The Subversive Potential of Art by Carol Becker [abridged]

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excerpt from Carol Becker
essay, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art’,

from ‘The Subversive
Imagination: Artists, Society & Social Responsibility’:

[abridged – edit by Jeff
Mather]

         “The radical
qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and
its invocation of the beautiful image and of liberation are grounded precisely
in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates
itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its
overwhelming presence.  Thereby art
creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes
possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed
and distorted in the given reality.”        Herbert Marcuse

         In the refusal to be
absorbed within the reality principle (Freud’s term for the world of work and
obligation as constructed by the demands of civilization) or adhere to the
rules of the reality principle, in insisting upon issues of subjectivity and
the presentation of contradiction, art rejects the idea that there can be any
simple transformation of society or that all of that which art invokes and
indicts could be settled through the class struggle.  But if art indicts, what comprises its indictment?  All humans have been forced to repress
basic instincts in order to survive with civilization as it has been
constructed.  How can civilization
freely generate freedom, when unfreedom has become part and parcel of the
mental apparatus?

         Art is a location –
a designated imaginative space where freedom is experienced.  At times, it is a physical entity, a
site – a painting on the wall, an installation on the floor, an event chiseled
in space and/or time, a performance, a dance, a video, a film.  But it is also a pychic location – a
place in the mind where one allows for a recombination of experiences, a
suspension of the rules that govern daily life, a denial of gravity.  Art presents the possibility of a
fulfillment, which only a transformed society could offer.  It is a reminder of what a truly
integrated experience of oneself in society might be, a remembrance of
gratification, a sense of purpose beyond alienation.  Art can embody a tension which keeps hope alive – a memory
of the happiness that once was, and that seeks its return.

         In its ability to
conjure those dimensions of the individual’s emotional life not dominated by
the social system, art is able to keep alive an image of humanness – the
emergence of human beings as “species beings” capable of living in that
community of freedom which is the potential of the species.  The recognition of this potential is
the subjective basis of a classless society.  The image of the liberated human psyche can be communicated
by art, not necessarily through a literal representation of the utopian dream,
as in socialist realist work, but in the emotions such work is able to
elicit.  This range of emotional
responses can be transmitted by the struggles depicted in content and their
embodiment integrated by form. 
Through form, art can portray humanness on a grand scale, beyond class
struggle.  Here, where form becomes
content, individuals can experience a spectrum of imaginative possibilities
crucial to envisioning and manifesting a revolutionary process.  A great deal of the radical potential
of art lies in its ability to play within as well as outside of the reality
principle.

         The act of observing
art may have a transformative effect on a person; nevertheless, within a
society of alienation this use value is often discounted.  Within a capitalist system the deepest
purposes of art go against the basic premises upon which capitalism is
constructed.  Within capitalism the
only justifiable place for art is as an object that can be bought, speculated
upon, and sold for a profit.  Or it
might serve as a diversion or entertainment.  Its value is as a tool that can regenerate the lost, hidden,
creative, spiritual, and intuitive aspects of human life which capitalism has
denigrated.

         At its best, art
serves a different master than capitalism, one whose values are not so readily
discerned.  Although its place in
the order of things is not always clearly articulated, no one would publicly
advocate a society that did not, at least in theory, encourage creative expression
as manifested in art.  A society
without art seems unimaginably impoverished.  The necessary tension between the longing embedded in the
people’s desire for a fuller life, a more complete self, and the world in which
they live would have one fewer outlet. 
What is almost unspeakable, what cannot be contained is allowed to live
through the form of art.  This is
why at times art is perceived as subversive, not simply because it presents a
world that appears immoral or licentious, as is frequently thought, but because
it reminds people of what has been buried – desires their deepest selves dream
but cannot manifest within the existing system.

         This might mean
advocating art that embodies the possibility of change and struggle, the sense
that through deliberate action or the transformation of consciousness and
social conditions one’s personal situation could also be altered.  Art allows for this actualization
through the vehicle of form – a physical organization that captures a range of
intangible experience.  Artists are
those for whom form becomes content. 
This is the source of their strength and alienation.  Those outside the art-making process
may not consciously understand why they respond to the work as they do.  They may be unconscious of how beauty,
coherence, properties of elegance, or a deliberate refusal to allow for the
experience of beauty affects their ability to understand the content of the
work intellectually as well as emotionally.  Successfully executed art stands as both part of and not
part of the society out of which it has emerged.  It has not accepted the limiting prejudices of race, class,
gender and sexuality.  While
commenting on these, it is also capable of moving past them.  This why, when art is effective, it
appeals to people with progressive interests.  It may well contain a critique of the prevailing
ideology.  Or, the clarity and
integrity of form itself may prove subversive, especially when all else in
society seems in disarray.

