– Alfred Uçi, 1984 –
Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics
Recently the bourgeois and revisionist aestheticians are more and more talking about the crystallization of a new phase in the development of modernist theoretical thinking and artistic practice. They have even found a new name — postmodernism. For this phase which is being advertised as an expression of vitality and innovation which allegedly carries forward contemporary artistic culture.
Postmodernism is among the many new “isms” which have been put in circulation in the capitalist and revisionist countries in the recent 20-30 years, together with pop art, kinetic art, concrete poetry, aliterature, cybernetic art, the theatre of the absurd, electronic art, body art, kitsch art, hyper-realism, boundless art, the art of the great negation, etc.
Among the many arguments that are being proposed to camouflage the symptoms of the crisis of the bourgeois-revisionist artistic culture one is that of the rapidity with which the new schools of modernism exercised their influence for two to three decades, their postmodernist variants do not live more than two to three years. However, the rapidity of their replacement is no sign of their “vitality” but, on the contrary, a sign of their creative sterility because they are unable to create genuine, significant and permanent values. They are unable to attract attention for long, go quickly bankrupt and leave the place to new fashions. Thus, the permanent metamorphosis of modernism and postmodernism is one of the major expression of the crisis which has bourgeois-revisionist art in its grip.
The bourgeois aestheticians try to show that with the variants of postmodernism a broad road has been found for the development of art towards the future, with prospects as great as those of the time when art was discovered for the first time. In order not to lag behind the Western modernist aestheticians, in their enthusiasm the Soviet revisionist aestheticians are hastening to show the “achievements” of postmodernism. This is what the Soviet aesthetician, O.E. Tuganova, writes in an article published in “Voprosy filosofii” this year: “There are many interesting and fruitful things in the principles and artistic means of postmodernism, things which stimulate thought and feeling”; “Postmodernism has stimulated the discussion about problems of art and culture, of the stand towards life and contributed in many directions to a more acute perception of the everyday reality.”
In order not to be misled by these clamorous advertisements it is important to give a clear answer to these questions: What does postmodernism represent? Is it an expression of “vitality” and “progress” in contemporary aesthetic culture? As a matter of fact, postmodernism, both as theoretical aesthetic thinking and artistic practice, marks a further deepening of the crisis and decadent phenomena in contemporary bourgeois-revisionist aesthetic culture.
A gloomy atmosphere of crisis and decadence pervades all bourgeois-revisionist aesthetic thought and postmodernist practices. Nothing original emerges on the horizon of bourgeois-revisionist aesthetic thought of our time. It comes out with less and less theoretical conceptions which would undertake a global examination of the key problems of aesthetics. There is a prevalence of fragmentarism, one-sidedness, shallowness and essayistic descriptions and a marked lack of inner coherence and logical consistency. The poverty of thought is covered up with paradoxical and equivocal expressions, vulgar empiricism and pseudo-theoretical speculations.
Contemporary bourgeois-revisionist aesthetic thought is less and less capable of building itself in the forms of a consist theoretical and methodological monism. The pluralism of concepts of bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics is being used as a disguise to create the impress that it investigates art and aesthetic phenomena in all their aspects and from all possible angles of view. Distortions of the truth are the main theoretical source of the motley doctrines of bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics. Pluralism indicates, among other things, that bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics lacks a fundamental scientific criterion for its study of aesthetic phenomena, of art and its development.
Contemporary bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics is involved in an all-out struggle against realism and revolutionary art; it has risen in defence of the ugliest variants of postmodernism. Its new postmodernist practices do not represent a manifestation of true vitality and innovation. They are all built on:
First, the exhumation of a number of decadent concepts and practices long ago forgotten and short-lived in their time. Thus, for example, many of the artistic variants of postmodernism rely on the decadent anarchic ideas and practices of Dadaism which in the twenties, due to its ultra-scandalous character, could not have broad extension. Nevertheless, many supporters of modernism cover up the impotence and creative sterility of its representatives by exhuming and imitating the decadent ideas and experience of Dadaism;
Second, carrying the former variants of modernism to their extreme manifestations. Here postmodernism presents itself as an assembly of ultra-decadent artistic concepts and practices which carry the old variants of formalism and naturalism to their extreme consequences;
Third, the abandonment of the objective laws of the aesthetic assimilation of the reality, oscillating from a one-sided interpretation to the other or relying on the eclectic conciliation of extreme concepts. All this shows that postmodernism is only an expression of the profound crisis of bourgeois art and aesthetics.
