Guest Author of August 2010

We are very happy to welcome a legendary figure like Rasheed Araeen on our website. He has created the most important international periodical on the global art scene outside the west and the lost modernity, Third Text. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, in 1987. As author and editor, he has become the leading voice in the representation of the art world in its contradictions. In the first GAM volume Andrea Buddensieg has introduced his work as artist in her study “Visibility in the Art World: The Voice of Rasheed Araeen” (2007). Araeen will also be presented in our forthcoming exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 in 2011. An earlier version of the following Manifesto was issued on Saturday, October 18, 2008, as part of the Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The text touches one of the real problems of today’s art production, namely the “ultimate failure of the avant-garde” in the face of both art market and bourgeois institutions, a failure which was “fatal for the criticality of art.” “Art now performs no critical social function” and therefore does not reach the ordinary people.

“The complicity of the artist [...] turns him or her into a celebrity as part of the spectacles of culture industry.” The answer of “what is do be done now?” has become difficult. Araeen seeks the answer in that art “should focus on what is there in life” and develop an imagination of its own for the collective survival problems of mankind.

ECOAESTHETICS. A Manifesto for the 21st Century

THE BARBARISM OF CIVILISATION MUST END!

Is the history of human achievements also not a history of violence, which Walter Benjamin calls the barbarism of civilisation? The six thousand or so years of Civilisation or civilisations have given us tremendous knowledge, of ourselves, of the world around us and of the cosmos. We are now much more knowledgeable and can penetrate the invisible space of the universe. And yet we are no wiser than the Mesopotamians, the ancient Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians or Arabs. Our imagination can reach beyond Mars, but is often unable to resolve even small disagreements or disputes among ourselves without resort to confrontation leading to all kinds of violence. Is this not the violence of the infantile narcissistic ego (hereafter ‘narego’), not only of the high priests, of kingdoms and empires, ancient and contemporary, but what lies inside every one of us, male and female, as we constantly and persistently try to rise above or overpower others? Did not art, as well as religion, science and philosophy, try to exorcise this narego but failed? If the evidence of this is there now in the extreme self-centred individualism of art today, is it not a disturbing symptom of something that has gone wrong? Is it not due to our detachment as self-centred individuals from our collective humanity, which is now not only facing its own destruction but the annihilation of all life on earth?

However, what concerns me here is our own modern era, the twentieth century which began with great ideas in art, literature, music, science and philosophy, giving humanity great hope for a better future. But this hope was dashed by the violence that this century unleashed, killing more than a hundred million people; perhaps the most violent century in the history of humanity. Can we explain this paradox only by blaming a particular socio-political system while extricating ourselves as individuals from it by believing that we as avant-garde artists have been engaged in what would have exposed and confronted the brutality of the system? Has this belief not been based on the naivety of an idea that has failed? It failed because it never achieved what it claimed it wanted to achieve, to liberate art from the bourgeois enclave and make it part of the collective everyday life of the people.

THE AVANT-GARDE

When Marcel Duchamp threw a urinal in the face of the bourgeoisie to confront its aesthetic values, what did he expect? Did the urinal not come bouncing back in his face? Did he at the time not realise the futility of such an action, that he would be celebrated for this action, eventually, by the very same bourgeoisie and placed him in history as one of the most important artists of the 20th century?

Duchamp was of course aware of the pitfalls of entering the art market, and he did resist the temptation of selling his work. But it seems he did not comprehend fully that the fate of art in bourgeois society depended on its becoming a saleable commodity and that his own work would end up in the same way. It was only in the 1950s that he sensed what actually lay in store for his work, resigning himself it seems not only to his own failure but also to that of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He knew then he had no choice but to accept his eventual fate, perhaps cynically, that of replicating his works and offering it to the art market in exchange for a sense of celebrity in his old age. Did not Duchamp, in the end, capitulate to what he had been confronting all his life?

I have deliberately oversimplified an extremely complex issue – which has been critically dealt with by many theorists–only to highlight a basic but significant problem. The example of Duchamp, who in my view was the most imaginative radical artist of the 20th century, and who had opened up many new possibilities for art and had left us a large body of important ideas for which he should be admired, is to show the ultimate failure of the avant-garde due to its capitulation not only to the art market but the bourgeois institution. This may be a unavoidable paradox as without this paradox everything seems to collapse into nothingness within bourgeois society. My aim is therefore not to renounce or denounce the historical avant-garde but to suggest the possibility of overcoming or avoiding this paradox.

The aim of the historical avant-garde was to free art from the bourgeois legitimation by entering the everyday life and becoming part of its creativity. But it could not. Because the artist’s narego would not allow him or her to come down from its high intellectual pedestal and become part of the life of ordinary people. While it used the strategy of confronting bourgeois aesthetics, the avant-garde at the same time looked to the bourgeois institution for what would recognise its historical status as art. Consequently, what appeared to be a confrontation was in fact what brought the narcissisms of two egos together–the artist’s own ego and the ego of the power of the art institution. Did these egos then not find reconciliation by coming together in a happy embrace?