         The strength of art
lies in its Otherness, its incapacity for ready assimilation.  If art comes too close to reality, if
it strives too hard to be comprehensible, accessible across all boundaries, it
then runs the risk of becoming mundane. 
And if this occurs, its function as negation to the existing world is
abandoned.   To be effective,
art must exert its capacity for estrangement.  There is certainly work in which its utter banality becomes
dislocating, often because it is unexpected within an art venue.  Here the context may provide the necessary
tension.  It must dislocate the
viewer, reader, audience, by its refusal and inability to become part of the
reality principle. 

         “The more
immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of
estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change. In this sense,
there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud
than in the didactic plays of Brecht.”    H. Marcuse

         The North American
left has often restricted its understanding of form.  The same audience that desires art that contains
revolutionary messages cannot grasp the degree to which innovations in form can
also be radical, since they can change the scope, order, and content of what
people are able to see.  If the
content does not overtly and directly articulate social concerns and the work
is not easily accessible in a formal sense, then it is often not deemed
political.  This encourages the
judgment that “political art” must be “anti-art”  -- art that refused to take pleasure in its own formal
properties or denies conventional forms or complexity of form.

         There is a part of
the human psyche that remains invulnerable to social repression.  If this psychic aspect is tapped then
it can be given shape, articulated, and its wholeness explored no matter how
fragmented the reality surrounding it may be. 

         The issue of “the
Beautiful” is a locus of controversy that appears time and again in progressive
movements as an aspect of the reconstruction of nature and society.  Even when social upheaval is on the
agenda, beauty often has been defined in a limited, benign way as plastic
purity and loveliness and as an extension of exchange values to the
aesthetic-erotic dimension.  
The Beautiful is sensous and preserved in aesthetic sublimation,

and the autonomy of art and
its political potential reside in this sensousness.

Marcuse rails against a crude
form of Marxist aesthetics that rejects the idea of the Beautiful as the
central category of bourgeois aesthetics and fails to grasp its subversive
element.  Marcuse contends that
what is deeply satifying and aesthetic is political and art with political aspirations should utilize the
subversive power of beauty when appropriate.  But the left has not always understood these
subtleties.  This leaves those
artists anxious to make a strong statement about society without the
possibility of making work that is both political and beautiful.  Perhaps this is why many artists resist
involvement in political movements: They fear that such associations will deny
them the right to engage in the sensuous, aesthetic fulfillment of the
art-making process – the love of materials, principles of structure, pleasures
of translating abstract concepts into form.  For many artists, these are the reasons that they were drawn
to art-making in the first place.

         Such artists fear
that they will be forced to replace this love with a more intellectual grasp of
issues and that pleasure will be transformed into gnawing guilt derived from
the enjoyment they take in line, color, texture.

In fact, the work considered
by activists and critics to be the most subversive is often filled with
unpleasure, deliberately negating the Beautiful and reflecting the unhappiness
one would want to change.  It is not
a vision of what is possible or what might seduce others into endorsing the
more progressive philosophical understandings it represents – or the future
world it portends.  Marcuse’s
understanding of the sensuousness of art can be subversive, especially if it is
understood that mass culture, as it exists in the United States, cannot
comfortably tolerate what is truly beautiful in his terms – art that resonates
with originality and strong formal properties and allows complex meaning to
evolve.

         Work matching this
definition of the Beautiful could also require people to consider what no
longer exists, what resides in dreams, memories of a time (whether real or
imagined) when life was fulfilling and people’s relationship to it seemed less
estranged.  It is not necessary to
prove or disprove the historical existence of such a time.  Rather, it is important to note that,
in the context of many social movements, the seemingly retroactive emotion of longing
has propelled people forward.  This can be elicited through an appeal
to the senses as well as the emotional and psychological life of an
individual.  There is little in
mass culture that attempts to touch people at all these levels.  When longing is evoked, it appears as
melodrama or nostalgia.  Such
manifestations usually homogenize differences by settling for a mundane version
of human experience.  The result is
a form of sublimation we tend to think of as entertainment and diversion, not
the complex interaction of form and content we call art or the enjoyment one
derives from art which is humorous, playful, seductive, well-executed, and
helps to move ideas and emotions to a new plane.

