Quotes from "The Case Against Art" by John Zerzan
This article - in the book, Apocalypse Culture, edited by Adam Parfrey, caught my attention a few times - enough where I want to go through it here and figure out where and why I'm attracted to parts of this work. Zerzan's thesis of art not needing to exist anymore is not something I agree with, nor do I think his article makes that point successfully. (I don't agree with him that art needs to remain in alienation, which is the lynchpin of his argument). But I don't want to go into that - because that isn't what grabbed me. I have listed some quotes from the article here so that I can swim around in them and figure out why they attracted me and maybe, even, what that has to do with my current work.
Zerzan starts the article by trying to dismantle the idea of art being inherent to the human mind, being something always tied to humanity. He states that a shift occurred during the Upper Paleolithic (30,000 years ago) period where we have found the oldest enduring artworks such as the handprints made by blown-pigment or the naturalistic looking herds at Lascaux. Zerzan suggests that this is the first symbolic. He quotes German Art historian, Wilhelm Worringer, who posited a direct relationship between the perception of art and the individual. Worringer claims that "We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art" led to a formula, "The aesthetic sense is an objectivized sense of the self."
Repeat morsel: 'We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art.' I am remembering how I've felt in front of works of art that I was experiencing. Did I get a sense of myself, as a person or as a human? Yes, I can kind of see that empirically. But since we are talking about an individual's sense of something- it is hard to pin down, that floats through subtly. Although if thought of in theory, vs empirically, it does make sense that we build ourselves into everything we make. I personally love sculpture because - to me - it make me sense my own physical body in the moment - especially if it is around body-sized - as an example. I also feel my sense of self in large architecture - like grand churches - as they were designed to awe us.
Finally, here is Zerzan's Worringer quote: "The veritable explosion of art at this time [Upper Paleolithic] bespeaks to an anxiety not felt before, in Worringer's words, 'creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.'
Torment of Perception. Yes, I have felt that, viscerally. Reality can change based on who is looking at it? A recognition, an anxiety, that nothing is fixed! Is the Upper Paleolithic when the human's brain started to change to recognize ourselves as separate from nature, other animals, the earth? Is this when our god complex started?
His quote goes on:
"Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of 'the beginning', the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself."
If we are separate, then we have to capture it, fix it, control it. If we aren't separate, we wouldn't think this way...we'd be inside it, not outside looking in. We wouldn't even be able to recognize ourselves as being separate. There is a quote often sourced to Marshall McLuhan that this reminds me of, "We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish."
I also find the part of Zerzan's quote above, 'we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of 'the beginning', the primordial paradise of the timeless present' interesting. When he says 'the moment 'of the beginning' - is he talking about the story of Adam and Eve? Is the Christian paradise the pre-civilization before we were aware of ourselves as separate from nature? I always considered Adam and Eve to be a misogynist parable about disobeying god and about not having sex. I never tied it to our sense of self - our consciousness, our ego, our sentience. I also never considered that what I think of Buddha's timeless present could ever be tied to the paradise before the fall of man for the Christian and Jew or maybe even versions of the story in religions before Judaism. This is interesting.
Zerzan continues in his description of the human recognizing its difference from the rest of nature. "In the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo, the world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already configured."
El Juyo is the oldest known religious shrine- made about 14,000 years ago. From the NY Times article below, "The El Juyo sanctuary contains a free-standing sculptured stone head, interpreted by the scientists as that of a supernatural being. On one side of the sculpture is the visage of a human being, and on the other is that of an animal, probably a cat."
Here is the rest of the article on El Juyo:
I've always been fascinated with human/animal hybrids from past mythologies...I am also fascinated with cyborgs. It is a non-whole hybrid entity, vs something thought of as whole or contained/controlled, which enthralls me - yes - and those are both that. But also - since reading this article - I am fascinated to see that my mind is drawn to the actual line, the cusp between where we belong with the world around us (we are all made of the same materials throughout all of space, our DNA is very similar to everything on Earth) and where we separate ourselves. We separate ourselves in consciousness, in making civilizations, in creating art and machines and technology. We separate ourselves into a hierarchy where we use up the world around us as if it is not a part of us. We separate ourselves from the animals and plants as if we are a superior species because of our own consciousness of our own intelligence. We are growing and changing still. Animal/Human : Human/Machine.
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A later morsel of a quote from the article: "Vision is placed at the highest in the hierarchy of senses instead of using all of them...Levi-Strauss discovered..a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in the daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very acute, they were also not ordered and separate. Part of training sight to appreciate the objects of culture was the accompanying repression of immediacy in an intellectual sense: reality was removed in favor of merely aesthetic experience. Art anaesthetizes the sense organs and removes the natural world from their purview. This reproduces culture, which can never compensate for the disability."
Definition: Anaesthetize- administer an anesthetic to (a person or animal), especially so as to induce a loss of consciousness; to deprive of feeling or awareness.
Holy crap. I see what he means. (Funny that I use the word 'see' here). He is arguing that our human (vs animal) side has placed vision at the top of the hierarchy and ignored the full mixture of all of our senses that are better used when we live in the moment -as in not in the removed civilization and its symbols, hierarchies, labels, we've built since becoming aware of ourselves as separate from the earth. Vision is the primary sense in art. It is about looking and feeling through that moment with an object. And he is arguing that it, therefore, is actually a desensitization because it is culture which is, itself, desensitization and not in the moment. I now am starting to see his argument against art. It is limiting. It is only a reproduction of culture which could never compare to the real deal (nature). That is already obvious to anyone who really looks at nature. But I never thought of it being an anaesthetic before...since it is removed from nature.
