Page 19 - Studio International - December1996

3. Planned obsolescence: a product is We have to feel rather than judge what is speak and take clay and colour and yield up other
planned to break down physically during a actually new. Destruction is not new but things like Yves Tinguely's delicate machines. And
all these man may become—sculpture, poet, writer,
specified period. regressive. Although the forms or techni- dancer, mannekin—things of which Artaud would
ques of destruction may be new, the acts approve, and lavish praise and words; from, of course,
The first is the result of research, the other two for of these regressive agents are not really the public asylum, where he let his brain be picked
forcing production and sales. apart, as he smiled.
I believe these techniques have been used in art creative acts. After twenty years, more or less, man is ready to
since the war. Functional obsolescence occurs when José Luis Castillejo begin his great work of art, his fundamental project,
a new aesthetic supersedes. Art is always subject to his supreme act of creation, his monument to the
contemporary/techniques and ideas. Since 1945, BOOM!!! world. He will destroy himself.
a series of short-lived movements have replaced one Juan Hidalgo And it can be said that man fulfils this project with
another. All date quickly—have become psycholo- finesse, and style, and great variety of method. Some-
gically obsolete. The physical break-down is clearly BANG!!! times he does this alone, but most often he employs
seen in the use of impermanent materials. tens, hundreds, even millions of other people to aid,
Auto-destructive art represents all three kinds of Walter Marchetti encourage, and participate in his finale, which, at
obsolescence. best, takes many years to complete.
The existentialist spirit realizes that reality is differ- Of the myriad ways, at least five are typical. Assorted
ent in time and place, and is auto-creative. Man is a work of art in the act of destroying combinations of these five will exhaust most possi-
Often, Realism is national and political: Pop Art was itself. He is a painting slowly turning black, bilities of the art of self-destruction. . . .
the social realism of the U.S.A., representing its hero. But of all these forms of artistic integrity, that is, of
Russian Socialist Realism represented in the appro- a sculpture just beginning to crumble. He is man, none triumph so much as his joining together
priate style its peasants and heroes. Victorian Eng- an objet d'art from the moment of his con- with other men to create the prototype of the theatre
land's big pictures and David's Republican paintings ception till the time that his last remains of cruelty and the archetype of the present day hap-
were political in their realism. pening, that is the spectacle of death, epitomized by
Realism is always self-contradictory. Freud analyses yield but ash to the touch. He is the most war, characterized by the inquisition, and institu-
the antithetical sense of primal words. Camus realizes perfect machine ever created, and the tionalized by the modern state. In no other way does
there can be no slice of life. Courbet expresses an machine which most perfectly destroys man, in collaboration with other men and nature,
acceptance of one reality, but is a nineteenth-century achieve such a complete vindication of his power of
socialist recommending reform. itself. He lives as a self-disintegrative destruction, not only of himself, but of plant, animal,
Auto-destructive art may be against arms and dance. and all that to which he had previously given of
obsolescence, but obliged to use these techniques as himself.
its language. And as a bit of clay that is moulded and given shape War has taken over Art. War is Art. No other form of
Ivor Davies and size and colour, he is born. And as clay yields to human endeavour allows man to destroy with such
the hands of a man, the man yields to the way of the joyous abandon, such total commitment, such atten-
world. And his world lets him grow and become hard. tion to detail, such heraldry, and pageantry, and
And it may be said that the man will show great pro- ceremony. And, as such, we all stand impatiently,
mise of things to come and all around will come to and wait for war to kiss our lips.
If many a 'creative artist' has discovered inspect this man like one inspects a new vase off the The mise-en-scène is now South Africa, or Vietnam,
potter's wheel. The wheel turns, the man matures, or perhaps Watts. 'Burn, baby, burn', the chants
that the most destructive thing he can do is grows more valuable with age. Twenty years pass. reverberate and engulf one's mind as Stravinsky's
to create (art objects), systematic analysis The man is finished. The glaze has taken. The fire chords in the Rite of Spring. All is flame and move-
of what is appropriate has not found its has done its work. But unlike a vase which can only ment. A mad Tango. A mediaeval smell.
be as is, or break apart, this work of art can move and Joseph H. Berke
terms. Do words, spoken or written, mean
what they intended, are the notions or
ways of knowing in their handling by
'authorities' valid enough for the situation,
and what can be said precisely about the Press comments on DIAS able.' The Peace News commentator, in a long article,
described the DI AS philosophy as a 'kind of "therapy/
lingering Absolute?
