Uncommon Sense by Craig Leonard

Author:Craig Leonard [Leonard, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Coda: Misreading Marcuse’s Aesthetics

Some of the main commentators in the 1960s and 1970s on Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetics—including the art critics Ursula Meyer, Jack Burnham, Harold Rosenberg, and Gregory Battcock—often raised questions about the connection he makes between art and politics. What exactly is it about art’s “internal exigency”1 that links it with political practice? How can art’s indirect political character have actual political effects? Can these political effects be measured, identified, or nurtured? Ultimately, must the artist step outside of art (that is, become a non-artist or harmonic anti-artist) to engage in direct political activity? A main purpose of this book has been to address such questions by closely analyzing Marcuse’s aesthetic theory to show his overlooked relevance to the discourse on contemporary art and politics. This coda looks at some of the main criticisms and misreadings of Marcuse’s aesthetics specifically by Meyer, Burnham, Rosenberg, and Battcock and, in the process, applies some of the terminology and issues that were addressed in depth in the preceding chapters.

Marcuse’s essay “Art in the One-Dimensional Society” was published in the periodical Arts Magazine in May 1967. In the same year, art historian George Kubler published “Style and the Representation of Historical Time” in the multimedia magazine Aspen (no. 5+6, “The Minimalism Issue”), which was a synopsis of his admired, but now mostly forgotten, book titled The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962). There are strong affinities between Marcuse and Kubler in the former’s notion of “radical sensibility” and latter’s category of “radical human invention.” Curiously, however, Marcuse’s aesthetic theory has mainly been viewed as anachronistic and conservative while, at the time, Kubler’s was seen as innovative and progressive. It is known, for instance, that Kubler influenced artists such as Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Asger Jorn, Brian O’Doherty, and Ad Reinhardt (who even wrote a review of Kubler’s book for Art News).2

At the core of The Shape of Time he presents two models of human invention: the production of tools based on changing needs and the production of artworks beyond immediate needs. Where the first signifies inventions to serve some utility, the second refers to inventions of “non-instrumental use.”3 Art’s non-instrumentality, however, does not mean it is of lesser value than useful invention. On the contrary, aesthetic invention is the “channel to the universe,” since it “alters the sensibility of mankind [and when] the capacity of that channel can be increased, knowledge of the universe will expand accordingly.”4 Where human inventions take on varying degrees of expansion, the most transformative is non-instrumental “radical invention,”5 which “discards ready-made positions, [such that] the investigator constructs his own system of postulates and sets forth to discover the universe they alone can disclose.”6 While the invention of artworks and tools are “among ways of altering the set of the mind,” it is exclusively radical artistic invention that alters the governing “system of postulates” that construct common sense. While tools are limited to solving matters at hand, radical artistic inventions, in their non-instrumentality, confront “elements already given to the observer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.