Art is a part of culture. Art is only reflective of what exists in the culture or is used as a means to make change in said culture (propaganda). This is my opinion. I'm not sure how much art is able to make real changes in said culture by itself. It has to be hooked to propaganda. Maybe art can be a powerful part of a culture willing to become less hierarchical and willing to have a better relationship with nature. Because art is about symbols, it is language. Any symbol is at least one step away from the present/the real. It is representative, an abstraction.
His use of the word anaesthetize really affects me. It makes me think of all the ways we remove ourselves from real awareness (alcohol, drugs, food, sugar, even film, theater and art are an escape.) But he also seems to say that all of culture is this already. All of culture is a separation of ourselves from nature, or really - a recognition of our separation that already exists through our sense of autonomy.
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Another quote from the article: "Recently the painter Eric Fischl presented at the Whitney Museum a couple in the act of sexual intercourse. A video camera recorded their actions and projected them on a tv monitor before the two. The man's eyes were riveted to the image on the screen, which was clearly more exciting than the act itself...even the most primal acts can become secondary to their representation."
Wow- 'secondary to their representation.' Why does our mind do this? It is kind of like a god view. There is a sense of satisfaction from stepping back and seeing yourself. Maybe it is a sense of control...
It makes me think of when I was younger and would have weird moments where I felt like I was in a tv show - where something would happen that was so sitcom-ish or so like a tv character's life- and it felt almost like a deja vu kind of feeling- but I recognized it as me identifying with a television character and I remember feeling...validated?...or some kind of small positive feeling. I was brought to light - seen somehow -by experiencing something that a tv character - a removed representation of a self - also experienced.
'Secondary to their representation' is so on point with the selfie craze. I was sitting next to a woman in her 20s on the subway the other day- a girl really, she was probably early to mid 20s. She was going through images on her i-phone and throwing some in the trash and viewing others. Curating. I saw a video of her dancing in lingerie. I saw her posing in sexy lingerie, squatting in a side shot in heels. I saw her completely topless taking a selfie in front of a bathroom mirror and - this was the weirdest part - I saw her watch a video of herself that was several minutes long where she was talking slowly and sexy and maybe singing a little.
More of Zerzan quote on our privileging representation over the real:
"Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art as striven to make life itself an object of contemplation."
I do understand his critique of art in this sense. And I know I've felt comfort, satisfaction, a sense of worth and happiness in those representations of art, theatre, literature, tv, film, culture that was because of a distancing from the real.
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Another jewel of a quote:
'The vivid representation of the late hunter/gatherer art was replaced by a formalistic, geometric style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to symbolic shapes. The narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the symbolic universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who associate line with civilization, "This country has become civilized'', literally means, in Yoruba "this earth has lines upon its face."
The symbol can be repeated with more ease than the vivid representation. The language can spread. The lines are the spread of civilization. They are the human moving away from nature. I recently made a sculpture piece - C28, H33 - (stands for Cyborg and Human and it is a score) where I painted a bodily torso sack form with a plaid patterned shirt. I wanted the organic curving body to fight the plaid, to make it curve and not be straight, to push its grid. The plaid was my symbol for the cyborg, the machine, the part of humanity that is removed from the human (in this sense the human as animal). I also think it is closer to the masculine even if i wouldn't put the feminine on an opposite pole or anything. The human form, the blobby, uncontrollable, form is all of us in our animal human sense.
Zerzan continues:
"The inflexible forms of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordan Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that all the pots in the Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art."
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Zerzan:"Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part of the symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that art does not imitate life, but vice versa, which is to say that life follows symbolism not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Elliot, is an 'attack on the inarticulate.' Upon the unsymbolized, he should have said.'
This is the first time I've seen the negative in either of those quotes. I've always privileged searching for knowledge, ways to say something, civilization over nature, ashamedly so. Of course, after living for awhile and observing, I now see that the grand piece of architecture only tries to mimic the majestic mountain in its feeling of awe and wonderment and ability to make the human feel small and powerless. (I enjoy that feeling). Also, after thinking of Buddhism over the last few years, I now see the negative in having everything quantified and controlled and symbolized. When he says that 'deformed' life produces symbolism - deformed because it is a civilization, not pure real life, I think...
Zerzan continues:
'The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one's own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, its a falsification. Under the guise of 'enriching the human experience', we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security....Life in civilization is almost wholly a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic activity consists largely of symbol processing...The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, thus an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced."
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Another one:
Art cannot rival nature in terms of beauty so why does it receive the reverence/attention that it does?
"As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, 'One gives to one's art what one has not been capable of giving to one's existence.' It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire."
Wow, so amazing, that quote. This article has really taken me by the throat. There is so much interesting juice in here! I'll probably read it again later and get even more to ruminate on.
The article goes on in describing how art has dealt with its own realization that it is bankrupt and now just regurgitates the same thing over and over - basically. I don't agree that it is the same thing...because the individual artist in the individual time with the individual viewer all communicating in one moment in time is unique --- that is the real in our civilized world - the nuanced moments of speaking in time as everything changes around us. So I don't agree with Zerzan that art itself has nothing new left...since our culture continues to change, so will art. I do agree with him that we are not connected enough to nature and that any piece of culture is a poor substitute to being one with nature...but I also think we can only make our own relationships with nature - it isn't like culture is going to go away and we are going to be like we were before we started making symbols and language and religious ceremonies. So I'm still going to make my own language, my own symbols, my own art. But I'm also going to sit a lot with the real. Because ... it is the real.
