Readymade
"The individual can never become the measure of all things. For when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection. Only the class can relate to the whole of reality in a practical revolutionary way. ... For the individual, reification and hence determinism (determinism being the idea that things are necessarily connected) are irremovable. Every attempt to achieve 'freedom' from such premises must fail, for 'inner freedom' presupposes that the world cannot be changed."
- Georg Lukacs
"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."
- Marcel Duchamp
According to Lukacs (writing in 1923), the individual in capitalist society is effectively imprisoned by the objective world. Intellectually, the individual perceives a world of static objects and conceives of their own thoughts as, at their best, merely static reflections of those objects. Economically, the components of the individual's world are literally ready-made in the factory and presented as indistinguishable members of their species with no potential but their socially prescribed ones. With the elevation of these social prescriptions to the level of natural law, the construction of the ice palace is complete, and the individual finds themself frozen in place with the "freedom" to think whatever they like about their situation.
This is obviously bad news for the individual in a world that is in desperate need of action. Lukacs puts his money on a different horse, the proletariat as a class. For whatever reason, that hasn't worked out as planned.
Six years before Lukacs' Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, Marcel Duchamp conceived of Fountain (pictured above)--a urinal which he found, signed "R. Mutt," titled, and declared to be art. He submitted the work under the false name to New York City's Society of Independent Artists, who had stated they would show any art received at their next exhibition. But the Society's board refused to show the piece. Duchamp, who was in fact a member of the Society's board at the time, resigned in disgust, and soon after the piece was soon lost. But history vindicated the Fountain. It is now considered by many to be the most influential artwork of the 20th century.
Duchamp made twenty readymades in his artistic career, so-called because they consisted primarily of a single pre-existing manufactured object. Fountain was the most notorious of these. Another was L.H.O.O.Q, which consisted of a reproduction print of the Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp true a moustache and goatee. He wrote the title beneath it in pencil; when read aloud, its pronunciation is similar to "elle a chaud au cul," meaning "She's got a hot ass."
What is going on here?
On the one hand, it would be easy to take a cursory look at Duchamp's readymades and declare them to be precisely the sort of art Lukacs predicted for capitalist society. For perhaps the first time in history, the artistic "act" did literally nothing (or hardly anything) to change the object involved. The world remained unchanged, and all that happened was the individual exercise of "freedom" to consider or not consider various arrangements of its molecules as art.
But while there's an element of truth in this sad account, further analysis, such as that done by 1960's artist Joseph Kosuth, reveals that it is not the whole story.
Kosuth calls the kind of art ushered in by Duchamp conceptual art, and introduces it by contrasting it with what he calls formalist art. The formalist critic is one who believes that what makes an object a work of art are its properties as an atomic object--it's "morphological" properties. Art's purpose, to the formalist, is primarily decorative, and so to judge art one ought to consider its merits as a decoration. One asks: do the shapes, colors, etc. of this painting make it look nice hanging in the corner of the bedroom? The intentions of the artist are never considered by the formalist, since these are irrelevant to the value of the artwork itself.
Conceptual art radically rejects this view. Rather, it shifts the domain of art off the art object and onto the intentions and conceptions of the artist. Kosuth writes:
With the unassisted Ready-made, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change - one from "appearance" to "conception" - was the beginning of "modern" art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.
For Kosuth, the new function of art, when it is opposed to the aesthetic function embraced by the formalists, refers to the concepts of the artists. Specifically, the function of art refers to the artist's concept of art (in Fodorese: ART). The difference between formalist and conceptual art can then be articulated in terms of this concept. On the one hand, "morphological notions of art embody an implied a priori concept of art’s possibilities." The ART concept is a given, and objects are, in Lukacs' words, merely recognized or rejected on its terms. In conceptualist art, however, the concept itself is the medium; it is, according to Henry Flynt, "first of all an art of which the material is 'concepts,' as the material for ex. music is sound." So (back to Kosuth's analysis:) the real art work is to posit a new definition for art by constructing something that challenges old concepts of art and declaring with tautological force, "Art is that."