         Most artwork is too
layered and at times difficult to easily lend itself to mass appeal.  Nevertheless, art that deeply affects
the senses, the intellect, and the unconscious is essential to the well-being
of the collective imagination.  Yet
in North American society, such art usually receives mainstream attention only
when it has come under attack in the name of morality and religion.  It is to art’s credit that it can generate
such an extreme response.  Whether
they know it or not, moralists are fearful that such work will arouse people,
not in an overtly sexual way, but in a sensual, provocative manner.  They fear it might touch people’s
profound desires and challenge the banality, conformity, repressiveness, and
the dissatisfaction they actually feel in the their daily lives – work,
environment, and relationships. 
Therefore, there have always been those who have tried to impose silence
on what they consider dangerous art.

         Artists know the
power of creating work that is directly sensual and erotic.  They often do it precisely because it
battles with the tyranny of delayed gratification and unfulfilled needs – a
repression at the heart of capitalist society.  But within the art world, work often becomes explicitly and
provocatively sexual because artists assume their audience to be composed of
moralists who will always be offended by sexuality and thus need to be
confronted.  Artists rarely imagine
an audience hungry for real sensuality and receptive to all its possibilities –
an audience with whom it would be a challenge to communicate.  Were they to make work with such an
audience in mind, art might be able to fulfill the types of demands Marcuse
presented.

         The appropriation,
pastiche, sometimes parodic cynicism characteristic of the postmodern period
left a vacuum.  Curiously, it now
seems that the pendulum has swung fiercely in the opposite direction – toward
sincere social concern and commitment. 
What results is an atmosphere in which artists are expected to serve a social function, moving in communities
where they are unfamiliar and making work talks to, has meaning for, people
other than themselves.  Certainly
this turn of events could be significant if the concept is carefully
considered.  But more often than
not these ideas become demands placed on artists by other artists for whom
making politically useful work has becom a moral issue.  Which is to say, if someone is not
working in a political mode, their work cannot be considered responsive to the
pressing issues of the society. 
This imperative

is often directly connected
to the issue of audience:  Who is
the work for?

         The more alienated
people are from their own inner needs and desires, the more fragmented they
will be in relation to the society in which they live and work; they more they
need the experience of art which is powerful, the more they may turn away from
it because the deeper concerns such art engages seem too remote and obscure to
touch their daily lives.  Therefore
it

happens that the
audience  that would benefit the
most from the work will reject its content or find its form unattainable.  Nonetheless, attempts to
conscientiously tailor the art to the audience can defeat the necessary tension
that allows it to be subversive.

         The prevailing
cultural values that make complex thought intolerable and fearsome to mass
audiences should not force artists to create art to suit the tastes on an
audience embedded in a one dimensional society.  If art cannot change the world, it can help to change the
consciousness and drives of the men and women who would change the world.  Artists can make a decision to work for
the radicalization of consciousness. 
This may mean making explicit and conscious the material and ideological
discrepancy between the artist and ‘the people’ rather than to obscure and
camouflage it.  Revolutionary art
may well antagonize and confuse. 
Its ability to rupture continuity may be its strength.  But it may be misunderstood, ahead of its
time, beyond its audience, even when the message is precisely to liberate those
who passively ignore or actively oppose it.  The function of art is not to be politely absorbed but
rather to challenge and disrupt.

         The notion of making
politically useful work often leads to a desire to simplify not merely the form
but the content as well, reducing it to a message that can be easily
apprehended.  This may result in
heavy-handed, almost insulting condescension that alienates the audience rather
than engaging it.  In the name of
relevance and accessibility activist artists may have the unwanted effect of
destroying what is uniquely important about art – its commitment to play and
freedom of expression.  This crisis
of purpose also provokes a crisis of vision.  Artists insecure about what art should be and how to justify
their activity, attempt to impose a meaning from the outside in the hope that a
set of political criteria will make art more scientific, objective, moral, and
therefore more legitimate.  The anti-intellectual
bias of North American society has relegated those engaged in such activities
to its margins.  It is no wonder,
then, that what is most valued in art is that which appears to directly engage
with the issues of contemporary culture.

           Marcuse’s
work demonstrates the importance of aesthetics as an area for exploration and
of art and artists as a crucial force of liberation within a repressive
society.