REALISM OR ANTI-REALISM?
In the recent decades the process of crystallization of postmodernism is being accompanied with clamorous calls for a transition to a “new realism”! These calls may surprise anyone who knows that the history of modernism is the history of its uninterrupted and irreconcilable struggle against realism. Every aesthetic ideas and artistic practice of modernism was advertised as an overcoming of the “limitations” of realism, as a “victory” over it. This being so, in front of the calls of the postmodernists for a “new realism,” one cannot help asking: Are we witnessing a true change in the anti-realist course of contemporary decadent bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics and art? In fact, both the theoretical aesthetic platform and artistic practices show that we are confronted with new attempts to deepen the struggle against realism, although under a pseudo-realist disguise.
This deceptive tactic is not new, it was formerly used by the supporters of modernism too. Although cubism was the most flagrant departure from the traditions of realist painting in the beginning of this century, many of its supporters tried to peddle it with talk about “a modern variant of realism.” In the twenties and thirties, in order to prop up somewhat the shaky fortunes of modernism, its supporters came out again with a pseudo-realist label, that of surrealism, the representation of a world of horrible hallucinations and delirious dreams built on the basis of an irrational world outlook, which considered the forbidden impulses of the subconscious and instincts the source of creativeness. Indeed, to defend abstractionism, an ultra-formalist trend in painting, they came out with the theory of the “new reality” revealed by surrealism. In the name of “total realism” the road was paved for the emergence of one of the most disgraceful variants of naturalist modernism — “pop art.”
In favour of postmodernism are also the “theoretical” manipulations of the revisionist aestheticians of our time who are advertising “boundless” or “open realism.” Their intention is to expand the concept of realism to such a degree as to include within it all the variants of modernism and postmodernism. Despite their zeal, the revisionist aestheticians are not at all original, because prior to them there were bourgeois aestheticians who attempted to level out the contrast and irreconcilability between realism and modernism and put together all schools, trends and currents of modern art under the label of a “new realism.”
In our time the supporters of postmodernism, with their call for a “new realism,” try only to deepen the anti-realist spirit in art. The only thing that distinguishes postmodernism from its modernist precursors is that it comprises and mixes up the manifestations of formalism and naturalism. The history of modernism shows that its variants have, in general, oscillated from the one extreme to the other and presented themselves either as variants of formalism or as variants of naturalism. In the modernism of the past these two extremes were more or less apparent, whereas postmodernism, unable to bring out new original ideas, despite all its manipulating of the old anti-realist arguments of formalism and naturalism, produces only eclectic and arbitrary combinations, considering precisely the formalist-naturalist symbiosis a new step forward, indeed a kind of “super-realism” or “total realism.”
The theoreticians of postmodernism leave no way open to their being misunderstood and identified with true realism. Every historical variant of realism (the realism of the epoch of the Renaissance or Critical Realism of the 19th century, Neo-Realism of the 20th century or Socialist Realism) is, according to the theoreticians of postmodernism, fraught with irremediable shortcomings. Part of these theoreticians combat realism, proceeding from the positions of formalism,charge it with the sins of naturalism, consider it a mere inventory of the manifestations of the reality, a simple figurative copy of things. According to them, if realism with its imitation of the reality could be tolerated before the invention of the camera, now that optical means have reached a high degree of perfection and can reproduce things with great precision, realism has definitively lost all value! For the further existence of art to be justified, according to the supporters of postmodernism, it must abandon the platform of “imitative realism” and become “Promethean creative realism” by adopting postmodernist forms which are “pure creations.” The common characteristic of these forms is their complete departure from any reflection of the reality.
