 

             Land art was created as part of the feedback loop generated by the entire concept of concept art. If the artist is a part of the ecology, their actions, their ideas, and the concepts they put into circulation will go on to become part of the world, creating ripples, small or large, and information feedback loops within the system.

ALL TOGETHER SOMETHING ELSE 

To summarize, the artist as prankster, conceptualist, synthesist and ecologist may continue to have a role in the societies of our futures. Changers are needed when things become locked into rigid patterns of calcified mentality. In these times the trickster steps in to shake things up, to question what it is we are doing and what exactly it is we might become. Subtle concepts might be created that leak into the culture, small actions giving way to large transformations. These concepts might be in any medium, or fall in the cracks between media, expanding our senses, and in doing so, highlight the interconnected relationships we might otherwise take for granted.
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Of course the artist might just become something else altogether.

FOR MY OTHER CHEAP THRILLS ARTICLES FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

CULTS OF MUSIC

IN SEARCH OF LOST SLACK

NOTES:

[1]Gioia, Ted. Healing Songs. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2006.

[2] Shaw-Miller, Simon. Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2002.
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[1] Higgins, Dick. Intermedia Newsletter 1, https://dickhiggins.org/newsletters-vol-1-%26-2

[2]The daughter of Dick Higgins and Fluxist artist Alison Knowles.

[3]  Higgins, Hannah. Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory. <https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/intermedial-perception-or-fluxing-across-the-sensory.html>
[1] Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1970.

[2]Another interesting aspect of 2312 that New Maps readers may enjoy is the way Robinson modeled the economy of his future worlds on the cooperative Mondragon corporation.

[3] Hatley, James D. (2005). "Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace in Andrew Goldsworthy". Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2. Fall 2005.

​RE/SOURCES:

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1979.

Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. New York, NY.  Academy Editions, 1998.

Goldsworthy, Andy. Ephemeral Works: 2004-2014. New York, NY.: Abrams, 2015.

Goldsworthy, Andy. Hand to earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture, 1976-1990. New York, NY.:|Abrams, 1993.

Hatley, James D. (2005). "Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace in Andrew
Goldsworthy". Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2. Fall 2005.

Higgins, Dick. Intermedia, Fluxus, and The Something Else Press: Selected Writings of Dick Higgins. Siglio, Los Angeles, CA.: 2018.

Higgins, Hannah B. “Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory.” <https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/intermedial-perception-or-fluxing-across-the-sensory.html>
Moffitt, John F. Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: the Case of Marcel Duchamp. Albany, NY. : State University of New York Press, 2003.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2312. New York, NY.: Orbit. 2012.

Sanouillet, Michel, and Elmer Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press, 2023.

Shaw-Miller, Simon. Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. Yale University. New Haven, CT.: 2002

Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York, NY.: Dutton, 1970.

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