But the Formalists are not content to ascribe to their methods a merely subsidiary, serviceable and technical significance – similar to that which statistics has for social science, or the microscope for the biological sciences. No, they go much further. To them verbal art ends finally and fully with the word, and depictive art with color. A poem is a combination of sounds, a painting is a combination of color spots and the laws of art are the laws of verbal combinations and of combinations of color spots. The social and psychologic approach which, to us, gives a meaning to the microscopic and statistical work done in connection with verbal material, is, for the Formalists, only alchemy....
The quarrels about “pure art” and about art with a tendency took place between the liberals and the “populists”. They do not become us. Materialistic dialectics are above this; from the point of view of an objective historical process, art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds the necessary rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and feeling closer or contrasts them with one another it enriches the spiritual experience of the individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes it more flexible, more responsive, it enlarges the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, it educates the individual, the social group, the class and the nation. And this it does quite independently of whether it appears in a given case under the flag of a “pure” or of a frankly tendencious art. In our Russian social development tendenciousness was the banner of the intelligentsia which sought contact with the people. The helpless intelligentsia, crushed by Tsarism and deprived of a cultural environment, sought support in the lower strata of society and tried to prove to the “people” that it was thinking only of them, living only for them and that it loved them “terribly”. And just as the “populists” who went to the people were ready to do without clean linen and without a comb and without a toothbrush, so the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice the “subtleties” of form in its art, in order to give the most direct and spontaneous expression to the sufferings and hopes of the oppressed. On the other hand, “pure” art was the banner of the rising bourgeoisie, which could not openly declare its bourgeois character, and which at the same time tried to keep the intelligentsia in its service. The Marxist point of view is far removed from these tendencies, which were historically necessary, but which have become historically passé. Keeping on the plane of scientific investigation, Marxism seeks with the same assurance the social roots of the “pure” as well as of the tendencious art. It does not at all “incriminate” a poet with the thoughts and feelings which he expresses, but raises questions of a much more profound significance, namely, to which order of feelings does a given artistic work correspond in all its peculiarities? What are the social conditions of these thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historic development of a society and of a class? And, further, what literary heritage has entered into the elaboration of the new form? Under the influence of what historic impulse have the new complexes of feelings and thoughts broken through the shell which divides them from the sphere of poetic consciousness? The investigation may become complicated, detailed or individualized, but its fundamental idea will be that of the subsidiary r6le which art plays in the social process. (From Literature and Revolution, Trotsky)
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[Thanks to Joanna for putting up Trotsky on art]
Going over these passages, reminds me of a long standing battle in Art History and the arts that is still with us. In the academic setting the struggle has only slightly changed terms over the years. It seems to come down to this. The only art worth doing or involving ourselves with is of the Formalist kind, as Trotsky notes above. In art history and criticism circles the highest valued arts are those that stress the art's own formalist qualities, and the art that remains aloof from the material and political struggles that surround its production. You can see this form of intellectual censorship immediately if you attempt to deal with work labeled pornographic, poster art, propaganda. But there is also a more subtle form of censorship in the arts within academic writing on the arts.
When I look back on my own student years, I see a cold war battle ground of ideas and the censorship of other ideas, especially in the arts and humanities. These battles almost always took the Formalist side of the arts as the proper ground of teaching writing and painting. It was simply considered not good writing or not good painting to deal directly with the material and social conditions, most especially the conflicts in civil rights, war, poverty, anti- corporate state, and variants in human sexuality.
In effect a class war was going on between mostly working students with a growing awareness of their own struggles, and the academy and its values of high bourgeois formalism. While this was pretty obvious in studio, it was much less obvious what was going on art history and criticism
Marxist ideas and practices noted above by Trotsky, where simply excluded from reading lists, missing in lectures, and down graded if even hinted at in papers. Part of the way I discovered that there was censorship in the arts, was by using material from my own psycho- sexual imagination and attempting to write about sculpture. I spent quite a bit of time on a term paper and read from Jung, Freud, and several art historians (can't remember them now). I got a -B which was the kiss of death for a grad student. I was in art practice so the grade didn't matter, but it pissed me off.