Another part of the supporters of postmodernism criticize realism from the positions of naturalism, accusing it of “subjectivism,” “spiritualism,” “illusionism,” etc. According to them, realistic works are artificial subjective concoctions far from “global truthfulness”! They consider the realistic interpretation and assessment of the material from life as a “limitation” and “subjectivism” of realism. To avoid these pitfalls, realism must reproduce the reality without any comment or interpretation, avoiding any ideological involvement, merging itself with things. Art must be not only creation of “pure forms” but also creation of real things, and only in this way can it reach the so-called “hyper-realism.” So by identifying art with the creation of “pure forms” and things, postmodernism combines the sins of ultra-formalism with those of ultra-naturalism in an eclectic and unprincipled manner.
One of the clearest expressions of this anti-aesthetic “synthesis” is pop art whose creations do not claim to have any connection to or to be the reflection of the real world — they are “pure forms” with the attributes of the real material existence of things, although they distinguish themselves from ordinary things by their lack of practical utilitarian functions. Things in pop art “paintings” are not activized in their practical utilitarian functions and are freed from the “burden” of thought, feeling, emotion, intellect, reason and logic. They are merely things which have not existed before, a reality without illusions, reflections, figures, feelings or thoughts. Such junk as nails, tin cans, rusty iron, rags, wire, etc. are combined in such a manner as to form a new afunctional thing which is presented as “pure form” and a thing in itself, at the same time. On this road pop art becomes a means for the destruction of art, as well as for the destruction of useful things by atrophying their natural functions which justify their production and existence.
The supporters of postmodernism see in pop aesthetics another attempt to overcome a shortcoming of abstractionism — its lack of figurativeness. According to them pop art has returned the painting the figurativeness it had lost through abstractionism: things have a concrete character and, on a whole, a normal figurative look. However, it is known that the figurativeness of things is one thing, and the figurativeness of painting is quite another thing. In pop art, figurativeness is not artistic and is used only as an optical illusion to pave the road for the objectivization of art. The aesthetics of postmodernism insist that “originality” is achieved by denying the figurative arts their figurativeness and imposing figurativeness on non-figurative arts.
Hence, postmodernism has nothing in common with realism, because it represents a concentrate of all anti-realist trends of modernism in all their formalist and naturalist variants.
NEW HORIZONS OR OBJECTIVIZATION OF ART?
The supporters of postmodernism accuse the aesthetics of realist classic art of narrowing and limiting the range of aesthetic phenomena which deserve to be reflected in art, while postmodernism has allegedly opened up new horizons for art, giving it new visions of the world. According to them, the theoretical platform of postmodernism is more productive on the aesthetic plane, because it excludes absolutely nothing that exists from the world of art, because it seeks and finds beauty everywhere and in everything without exception. “Why,” asks one of the supporters of pop art, “should you think that a hill is more beautiful than the gas pump? This comes about because you have grown into this convention, whereas I want to draw attention on the abstract qualities or banal things.” Another supporter of pop art, insisting on the same thesis, says: “Aesthetic values may be found in everything, even in junk.” This tendency has assumed the name of concretism.
The charge levelled against realism of allegedly narrowing the sphere of aesthetically assimilable phenomena is baseless in many directions. First of all, it is not true that realistic art has looked for beauty and aesthetic values in a very limited range of things and phenomena of the reality. It is known that in the art of every epoch the aesthetic assimilation of the world is historically conditioned by life and social practice, by the socio-aesthetic ideals of man. At every stage of its development society knows aesthetically what it needs and what the concrete socio-aesthetic ideal allows it to know. However, the masterpieces of progressive art are characterized precisely by the aim of discovering new aesthetic values in the things and phenomena of the real world, in the uninterrupted flow of the life of men. The history of progressive art is the history of the broadening of the circle of things and phenomena with known aesthetic qualities and values, is the history of the broadening of the phenomena aesthetically assimilated by man. We have only to refer to a genre of painting like still life to be convinced that during the history of the development of painting the things and phenomena it has known and assimilated aesthetically have increased greatly. This is characteristic especially of realistic art. Realism sets absolutely no limit to the things and phenomena of life that may be assimilated aesthetically.