This embrace of the avant-garde with the bourgeoisie has not only trapped art in a paradox, but it has been fatal for the criticality of art. The consequences of which is evident everywhere today. Art now performs no critical social function, because what was once an opposition to the system has become a tool with which the bourgeoisie now asserts its cultural power. In fact, what is created and promoted today in the name of the avant-garde is part of the mass media entertainment, promoted and legitimised by the bourgeois art institution on the basis that this way art reaches the ordinary people. But what actually happens is an exploitation of gullible public through the sensationalism of the populist media that often disregards people’s beliefs and values; its offensiveness is justified on the basis of the individual freedom of speech or expression.

The complicity of the artist in all this is understandable, as it provides him or her a successful career. Which also inflates the artist’s narego further and turns him or her into a celebrity as part of the spectacles of culture industry.

However, it is important also to recognise that there is another history of art which was involved in a different struggle within the avant-garde, which indeed tried to integrate art with life. Its beginning can perhaps be attributed to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement, some ideas of which re-emerged in the early twentieth century as part of the progressive forces unleashed by the Russian revolution and the Bauhaus. But all this also eventually collapsed, perhaps prematurely. Many different and complex historical forces brought about this collapse. But the division of labour between mental and manual work, which provides the bourgeois intellectual with the means to create new ideas, also played a role in this collapse. No matter how good or significant the ideas may be, they cannot succeed when imposed from above on the masses and without any consideration of the nature of people’s own creative resources and abilities. Altruism cannot perform any true social function if it is an extension of the narcissist ego or a charity towards those who are deprived of the means to express themselves.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE NOW?

The failure of the historical avant-garde was not entirely due to the nature of the ideas it produced. It had much more to do with the way they were articulated and with the forms that were open to appropriation by the very forces it wanted to confront and change. Some of these ideas still have the potential to intervene in life and transform it. But to deal with today’s disturbing world situation art must not only liberate itself from the artist’s narego but also from the trap into which art has thus ended up. This trap is of the bourgeois art institution that has now become totally subservient to the commercial interests of the art market. If art must have a social function, it must go beyond the making of mere objects that end up in art museums and/or as precious commodities in the art market. Only then it can enter the world of everyday life and become part of its collective creativity.

The avant-garde has indeed produced some radical ideas whose historical significance cannot be denied. These ideas may represent a body of accumulated finite objects in the Museum, but they were part the historical movement the complexity of which involved contradictions and paradoxes which allowed it to maintain it dynamics, while moving from one innovative stage of its development to another. Even when the significance of ideas was legitimised by the bourgeois art institutions and they thus became trapped inside its Museum, the actual movement of the ideas did not follow the predetermined institutional agenda. This is very important to recognise, because we can then look at this movement on its own terms and re-activate it outside the space determined institutionally. In this way it can defy the demands of the established order and come up with something very different, not necessarily by opposing the earlier models of art production or concepts but transcending these models. The movement can in fact be made to re-emerge in history and to take up different forms with a new vitality and vision.

There are indeed ideas in history, particularly those which emerged during the late 1960s and early 70s, which can be now liberated from their institutional prisons and made part of life. During this time the making of paintings and sculpture was abandoned in favour of art as concepts, thanks to Duchamp whose early ideas helped art to reach this point. But art now went beyond Duchamp’s object-making and engaged with the concepts–thus called Conceptual Art.

The land has always been an object of the artist’s gaze, but in Conceptual Art the gaze did not produce landscape painting. On the contrary, the conception of land as art itself became the artwork. This was achieved by intervening in the land and transforming it into something that remained part of the land, either as a stationary object or as something that would transform itself continually. Many artists dug holes in the ground or made dam-like earthen structures. Robert Smithson turned an existing lake into an artwork. Robert Morris, on the other hand, contemplated growing a crop on farmland and turning it into a work of art. But he did not execute the project. It seemed he faced the problem of his narego. The conflict between the individualism of the intellectual and the collectivity of manual work prevented the artist from recognising the farm workers as his equal partners–in terms of both its production and ownership. The only choice then left for Morris was to abandon the idea.

What emerged from some of these conceptual works was a paradigm shift from the idea of representation to a process of continual transformation that would allow art to become part of living processes of productivity of the land itself as well as its inhabitants. But despite this historical shift in the conception of art, most of the works ended up as photographs in museums, mere objects of gaze. What should have become the living process of productive land ended up in museums as frozen, reified art.

About ten years later, in 1982, Joseph Beuys tried to resolve this difficult problem–perhaps a paradox–by suggesting that his work of planting trees at Kassel should become part of peoples’ everyday life. It offered a model of the transformative power of art, but his proposal also failed to go beyond the idea of art legitimised and contained by the bourgeois art institution. And although with this specific work Beuys opened a space for future developments, he failed to resolve the problem of art trapped within both the artist’s narego and the institution that could not allow art to become part of the collectivity of peoples’ everyday life.