I can see now after years that the problem with the paper was its content, and more specifically it's psychological references to human sexuality-sensuality. From the Formalist view, I had crossed some line, and gone into forbidden realms.
This passage in Trotsky goes to the point:
``The form of art is to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions. The creation and perception of art forms is one of the functions of this psychology. And no matter how wise the Formalists try to be, their whole conception is simply based upon the fact that they ignore the psychological unity of the social man, who creates and who consumes what has been created.''
I am only just now seeing within the intellectual history of the Cold War period, that the insistence on formalist values within the academy was in effect used as a weapon of censorship to suppress both materialist and marxist scholarship, but also suppress the more `earthy' ground of student consciousness---its natural placing of its own working class levels of awareness above those encountered in the elite and bourgeois academy.
A good friend of mine's daughter just fought her way through BA at Carnegie Mellon. Thinking about her struggles and watching her painting develop, I can see these battles are still going on.
What seems amusing, even ironic, is that we were constantly being told that behind the Iron Curtain, art was censored, but here in the freedom loving West of course there was no censorship. Sure we could criticize anything we want, .... well just as long as it was `legitimate criticism.' So, this is why that phrase jumped out at me, when I was reading about Wm Robinson. Ah, yes the old legitimate and illegitimate line. I remember that one.
So, what I am saying is that the hegemony of the Formalist school is used as the gatekeeper and censor to keep the unity of psychological and social realities out of the realm of the legitimate. This is how class war is conducted in the academy.
``But without knowing what a mediaeval city was like, what a guild was, or what was the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, the Cologne cathedral will never be understood. The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline.''
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm
During my time as a student in the arts, two then current and well known writers were definitely kept out of the discussion of US art history -- Arnold Hauser and Andre Malraux. So then the social condition of the arts and their psychological unity and function that Trotsky talks about were both excluded. These writers including Trotsky of course in effect represented the illegitimate realm, as opposed to the legitimate realm of the academy.
This exclusion was so effective that I only read these passages last night and today. Obviously this book should be on the reading list. There were a lot of books like that, that circulated around student circles, but never in actual course work, or with rare exception.
Trotsky and Malraux knew each other. Both had been writers in revolutions. There is a Trotsky critical essay on Malraux's The Conquerors and Malraux's Reply to Trotsky. I am guessing both appeared in Gide's NRF during the 1930s. In this exchange the level of critique is not formalist at all, but the art of seeing and characterizing the lessons of a revolution. The critique of art and life takes place at its most intense moment, in a revolution. The subject in this case was the failed or first phase of the Chinese revolution in the 1920s. Malraux was a young writer, gone to Cambodia and Vietnam to steal temple artifacts, got thrown in jail and met some Chinese students who were in the same French colonial prison for trying to import a printing press into Vietnam from Hong Kong. (It could have been the other way around, I can't remember now).
Just to check the academy today, I pulled out Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Sourcebook of Artist's Writings, eds. Stiles K, Selez P., UCB Press, 1996. It's excellent by the way. Only one problem. Marxism has reference to pages 4, 68, 170 out 1003 pages. Hauser, Malraux and Trotsky have no index listing at all. Timothy Clark and Fredrick Jameson are mentioned in the introduction, but only in passing as representatives of struggles within the profession of Art History. That's it. In other words this giant source book represents an extension of the formalist school. The original scholars for the project were two of my art history professors, Herschel Chipp and Peter Selz. The book was finally completed by one of their graduate students, Kristin Stiles. Both were great professors, and each had been influenced to some extent by the radical (or revolutionary art, Trotsky might say) art of their day, Chipp by the Cubists, and Selz by the Abstract Expressionists. They both somehow fell prey to intellectual climate of the Cold War.
``The Formalist school represents an abortive idealism applied to the question of art. The Formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that `In the beginning was the Word'. But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow.''
CG