Marxist-Leninist aesthetics accepts that progress in art manifests itself also in the further broadening of the circle of things and phenomena assimilated aesthetically. In the future, art will discover beauty in many things and phenomena which have gone unnoticed up to now. From this, however, it does not at all ensue that realistic art and pop art are identical, on the contrary. Realism accepts beauty in many ordinary things and phenomena, but unlike pop art, it does not level out the qualitative distinctions between aesthetic values and anti-values, between aesthetic and unaesthetic properties and values. A shortcoming of the pop art variants of postmodernism is not that they see beauty in many things and phenomena which have been unknown aesthetically, but that, under the slogan of “expanding the aesthetic horizon,” they level out the distinctions between aesthetic values and anti-values and attribute positive aesthetic values to all things and phenomena, indeed consider them genuine aesthetic works. This thesis is not correct. There may be beauty in a bottle, a tin can, a cloth, but not any bottle, any tin can, any cloth is beautiful. There are many things in them which have no genuine aesthetic value, indeed they may even be ugly.
There may be aesthetic values even in tin cans, even in the packaging of food products, but the problem is: May we consider them works of art? May we equalize them with Mona Lisa or any other masterpiece of realistic art? Unfortunately, for postmodernism it levels out the distinctions between art and non-art, between artistic aesthetic values and non-artistic aesthetic values. By so doing postmodernism brings aesthetic demands on art down to a minimum. And it is not accidental that minimalism is proclaimed as the fundamental and the more productive principle of postmodernist aesthetics.
The aesthetics of postmodernism puts art under the pressure of chance and prevents the artist from looking actively for beauty, forces him to capitulate before chance and the ugly phenomena of life. Explaining the chance method as the aesthetic “base” of pop art variants, one of its representatives says: “I see suitcases in the hands of people, and that is enough for me to use the suitcase as a means for the creation of pop art sculptures.” So, under the slogan of the “discovery of new elements of beauty,” pop art leaves the artist and his public at the mercy of chance. With their pseudo-theoretical arguments the pop art supporters cover up their inability to find beauty there where it really is, because this is not easy and, moreover, calls for talent. And the lack of talent cannot be made up for by a heap of rubbish.
The supporters of postmodernism are trying to extend the chance principle to other spheres of art too. This has prompted the emergence of the so-called “aleatoric music” (from the Latin alea which means die, dice). Its fundamental principle is that all the elements of music — sound and its pitch, duration, intensity, etc., can be chosen and placed in time according to the results of the throwing of dice. The irregular distribution of colours in the so-called action-painting, a variant of abstractionism, is also subordinated to the chance principle.
The concretist platform of postmodernism is anti-aesthetic because it deepens the line of the dehumanization of art. In quest of “new” aesthetic values, the supporters of pop art seek beauty absolutely everywhere, with the exception of man! If the progressive classical realistic art focusses on man and his physical and spiritual beauty, postmodernism, on the contrary, excludes man from art and replaces him with “ordinary” things, with rubbish, with the concretist “ideal” of the objectivization of art.
The history of art shows that man has always been the favourite aesthetic object for the great progressive artists. Even when they have devoted themselves to such genres as, for example, landscape painting or still nature, they always have found ways to express man’s ideas and feelings through them. Had these genres not expressed the aesthetic values and ideals of man, they would have been a mere inventory of lifeless things. Hence, the true painter never neglects man, even when he reflects things. The history of the advance of art is also the history of the extension of the presence of man in art, whereas postmodernism is a regressive tendency, because it seeks to eliminate man from art and replace him with lifeless things.