Artists working with DIAS appeared on B.B.C., release through visual violence" theory'—'its own
Granada, and American T.V. programmes; interviews anti-war "art" is spurious, kitsch, propagandistic';
The nutshell content of any great civilization's
were broadcast in B.B.C. Home, European and Over- 'actively working towards a progressive deterioration
DREAM has been, in some way, to make 'the
TRUTH' (as inferred), WORK, in practice. The seas services, and the B.B.C. Third Programme of our present situation, and is guilty of complicity
English version, typified for example by Magna broadcast a discussion on Destruction in Art. Tapes in the general drift towards catastrophe.' Peter
Carta, Parliament, and beheading the king for ille- were made by Pacifica and C.B.S. Schjedahl, in Village Voice of New York, wrote: 'It
gally ignoring it, invasion of all parts of the world Articles and news items appeared in the following seems that art is running out of things to make, or (if
with the Dream as a handout, and indigenous expres- newspapers: Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, you prefer) that social exigency has discredited the
sion of all kinds, has carried a fallacy always apparent Daily Sketch, Daily Telegraph, Evening News, Evening conventional, fabricating approach, and that we are
to some but great drive none-the-less. When, about Standard, Guardian, Morning Star, New York Times; therefore in for a period of seeing things get broken,
1945, the idea of a Great Truth became reconstituted and in the following publications: Arts (Paris), Art a sort of blithe and bloodless Reign of (Holy?)
as an obscure property development project of and Artists, Freedom, I.C.A. Bulletin, International Terror.' Arts Loisirs of Paris treated the whole thing
'Science' the nation's central-motive-energy fund Times (London), London Life, New Society, Peace News,
simply dried up and doings became confined to a seriously, including Dali, César, and Niki de Saint-
minimal seriousness. Studio International, Time, and Village Voice (New Phalle among those who have contributed to 'the new
The core of the cycle poses a semantic problem. In York). aesthetic, often with a kind of romanticism which
borrowing from physicists the idea of non-existence Inevitably many Press comments were extreme: stresses the tragic side of the modern world'. Time,
as part of the structure of events and applying it to 'Sick art' (Evening News); 'another giggle for the after describing some of the 'events' associated with
art, many of the apparent characteristics of time, Town' (Freedom, the anarchist weekly); 'dangerous' the Symposium—particularly those performed by
space and continuity are contradicted and it is clear (Peace News). Reyner Banham, writing in New Society, members of the Vienna Institute of Direct Art ('blood
that the language abounds with pseudo entities. In said: 'The idea of a self-destroying art work, consum- orgy', the smearing of a girl with flour, tomatoes,
proposing some new terms in the context of Event ing itself with acid or smashing itself to pieces, may beer, etc.)—contented itself with recording the verdict
Structure, or NOIT, a rationale emerges. épate the ordinary bourgeoisie in Tunbridge Wells or of the critic of The Times: 'The visual arts today are a
Considerations include the properties of events in
first principle, Difference, structure of News, proper- Oberhausen, but not the grande bourgeoisie who kind of brothel of the intellect, and nobody can write
ties of well-formed notions, breakdown of 'art' events support internationalized modern art. Ever since a report on a brothel while primly standing outside
into four simultaneous event-channels in 'static' Tinguely's Homage to New York reduced itself to the door. The idea that he knows precisely what art is,
work, movement related to frequency, variable time smouldering but well-documented scrap-iron in the and what it is not, is, it seems to me, the only one
signatures, priority systems in conflict.... sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art . . . which the conscientious art critic cannot afford to
John Latham autodestructive art has been respectable and accept- give a hearing to.'