However, although the ideas which suggested the transformation of land into art failed to go beyond the achievements of some special individuals, and were thus appropriated and contained by the art institution, they could not be considered a finite closure. The ideas can be and are turned into institutionally manageable objects, thus contained in their temporalities, but ideas as knowledge can never be trapped as the property of an individual or the institution. They can always salvage themselves, give themselves a new context and move forward within the dynamic of new time and space. They can indeed perform a radically new transformative function in dealing with today’s situation. But for this art must go beyond what prevails as art and integrate itself with the collective struggle of life today to recover its true social function and become a radical force of the twenty-first century.

Before I proceed further in elaborating the dialectic of this salvage or recuperation, I want to pay homage to someone who even in the early days of the avant-garde realised the futility of confronting the bourgeois ruling classes. When Hugo Ball, one of the pioneers of Dada, realised that it was a waste of time making fun of the bourgeoisie, he walked out of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, which he himself had founded in the early 1916, and went to live in Ticino, Switzerland, among the poor peasants. This may appear to be a romantic gesture, following in the footsteps of Gauguin, and I am not suggesting that artists should pack up their studios and live among the peasants. But Ball’s integration with the life of a collective does open a way forward, particularly now when the collective life of the planet is in danger of being destroyed. It is in fact artistic imagination, not art objects, which once freed from the self-destructive narcissist ego, can enter this life and offer it not only salvation but put it on the path to a better future. Hugo Ball lived at a time before history had moved to the point when one could contemplate a piece of land as art. He lived in isolation, cut off from the development of ideas in art. But we are now aware that a piece of land can not only be a work of art but has historically been canonised as such. A piece of land can now be conceived not merely as a conceptual art object, but this concept can be taken beyond its canonised object-hood and become an ongoing and self-sustaining dynamic process, a movement generated within itself, and legitimised through its own agency. This agency is not that of individual artists, who might have initiated the idea of land as art, but the collective work of those who work on the land. It is this collective work of the masses, not nature as perceived by the land artists like Smithson and Morris, which continually transforms the land, producing an agency which is not only creatively productive but posits a progressive idea towards the solution of the problem the world faces today and will continue to face in the future if nothing is done in this respect.

What the world faces today is not just a phenomenon of climate change, to be studied by scientists in their ivory towers, but the reality of its disturbing consequences faced by all life on earth. They are not just the problems of polluted air, oceans, rivers and lakes, and the threat of the rising sea level which will drown large areas of the earth’s inhabited land, including many major cities of the world, but the resulting increased deprivation and poverty of a very large portion of the world’s population. Although the popular media informs us and makes us think about the misery of millions of starving people in the world, generating sympathy towards these people–notwithstanding the efforts of academics to deal with this problem–the real solution to the problem lies not in what is offered as charity but in the empowerment of the people themselves. Only when people are in a position to use their own creative potentials, which can be enhanced by an artistic imagination, will a change occur. What the world now needs are rivers and lakes of clean water, collective farms and the planting of trees all over the world. An artistic imagination can in fact help achieve all these objectives.

The rising sea must be stopped, for which the first priority must be the reduction of the carbon emissions in the atmosphere and the planting of more trees. Both of these objectives can be achieved by conceptualising the process of desalination as an ongoing continuous artwork, with its own dynamics and agency.

The establishment of desalination plants around the world–it can be millions–may not make much difference to the sea level but can provide an enormous quantity of water not only for the cultivation of land but also to fulfil all other needs of life on earth.

The idea of desalination plants as an artistic idea is based on the potential of art to transform things, and comprises a complex cycle of continuous transformation from the sun’s energy to the growing of plants. This can be understood by dividing the cycle into three parts:

1. The sun’s energy, which is plentiful around the world, when brought into contact with water transforms itself into steam, then to mechanical energy.

1. Mechanical energy can either be used directly or through the production of electricity to run the desalination plants.

1. In the third cycle, water feeds the earth which then produces trees and plants for the life of humans, animals, birds and insects.

This phenomenon happens in nature. But when it is replicated through artistic imagination, science and technology, its results enhance the very phenomenon of nature which it replicates. The role of artistic imagination here is to think, initiate and create not what is self-consumed by the ego from which the idea emerges, but what can transcend and transgress the narego and become part of the collective energy of the earth. It can then transform it in ways that not only enhance the natural potential of the earth itself but also the collective creativity of the life of all its inhabitants.

The idea of desalination plants is not just a conceptual artwork but can be materially realised; it is also meant to be an example of the broader conceptual framework from which many more ideas and projects can emerge. This manifesto for the twenty-first century therefore proposes that art not only should move out of the studios but also stop playing the silly games of the so-called neo-Dada. Instead, it should focus on what is there in life, to enhance not only its own creative potential but also the collective life of earth’s inhabitants. The world today is facing enormous violence and this will increase in the rest of the twenty-first century as the Earth’s resources shrink due to the stupidity of the kind of life humans have been pursuing. Art can and should strive for an alternative that is not only aesthetically affirmative and productive but is also beneficial to all forms of life of our planet. We humans are the gift of mother Earth, and it is now our duty as its guardians to protect the earth from impending disaster.