THE CULT OF THE UGLY
In general, classical aesthetics puts the beautiful at the centre of the system of its categories and at the foundation of its aesthetic ideals. However, during the 20th century decadent concepts emerged which equalized the beautiful with the ugly on the aesthetic plane and even called for the ugly to be put at the foundation of the aesthetic ideal! These ideas became the source for the so-called “aesthetics of the ugly,” which is specialized in the aesthetic discrediting of the beautiful and in the aesthetizing of the ugly. It strives for the ugly, the base, the horrible, to replace the beautiful, the noble and the other positive aesthetic values. Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “Under the cloak of an art which allegedly knows no social prejudice and ideological involvement, the cult of the empty content and the ugly form, of the base and the horrible is created. The main subjects and heroes of decadent modernist art are killers, whores, immorality, social pathology. Its banner is irrationalism, the liberation from ‘reason.’ Its ideal is the primitivism of the cave man.”[1]
The Marxist-Leninist aesthetics does not negate the right of art to reflect also the ugly and base aspects of the reality, but it is against the reactionary interpretation of the ugly by bourgeois decadent art, which proclaims it as the law of life, in general. In its treatment of the ugly, realistic art proceeds from progressive socio-aesthetic ideals, criticizing the ugly and its social sources. This is the source of the successes of realistic art, of its strength and progressive role.
The aesthetics of the ugly has raised ugliness to a principle which opposes the aesthetic bases of art as an activity according to the laws of beauty. An adequate form, that is, an ugly one, must respond to the ugly content of art, according to the modernists. Contempt of the beautiful, as an indispensable aspect of any artistic work, is apparent not only in painting, but in all the other fields of bourgeois-revisionist art, which brings about the triumph of most vulgar tastes, the degradation of aesthetic ideals and the explosion of an extreme modernism. It is not casual that many supporters of postmodernism prefer antiquated and worn-out things to create their pseudo-artistic concoctions. And it is known that with the passing of time things lose not only their practical-utilitarian functions, but also their “aesthetic” brilliance, that is, become ugly.
The cult of the ugly is fostered also by the irrationalist world outlook which constitutes another side of the postmodernist bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics. Many bourgeois and revisionist postmodernist aestheticians preach that art is worn out by centuries of thought and truth which allegedly atrophy its specific essence; for art to regain its aesthetic values, according to them, it must liberate itself from thought, reason, logic, must become irrational. Anything irrational, even absurd and unintelligible both in the sphere of content and in the sphere of form, can be justified with the theoretical platform of irrationalism.
In the post-war years the supporters of postmodernism made feverish attempts to conquer some spheres of art which had not been greatly affected by modernist influences. So, under the banner of irrationalism, the tradition theatre was attacked and the theatre of the absurd affirmed. In cinematography, an absurd symbolism was encouraged, compositional unity attacked, fragmentation and the disintegration of time favoured, the chronological connections between events and the normal flow of time combated and the retrospective used to give contemporary events an irrational and alogical character. That is how postmodernist cinematography was born.
One may ask why postmodernism should divert art from the beautiful and submit it to the cult of the ugly, the accidental, the anormal and the absurd. The answer is that in this manner postmodernism becomes a powerful means to distort the reality, to blur the perspective of history, to spread distorted ideas about life. In order to divert art from the reflection of the real problems and contradictions of our time, many postmodernist artists are in quest of some “permanent,” “unchangeable,” “instinctive-biological” principles which they find in the “primitive archetypes” and which, according to them, in mysterious inexplicable ways affect both the ordinary life of people and historical events. Postmodernists are fond of myths with an as alogical, magic and horrifying content as possible. They highly value elements of an archaic pre-historical symbolism, the alogical magic, mystical and ritual expressions of ancient mythologies. They seize of everything mythological which congrues with their irrational pessimistic and mystical world outlook which alienates modern man from the scientific world outlook and takes him back to the beliefs and superstitions of primitive man. Postmodernism strives for the mythologization of life also by means of its ramifications, such as “mass art” and “kitsch art,” which represent a whole industry of myths and illusions. This kind of art is among the main ideological means of the bourgeoisie for manipulating the consciousness of the masses, diverting their attention from the ulcers of the modern society and leading them to an illusory world of deceptive happiness.
PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS
Pseudo-modernism is more and more manifesting its tendency to abandon all aesthetic-artistic basis. This regressive phenomenon is justified with a number of pseudo-scientific speculations. Some variants of postmodernist aesthetics do not proceed from experience in the sphere of art and aesthetic phenomena, but from experience in other fields, the technical and natural sciences, in particular. This tendency is not casual but due to the fact that postmodernism rejects the laws of aesthetic assimilation, neglects the specific character of the aesthetic values of art. That is why it poses and tries to solve specific aesthetic problems on the basis, not of aesthetic experience, but of information from extra-artistic fields, the natural and technical sciences, in particular. The question here is not that the achievements of modern sciences should not be applied in aesthetics and art. Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and the art of socialist realism does this very well. The question here is about a deliberate manipulation of information from modern sciences, which not only make aesthetics parasitary, but also divert it from aesthetic-artistic experience.
