HOPERAPERTA

Il Mestiere delle Arti (part one)

by HoperAperta

(Maurizio Barberis e Patrizia Catalano)

"...The work of art is an attempt towards the unique; it asserts itself as a whole, as an absolute; and, at the same time, it is part of a system of complex relationships. It is the result of independent activity; it translates a high and free dream; but in it we also see the energies of civilisation converge. Finally... it is matter and spirit, it is form and content...' (Henry Focillon, from The Life of Forms)

What is the trade, if one can still speak of a trade, of the artist today, what is the target audience, how much is it worth to oneself and how much to a casual and distracted public. We must first consider how the main formative and educational issues in the arts originate from the imposition of a functionalist theory that transformed the dominance of the uniqueness of artistic experience into the technical and industrial reproducibility of the commodified object. The obligatory shift from the minor, so-called applied arts to the industrial arts in the first half of the 20th century resulted in the transformation of the production of art objects into the production of commodities tout-court, the shift from the values of artisanal, folk and aristocratic aesthetics, based on identity, permanence, expertise, craft and slowness (sustainability), to the values expressed by the bourgeois world and mass communication, namely non-identity, non-duration, non-competence, profession vs. craft, speed vs. slowness, economy vs. environment, as well as the shift from the expression-experience pair to the information-consumption pair.

The consequences of this process were first of all the disappearance of the very premises that, starting in the early twentieth century, had determined the rise of 'modern' sensibility and taste. Disappearing, in the short span of a century, was the idea of art as a craft, while the idea of art as a profession increasingly imposed itself. Schools of architecture, which originated together with art academies, break away from them, joining polytechnics and scientific universities: this is the first sign of a crisis in the educational system of the arts. The problem of the design of form and its plan, understood as the pre-figuration of an artifact, whether architecture, sculpture or object of use, moves away from the specifics of art, determining the formation of the author as a professional figure who, as such, joins other already accredited professional figures, such as that of the engineer, lawyer or doctor, thus differing substantially from his counterpart of previous centuries.

Schools of applied arts and decorative arts were first transformed into autonomous courses of professional drawing on Sundays, for blue-collar workers, the Arbeitschule in Germany or the courses organized by the Società Italiana Arti e Mestieri, SIAM, in Milan, courses from which would give rise to the Polytechnics that would give rise to real schools to train the profession of draftsman for industry, the designer. The fine arts remain alone, confined to the art academies.

The artist-author, increasingly marginalized from the production processes, from the economically active places of industrial societies, is considered at best as an exception, justified only by an art market increasingly drugged by economic mechanisms unrelated to the intrinsic qualities of the object. An educated amateur: since there is no longer a reference craft, this definition appears as the only plausible alternative, in opposition to the idea of 'professionalism' proposed by the amalgamation of art with scientific disciplines. An ornament, a decorative, superstructural figure.

It is no coincidence that in times of crisis and economic transition it is the art system that suffers the heaviest consequences. Collectors disappear, galleries close, museums suffer draconian budget cuts. Art no longer plays a structural function, as a necessary good, to the positive world of wealth production, which, according to the current idea, only technology and science are capable of producing. In the collective imagination, art becomes functional only to the world of consumption and luxury, that is, the squandering of individual and collective resources.

Therefore, the question we pose, which we will try to answer, is the following: can an author/artist still be an integral part of the values expressed by contemporary society, can he or she still be considered the bearer of constructive values that overturn his or her image as the idiot vanguard of the system that not only no longer recognizes in him or her any foundational values, but often fights the premises considered destabilizing for its own economic interests?Our social system has been dominated over the course of this century by the obsessive and repeated failed act of founding an industrial aesthetic, which the false prophets of the machine society, now Artificial Intelligence, have propagated based on the idea of widespread happiness, on the idea of the object for all, produced in infinite series and capable of permeating, educating and homogenizing, by virtue of its widespread diffusion, the taste and sensibility of all social strata. The object was thus transformed into a commodity, serving quite different masters. The new art, like any industrial product, is subject to the law of the design/production/consumption cycle. The cycle involves a planned exit to make way for a new cycle. The anxiety of the new, the ideology of progress at all costs, has as its fallout the rapid and superficial consumption of the work of art, transformed precisely into a commodity. Consumerist ideology gabellated as popular art (pop art) is just one of the macroscopic examples of this transformation, as is, in the aesthetic sphere, the dominance of semiological interpretations. Expression is transformed into communication, emotion into information. Art for all, like Toyland, promises what it cannot deliver, namely, rapid and painless emancipation, as well as, of course, the abolition of all differences in talent and natural aptitude for the craft. This is actually a well-established strategy of the market, attentive only, consistently with the transformation of the work into a commodity, to propose models of consumption in perpetual competition with each other, useless if not harmful, both from the point of view of the material qualities of life, and, of course, from the point of view of its spiritual and moral quality:

"... Art as the domain of symbol and form, style and meaning, became the scorched earth of modern life, in whose devastated abodes a few devoted custodians and faithful servants fought a hopeless battle, against the neglect and ultimate abandonment of deserted homes. This is why with all our superabundance of energy, food, materials and commodities, there has been no progressive improvement in the quality of our daily existence: and also why the great mass of well-fed individuals with all the comforts of life at their disposal, live in our civilization existences of emotional apathy and spiritual torpor, of dull passivity, of attenuated desires, existences that belie the true potentialities of modern culture..." (Lewis Mumford, Art and Technique, Etas-Kompas, Milan, 1960, pg. 10)

The failed promises of modern culture have produced, among other things, the cultural and educational background of the current system, as well as the technical gap between the artistic and design culture proposed by academic institutions, schools of architecture and design and the artistic culture proposed by museum institutions. Industrial design, the ram's head of the current didactic order of art education reform, is nothing but the false consciousness of the industrial system, which the current transition to more technologically advanced and post-industrial systems is resolutely undermining. Just think of the structural change produced in the field of visual communications: the graphic designer's trade, the mainstay of design schools, is gradually being replaced by new trades related to information and multimedia technologies. Thus, what now appears new will probably already be old and outdated by the time it becomes operational. The relatively new problem of the temporal disconnect between design systems and the real world arises here. Thinking about highly innovative cultural policies today means coming to terms with the speed of environmental change, with the ability to organize educational response in relation to the rapid shifts in horizon typical of post-industrial society:

"...Technical form does not have, as craftsmanship always has, that fifty percent of necessary stupidity: technical form believes too much in what we already know and too little in what we cannot yet know, but can feel, intuit. Or, which is the same, it believes too little in the form as such..." ( Heinrich Tessenow, Elementary Observations on Building, Franco Angeli, Milan, pg 91)

(Le immagini (dettagli) che illustrano questo articolo sono state ricavate dal volume ‘Onehundred’ edito da Nilufar nel 2007)