Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 22:21:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: Artists' unions and anti-art


Alastair wrote:

> What is the substance of the "unionisation" which you're addressing?
> Are you seeking those strands which may fit the trade union model, of a
> professionalised negotiating stratum which interposing itself between
> capital and labour, generally by reducing conflict to the question of
> "the rate for the job"?  Or are you seeking histories of collective
> artistic initiatives?

I would say, the former.  But let me give you a little history of this
curiosity of mine.  It arose out of the fact that I happended to be looking,
at one and the same time, at Huelsenbeck's "En Avant Dada" and Stuart Davis'
1935 article "The Artist Today: The Standpoint of the Artists' Union".

I've always found the Davis article very interesting.  Let me summarize it.
He starts by outlining "the immediate past of the American fine-artist",
which boils down to this: "the artist of the immediate past was an 
individualist, progressive or reactionary, in his painting theory, working
within the framework of middle-class culture with a subject matter acceptable
to that culture and marketing his product through channels set up by the
middle class.  His economic condition in general was poor and he was badly
exploited by art dealer and patron alike."   [...]

"Today, however, there are certain developments which are peculiar to the
time and which directly affect the artist in his social-economic relations."
Then Davis enumerates some of these developments (this is the early 30s), 
and goes on: "These events and and others are not isolated phenomena 
peculiar to the field of art.  They are reflections in that field of the
chaotic conditions in capitalist world society today.  The artist finds
himself without the meagre support of his immediate past and he realizes
now, if not before, that art is not a practice disassociated from other
human activities.  He has had the experience of being completely thrown
overboard and sold out by art dealer and patron, and his illusions as to
their cultural interests are destroyed.  He realizes now that the shallowness
of cultural interest of his middle-class audience was retroactive on his
own creative efforts, resulting in a standard of work qualitatively low
from any broad viewpoint.   Looking about him, he sees sharp class 
distinction, those who have, and those (the great majority) who have not.
He recognizes his alignment with those who have not -- the workers."

Then Davis talks about actions taken by New York artists, and most notably
the formation of the Artists' Union, which he calls "an event of greatest
importance to all artists".  "The slogan of the Union, 'EVERY ARTIST AN
ORGANIZED ARTIST' means something which no artist can afford to disregard."
Finally, he concludes with the following:

"The question of quality interests artists.  They say, 'Yes, we agree with your 
ideas of organization, but what standards have you?  We can't have everybody 
in a Union who calls himself an artist.  We have a standard and we resent the 
implication that our standard of quality is unimportant in the type of
organization you say is necessary for artists.'  The answer to this point
is as follows:  A work of art is a public act, or, as John Dewey says, 
an 'experience'.  By definition, then, it is not an isolated phenomenon,
having meaning for the artist and his friends alone.  Rather it is the result
of the whole life experience of the artist as a social being.  From this
it follows that there are many 'qualities' and no one of these qualities
is disassociated form the life experience and environment that produced it.
The quality standard of any group of artists, such as the National Academy
of Design for example, is valid for the social scheme of that group only.
Its 'world validity' depends precisely on the degree to which the life-scheme
of the group of artists is broad in scope.  We have, therefore, little
qualities and big qualities.  Any artist group which seeks to isolate itself
form broad world interests and concentrates on the perpetuation of some
subclassifications of qualitative standard is by definition the producer
of small quality.  For such a group to demand that all artists meet this
static qualitative concept is of course absurd.  Art comes from life, not
life from art.  For this reason the question of the quality of the work
of the members of the Artists' Union has no meaning at this time.  The
Artists' Union is initiating artists into a new social and economic
relationship, and through this activity a quality will grow.  This quality
will certainly be different from the quality standard of any member
before participation in union activities and will take time to develop.
As the social scheme of the Union is broad and realistic, directly
connected to life today in all its aspects, so we confidently expect
the emergence of an aesthetic quality in the work of the members which
has this broad, social, realistic value.  Therefore, an artist does not
join the Union merely to get a job; he joins it to fight for his right
to economic stability on a decent level and to develop as an artist
through development as a social human being."


So here are some of the things that fascinate me about this article.
First, there are many manifestos and manifesto-like documents in which
artists declare a, so to speak, spiritual allegiance with the workers;
but not many that, like Davis', claim such an allegiance on economic and 
political grounds -- on class grounds.  Second, artistic manifestos
usually construe art as if it could be the means to launch a political 
offensive: art, if done right, is declared as a means to transform the 
practice of daily living.  Davis, on the other hand, talks about much more
commonplace types of political action, and he sees the resulting 
transformation of daily life as a means to transform art.  Davis, like Dewey,
_assumes_ that art is always already experience; he doesn't think that
any transformation of artistic practice, or of living for that matter, 
is required to effect the equation between art and life.  At the same time,
he does want a new art, and he does want a new life.  "Every artist an
organized artist".  Third, I started wondering about the relationship
between, on the one hand, the development of the artist's political
self-consciousness (as a certain kind of worker) that is implied by this 
move towards organization and, on the other, various anti-art positions, 
such as that of the Dadaists -- whether or not they are compatible with 
each other.  Is "the standpoint of the Artists' Union" compatible with,
say, the sensibility that leads Huelsenbeck to demand "the introduction 
of the simultaneist poem as a Communist state prayer"?


-m


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