The experience of bourgeois-revisionist modernist aesthetics is clear evidence of this tendency. As early as the beginning of the 20th century the first attempts were made to justify the early variants of modernism, such as cubism, futurism, constructivism, etc. in the name of “modern science,” the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In reality there was no direct or, at least, important connection between them. The geometrical distortions cubism brought in panting and the principle of simultaneity of futurism had nothing to do with the new principles confirmed through the theory of relativity and modern science. They indicated only that bourgeois art was rejecting the objective laws of the aesthetical assimilation of the reality.
Postmodernist aesthetics is deepening this speculation on information from the natural and technical sciences further. An example in this direction are its speculations on the theory of systems, cybernetics, the theory of information, statistical mathematics, etc. By rejecting aesthetic experience, the bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics is rebuilding itself on the basis of the new sciences. After the formulation of the theory of systems we see the emergence of “structuralist aesthetics,” after the creation of cybernetics we have “cybernetic aesthetics,” after the theory of information we have “information aesthetics,” after the theory of signs we have “semiotic aesthetics,” and so on.
This tendency which is advertised to be a “credit” to postmodernist aesthetics, in fact, is an expression of its deepening crisis, which shows that bourgeois aesthetics is no longer in a position to affirm its independence as a separate aesthetic theory and is being transformed into a parasitary appendage of other sciences. One of the supporters of this tendency, A. Moll, proclaimed openly that contemporary aesthetics rejects the experience of art: “The study of musical messages from the positions of scientific aesthetics cannot be based on the theory of music,” he writes. The aestheticians and critics who support this tendency are giving up the traditional system of categories and notions of aesthetics and art as sciences and replacing it with a terminology mechanically borrowed from the sphere of the natural and technical sciences: invariant, linear parameter, dynamic programming, algorithm, paradigm, etc. The mistake here does not lie merely in the use of scientific notions, but in the fact that they are applied mechanically in the sphere of art, without introducing aesthetic experience into them, without taking account of the specific peculiarities of art.
The supporters of the borrowings from the technical and natural sciences go even further down this road — they negate the specific character of artistic creativeness, equalize it with ordinary technological and industrial processes, underevaluate the active role of the creative subject — the artist, leaving all creative initiative to modern technical means, machines, etc. Again, the error of this tendency of postmodernism does not consist in its attempts to apply instruments and apparatus, which represent inventions of modern science and technology, in creative artistic work. Some of them are being successfully utilized in realistic artistic cinematography, in the television, music, etc. The question here is that postmodernism absolutizes the role of these means, opposing and rejecting all traditional means. Besides, it aims to extend the use of these means to the field of art, although they produce no positive results but only hinder the development of its specific character. Particularly dangerous and harmful, however, are the experiments of postmodernism with modern “technology” and instruments when they are deprived of all aesthetic basis and aim, when they are made outside the limits of operation of the laws of the aesthetic assimilation of the reality. Realistic art never has been conservative in the use of new material means in art, but its merit is that it has never overevaluated them, subordinating them to its genuinely creative aims, to artistic talent and mastery, to the laws of the aesthetic assimilation of the reality. Unlike realistic art, the artistic practices of postmodernism, such as, for example, concrete music, modernist cinematography, etc. misuse the technical means and cripple the specific character of art, subjecting it to sterile formalist experiments.
The absolutization of the role of technical means has reached such a degree that ever louder cries are being heard among the supporters of postmodernism to do away completely with the role of the artist as a creator for the sake of “total objectivity” and leave all artistic work to machines. The fullest expression of this tendency is the so-called photorealism. At the 8th International Congress of Aesthetics, the American aesthetician, J. Hartner, called it an achievement “which enables art to render with complete precision chance things without the intermediary of the subjectivism of the artist” Photorealism, however, is only an exhumation of the naturalism of old which believed that the camera would give art its “total truth.”
