Page 52 - Studio International - June 1970

Some aspects of

bourgeois art

Jean Clay

Tor economic science the decisive point is what of the many factors which in Paris, in May believe that capitalism can be made 'human'
people do—how they act—and not what they them- 1968, provoked a 'biological', 'instinctive' and 'liveable-with'. Attempts are made to set
selves think about their actions.' revolt, a breach which nothing has been able young people to work picking up old tin cans,
Trotsky to heal.2 In 1968 creativity took to the streets; to stop them asking questions about the
it has never returned to the museums. People mechanisms of production, or about the
It is clear that we are witnessing the death know now that collaboration with the domi- logicality of a system which leads auto-
throes of the cultural system maintained by nant system on a 'cultural' level simply means matically to the private ownership of the few
the bourgeoisie in its galleries and its mu- adding a bit of plaster to the great lie which is pockets of breathable air and to the provision
seums. The values and the commodities maintained by the profit-making society. of more or less air-conditioned storage for the
which constituted it have now passed into the This collaboration is demanded, solicited or workers in vertical or horizontal low-cost
realm of the inessential. enforced by the system itself, which regards housing.
The lifeless residue is put to use by the as a menace any counter-society that rejects As the Utopie group has demonstrated,4 the
dominant system as an ideological screen for its values. On its side it has its promotion and notion of architecture is the perfect example
the real mechanisms of the profit-making distribution apparatus (galleries, museums, of the kind of ideological manipulation which
society. This is one of the innovations of neo- televisions, etc.) and various forms of eco- has no relevance to anything in everyday
capitalism: as we pass from the producer nomic blackmail. It distributes both fame and practical reality. Practically all the building
society to the consumer society', 'culture' is money. It offers one clear choice; pariah or that is done takes place without any contribu-
becoming a more and more indispensable welcome prodigal, puppet or beggar. Above tion from the modernist architects and town
ingredient in any commercial or political all, it imposes a definition of culture as an planners we read of in the specialist journals.
attempt to drug the public. The programmed inoffensive, marginal, decorative activity, a The reformers and the other great men of the
cretinization of the masses by the mass media game, a pastime or a confessional, the past history of twentieth-century architecture have
is carried out, by preference, with the help of tense of creativity; something which is to be had absolutely no influence on the human
a battalion of artists and intellectuals who entered, almost at birth, in the immemorial habitat, except in so far as their technical
give an aura of spirituality to the product and narrative of art history. And as for art ideas fitted in with the process of industrializa-
to the talk in which it is packaged. The whole history, everyone knows who wrote it; as tion and with capitalist values. Space has
apparatus is concentrated around the 'avant Edouard Sanguinetti points out, 'Bourgeois never been defined in a new way—except in a
garde'. Its members are invited to gesture culture has passed on to us all the historical few private houses by Frank Lloyd Wright,
on the boards, to advertise motor-cars, to inheritance of the past, but selectively, Le Corbusier and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld,
bear witness to the 'exquisite taste' of this or distorting it for its own purposes.'3 which serve as model dwellings, lived in by a
that representative of the monopolies, to In short, the system makes a paradoxical tiny minority. This was the misfortune of the
cloak with the name of a convenient uni- demand; it wants novelty, but only if it is pre- Bauhaus; its high-minded Utopia gradually
versal (`art' or 'beauty') the true nature of the cooked, de-vitaminized, without its energy turned into a system of norms for the con-
relationship between the classes. and its potency. The system transforms struction industry. Walter Gropius in New
Ideological manipulation is no more a static thought into a mere object. It organizes the York, building amid the urban chaos his
phenomenon than history itself. It makes steeplechase, but makes one condition : no giant Pan-Am building, set up the tombstone
progress. It becomes subtler. The concentra- running off the course. Or again, for those of his own ideas.
tion of the apparatus is generally poorly who have a Boy Scout mentality, the system This might well be the time to realize that, if
perceived by those who, in all good faith, are propounds a utilitarian variant on the ide- urban planning and control fail to establish
pursuing their 'pure research'. They think ology of leisure : 'Improve your environment'. themselves in most capitalist countries, this is
themselves 'neutral', but the system is al- On the themes of pollution, the spatial not the result of incompetence on the part of
ready tugging at their sleeves and thrusting organization of the city, the visual quality of their practitioners; nor is it the result of
them to the front of the platform. `The artists everyday life, the 'integration of the arts', public ignorance. Disorder is a logical
are with us!' This confiscation of creativity in even the design of the fork you eat your feature of any system founded on quick
order to beautify an 'obscene' society was one oysters with, it is fashionable to pretend to returns. In France, all the development plans