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...centuries, two main forms. First came the project of replacing the divine absolute with a collective human absolute, what revolutionaries in France called 'the Nation.' Initial enthusiasm for this project began to wane, however, from the moment the Revolution engendered the Terror. The struggle for liberty had ended in the suppression of liberty: was this not proof that the project itself had been ill-conceived from the beginning?
Those who did not wish to turn back the clock but were still dissatisfied with the present then sought a second way, that of an absolute accessible to the autonomous individual. The search for this second way itself took several forms; the most influential of these identified the individual absolute with beauty and favored what Friedrich Schiller would call the aesthetic education of man. This doctrine was Romanticism, adopted first in Germany and then throughout Europe; it glorified the poet in place of the prophet and the work of art in place of prayer. "Beauty in its absolute essence is God," declared a spokesman for the movement.
The fact that Romanticism reserved such a role for art and poetry, exemplary incarnations of the beautiful, did not mean that it neglected other human activities: for Schiller and his successors, aesthetic education and political vision went hand in hand. One of the best examples we have of the desire to improve the human condition by action in both spheres is that of the German composer Richard Wagner. Influenced by the revolutionary ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, Wagner took part in political agitation in Dresden in 1848-1849. Forced into exile by the ensuing repression, he sought refuge in Switzerland, where he produced two texts setting forth his ideas about art and its relation to society: Art and Revolution and The Art Work of the Future, both written in 1849.
These texts make clear that Wagner aspired to the absolute but did not seek it in traditional religion. Art seemed to him the absolute's best incarnation: it was "living religion represented." (1) On this basis, he suggested, a two-way relationship between artistic activity and social life is established. If art was to flourish, society must have the most favorable conditions for it. Now, Wagner's world, as defined by the Germanic states of his day, was far from satisfying those conditions. Hence, that world had to be transformed; revolution was essential. Wagner was interested in politics only to the extent that politics enabled art to flourish. For him, social revolution was not an end in itself but a means to artistic revolution, the foundation of a new edifice of the arts.
Why bestow such honor on artists? This is where the second part of the relationship between art and society comes in: "The supreme goal of man is the artistic goal," Wagner declared, and "art is the highest activity of man," that which crowns his earthly existence. "Genuine art is the highest form of freedom." Wagner shared the dream of the Saint-Simonians, who believed that machines would soon take over man's most arduous labors. Freed from exhausting chores, all would turn their attention to artistic creation in freedom and joy.
Art was not opposed to life, as another version of Romantic doctrine held, but rather the culmination of life. 'Artistic humanity' was synonymous with 'free human dignity.' Craft was to become art; the proletarian was to transform himself into an artist; the industrial slave was to metamorphose into a producer of beauty. The society of the future would no longer exist to serve art, as Wagner demanded for the present, because all life would have become artistic. Here art became the ideal model of society. There would no longer be any need to celebrate artists because everyone would be an artist. To be more precise, the community as a whole would freely decide how it was to live, thus adopting the attitude of the creator. "But who will be the artist of the future? The poet? The actor? The musician? The sculptor? Let us put it in a nutshell: the people." (2) Because this could be achieved only by a common effort, Wagner opted for the opposite of egoism, namely, communism--whose Manifesto had been published the year before by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
The failure of the revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe would sound the death knell of such dreams. Thereafter began a second major period in the history of the worldly absolute, from 1848 to World War I, during which the two paths, the collective and the individual, the political and the aesthetic, diverged. Baudelaire, though an enthusiastic commentator on Wagner, saw the hope that art might influence the world as an illusion. Meanwhile, Marx showed little concern for the aesthetic education of the individual. The two proudly ignored each other, though neither dreamed of renouncing the absolute.
Things changed again between the two world wars--the period to which I now turn. Two trends can be discerned, but each can be described as an actualization of the Wagnerian project of a total work of art, one that would be coextensive with life itself and with the world as a whole. On one hand, avant-garde groups, such as the Futurists and Constructivists, differentiated themselves from the modernist movement in general by attempting to expand the limits of the work of art so as to act on society at large. On the other hand, extremist political movements modeled their plans for transforming society and humanity on the creative activity of the artist. This was true of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.
Both avant-garde artists and political extremists saw violence as a legitimate means of achieving their ends more rapidly. They knew they were promoting revolution, which might well provoke resistance. That resistance had to be overcome--if necessary, by force. We see signs of this rapprochement of the two major forms of the worldly absolute--the political and the artistic--in Russia, Italy, and Germany. The convergence persisted until the end of World War II.
Avant-garde movements appeared in Russia around 1910 with the first glimmerings of abstraction in painting and Futurist experimentation in poetry. Initially, however, the gulf between art and society widened rather than narrowed. Painters were exhorted to forget the material world and to obey no laws other than the intrinsic laws of their art. Later, however, people began to question this divorce of art from the visible world of objects and the intelligible world of the senses--and therefore to question as well the quest for the absolute in the work of art as opposed to society. Some of those who questioned this divorce were the same people who had advocated it earlier.
The new turn took the name 'Constructivism' because its adherents eschewed artistic creation in favor of constructing objects and artifacts intended to become part of the environment. Their first group show was held in 1921, but the first manifestations of the movement date from 1915, when Vladimir Tatlin presented his "Counter-Reliefs" at the same time that Kazimir Malevich unveiled his "Black Square." The "Counter-Reliefs" were assembled from a variety of materials; and the artist's goal was not to reveal to the world the existence of a 'work' but rather to bring out the intrinsic qualities of the materials used in the construction.
The difference between Constructivism and earlier avant-garde movements was not political: all enthusiastically supported the ongoing revolution. It was rather in the relation between the work of art and its social context. According to one Constructivist theoretician, Boris Arvatov, even when earlier artists took nothing from life...
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