The “technicist” wing of postmodernist aesthetics is, in essence, a refined form of the distortion of the relationship between art and technical-scientific development, is a one-sided and distorted interpretation of it. The aesthetics of technicism distorts the role of modern technological progress in the development of art, misinterprets progress and the objective laws of artistic creativeness, stimulates and takes under its wing the technicist models of postmodernist art. It is called on to cover up the true causes of decadent art in general, and, especially, of its technicist wing, presenting them as direct results of technical and scientific progress and of the utilization of the modern means of communication.
THE ANTI-AESTHETIC ESSENCE OF POSTMODERNISM
The struggle against beauty, the cult of the ugly, the objectivization of art, the “technicist” forms, etc. reaffirm the anti-aesthetic platform of postmodernism.
Anti-aesthetics has been put in circulation long ago. The first manifestations of anti-aesthetic practices cropped up as early as the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, however, their anti-aesthetic essence was not revealed openly. As a platform of modernism, anti-aesthetics was relatively restrained and timid in its first steps. It continued to capitalize on the absolutization of this aspect or moment of aesthetic-artistic assimilation, whereas now postmodernist aestheticians come out openly in defence of a tendentious anti-aesthetics, that is, in defence of the attempts to build the so-called “modern art” as a complete and open negation of the aesthetic experience of art, the laws of aesthetic assimilation and artistic creativeness. At the 9th International Congress of Aesthetics (1980), the idea prevailed that an energetic and definitive transition must be made from aesthetics, which is the summing up of classical art, to anti-aesthetics, which would be the summing up of the experience of modernism and a support for the practices of postmodernism.
Anti-aesthetics takes under its wing and theoretically justifies things which have nothing do with art or aesthetic values. Anti-aesthetics is built outside the limits within which the criteria of art and aesthetic values have a meaning. The discrediting of art, of its beauty, of its aesthetic principles, the aesthetization of banal anti-artistic and anti-aesthetic things are the main content of anti-aesthetics. Now it proclaims cynically that all innovation is the result of the negation of art and its artistic laws. Anti-aesthetics is intended to make art disgusting for the public so as to bring it round to accept all anti-aesthetic manifestations.
What does modern bourgeois aesthetics ask for one thing, action or situation, to be proclaimed art? Only the capacity of arousing the curiosity with its absurd, spectacular or scandalous properties, only the possibility to astonish and surprise the public. Provocative aesthetics, this is the “last word” of bourgeois-revisionist aesthetics which reduces art to a means of incomprehensible attractions. It encourages all sorts of experiments with words, sounds, colours, etc. to concoct new absurd things, regardless that there is no aesthetic or artistic element in them; From them only one thing is required: to be surprising, provocative, absurd!
The aestheticians of postmodernism try to establish a theoretical basis tor their attempts to replace art with the most scandalous things. They have found this basis in the so-called “institutional theory,” according to which anything created may be called art if the public accepts it as such. According to the institutional theory, it is not objective aesthetic values that raise a work to the level of art, but only social conventions. “The merits or component parts of a work of art,” says the American aesthetician T. Monroe, “do not consist in the object (that is, in the painting) as a physical object, but mostly in the stand of people towards it.” The work of art, according to this theory, must have only the capacity to surprise, which makes it a source of equivocations and suppositions. Competitions, criticism, advertisements, academies, theatres, publishing houses, exhibitions and other social institutions decide whether this or that creation is to be called a “work of art” or not. The institutional theory, by proclaiming the works of art to social institutions, takes under its protection an anarchist explosion of capricious tastes in the sphere of art, justifies all the monstrosities of postmodernism, encourages arbitrariness and extravagance in artistic creativeness.
Modern bourgeois aesthetics tries to blur the boundaries between art and non-art. This is presented as a great step forward towards the “democratization” of art, its drawing closer and even blending into the reality. But how is this blending achieved? What is the price paid for it? It is precisely the loss and destruction of art. Mental derangements, misunderstandings, absurdities and oddities are what count most in “anti-art.” Anti-aesthetics justifies the penetration into the field of artistic creativeness of not only people with little or no talent, but also of charlatans and crooks. It has long ago considered madmen and even animals as creators of art.