If Kosuth is right about the shift in art spurred by Duchamp's readymades, then that has important implications for Lukacs criticism, since if the latter is right, conceptualist art should never have happened. Describing the problem of reified bourgeois thought, Lukacs writes:
Historical thought perceives the correspondence of thought and existence in their - immediate. but no more than immediate - rigid, reified structure. This is precisely the point at, which non-dialectical thought is confronted by this insoluble problem. From the fact of this rigid confrontation it follows (1) that thought and (empirical) existence cannot reflect each other, but also (2) that the criterion of correct thought can only be found in the realm of reflection. As long as man adopts a stance of intuition and contemplation he can only relate to his own thought and to the objects of the empirical world in an immediate way. He accepts both as ready-made - produced by historical reality. As he wishes only to know the world and not to change it he is forced to accept both the empirical, material rigidity of existence and the logical rigidity of concepts as unchangeable.
Note the close resonance between this problematic way of thinking and that of the formalist art critic. To the formalist critic, the (traditional) concept of art is an unchangeable given of their historical reality. The evaluation of art is then purely reflective: does this object correspond to the ART concept? (The creation of art is meanwhile nothing but, at best, the perfect reproduction of the commodity blueprinted by the concept.)
For Lukacs, social progress can be made only when the consciousness dissolves the rigid forms of reality into processes; "correct consciousness means a change in its own objects, and in the first instance, in itself." But he also states emphatically that "only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses the ability to transform things."
Problematically for Lukacs, however, Duchamp and, for example, the Dadaists who took up the new function of conceptualist art were not practically class conscious proletariat. Though they were consciously rebelling against bourgeois "reason," they were not embracing historical dialectic but rather chaos and irrationality much more in keeping with the radically contingent world of early Wittgenstein and the mature empiricists that were slowly subverting capitalist rationalism right under Lukacs' chronological nose.
But wait! Didn't all this start with art that was readymade? How then could conceptualist art have anything to do with teh "ability to transform things"?
It can and should be objected that at the moment of its inception, conceptual art did not change any objects. Kosuth himself is adamant that art, insofar as it is performing the art function, is not even able to refer to objects outside of itself. At its start, it exercised freedom while leaving the world unchanged.
But unlike the bourgeois intellectual freedom deplored by Lukacs, the freedom of the conceptualist artists goes become merely rational "recognition and rejection." Rather, it is a creative act that takes the existing conceptions of art and defiantly contradicts them. And this is possible not through the practical class consciousness of the proletariat, but by the individual consciousnesses of a class whose relation to the means of production is one of neither capital accumulation nor mass commodity production, but the unceasing innovation of new ideas. And while the creativity of conceptual art is limited to the undulating domain of art itself, was a first tug on the threads of reified rationalism and an example for others who would unravel it.
"Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!"
- F.T. Marinetti
As is necessary given the function of art, conceptualist art did not stop at Fountain. Rather, the microdialectic of conceptualist art has continued to evolve in the ninety years since it began. Over this time, other historical forces have arisen which should give us hope for society. These forces are, like Duchamp, spurred on to create new concepts, but in a way that is open up to material and social world at large. This will be the subject of another post, however.
As an epilogue, however, its worth noting that even conceptualist art has discovered its own dialectical praxis. By the 1960's, artists associated with the Fluxus movement had developed a new art form, the event score, which consisted of a short set of instructions which could be performed like a musical score. The performance was as much a part of the art as the instructions themselves. Fluxus artists also executed performance art events called happenings. Yoko Ono's (and others') instruction pieces--wherein Ono wrote some instructions for the creation of a painting and then executed those instructions--blurred the lines between traditional painted art and the newer medium of action.
In short, the radical and continuous reconceptualization of art brought on by the conceptualist art movement created a new kind of art, performance art, where the "material" of the art is not object nor concept but praxis itself.
Nowhere is this progression clearer than in the fate of Fountain itself. In the 1960's reproductions of Fountain were recommissioned by Duchamp. These few reproductions are valued at thousands of dollars and are on display at such prestigious locations as the Tate Modern in London and the national modern art museum at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Duchamp got his way; Fountain was Art--but couldn't stay that way. In 1993, performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli and self-proclaimed follower of Duchamp, got to one of the reproduced pieces, urinated in it, and vandalized it with a hammer. [1] [2]