In the field of literature, anti-aesthetics has come out with the anti-novel, the concrete poetry, the theatre of the absurd, etc. The anti-novel is built on the negation of all the main aesthetic achievements of classical literature, and especially realistic literature. Characters are eliminated and their place is taken up by descriptions of things, lines, colours, volumes, reliefs, geometrical forms and scents. Anti-novels have no story or subject, which are replaced with fragments, dialogues and monologues of uncertain appertenance. They render the “psychical flow” through alogical fragments of stories, landscapes, descriptions of things, movements, mimicry. Under intricate forms of absurd words and monologues against a background of dreams and hallucinations, events are blurred and conflicts, taken out of their concrete socio-historical context, concealed or camouflaged.
Concrete poetry, being the culmination point of all modernist tendencies, marked the complete negation of poetic art. It no longer employs language in its normal and aesthetic functions, as a means for the expressions of thoughts and feelings; it “liberates” language from syntax and grammar and, under the slogan of the struggle against “verbal tyranny,” gives up words and their meanings, uses simple articulated sounds to create “formal or acoustic structures” and “new things”!
The theatre of the absurd cynically proclaims the absurd, the negation of the laws of logic as the fundamental principle of its existence. Alogicity pervades not only the “content” of the play, but also its form and gives the theatrical performance an absurd character, leading the spectator to the conclusion that the world is absurd, meaningless, irrational and that for art to be worthy of it, it must be absurd too. The theatre of the absurd is the complete destruction of the play. It does away with all the logic of the flow of time, of life and history. And it is going further down on this road, “the theatre of the silence,” which renounces even words and thoughts and presents vacuity, silence and nothingness as “main values.” All this so-called theatre is reduced to the presentation of static extras shut up in themselves, of the deaf-mute, the blind, the paralysed, the crippled.
The representatives of anti-aesthetics show special zeal in the deepening of the process of destruction of art. Concrete music replaces musical language with ordinary noises. Body art negates sculpture and its artistic figurativeness and replaces it with “live specimens,” people who take the most absurd and dirtiest poses in exhibition halls or in nature. Lyrical erotic poetry is replaced with “live sex” or strip-tease. Instead of painting, pop art, which comprises all sorts of methods, creates physical-optical effects, optical illusions and irritating psycho-physiological ornaments. “Electronic” painting is made up of photos produced by means of electromagnetic illumination (magnified photos of structures of chemical elements, cells, etc.) and various rhythmical diagrams. The art of the impossible advertises such “masterpieces” as the opening and closing of a tomb, illusions of suicide, volutes of smoke from a motor, carvings of ice melting in front of the public, banners turning into wet rags, heaps of rubbish with a falling flag, etc.
Although the creators of “anti-art” present it as an expression of protest against “the modern civilization in crisis,” objectively “anti-art” renders a great service to capitalism, because is channels the dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society into channels unharmful to it. It is not by chance that the American bourgeois sociologist, Rozak, speaking about the different forms of “anti-art,” says that “they do not threaten the existing order and are tolerated because they are not linked with forms of real protest.”
Postmodernism is becoming ever more scandalous. There are no bounds to the degeneration of bourgeois-revisionist art. Its crisis situation is characterized by Comrade Enver Hoxha with these profound words: “The decadence and degeneration of bourgeois art and literature are terrible. They try to raise this degeneration to a model and symbol for the building of a new way of life which is nothing other but the offspring and faithful reflection of a decadent and degenerate life. With the degeneration of people’s mind and souls, the bourgeoisie thinks that it has found a new means for the further oppression of people and the suppression of proletarian revolution.”[2]
[1] Enver Hoxha, “Reports and Speeches 1972-1973,” pp. 320-21, Alb. ed.
[2] Enver Hoxha, “Reports and Speeches 1967-1968,” p. 489, Alb. ed.
(Albania Today, No. 1 (74), 1984)