Aaesthetics of the communication
Manifests of sociological art (1974) and the Aaesthetics of the communication.
MANIFEST I OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART *
Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot decided to constitute a collective of sociological art that can function like a structure of reception and of work for all those having for fundamental theme of the research and of the artistic practice the sociological fact and the link between art and the society.
The collective of sociological art notes the apparition of a new sensitivity for the given social, bound to the process of massification. The present settings of this sensitivity are not anymore those of the link of the individualized man to the world, but those of the link of the man to the society that produces him.
The collective of sociological art, by his artistic practice, has the tendency to put the art in question, to put in evidence the sociological facts and to "visualize" the elaboration of a sociological theory of the art.
The collective of sociological art fundamentally resorts to the theory and to the methods of social studies. He also wants, by his practice, to create a field of investigation and experience for the sociological theory.
The collective of sociological art takes into consideration the traditional ideological attitudes of the publics to which he asks. He resorts to the methods of animation, inquiry and pedagogy. At the same time that he puts the art in relation with its sociological context, he attracts the attention on the channels of communication and diffusion, new theme in the history of the art, and that implies also a new practice.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, October 7, 1974
*Published in the Journa1 Le Monde, October 10, 1974.
MANIFEST II OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART*
The sociological art, that we were again alone to defend a few months ago, cause various obstructions, that tempt to get involved in the confusion. Therefore, it’s time to make some recalls and to reaffirm the sense that we always gave to the concept of sociological art.
Indeed, the sociological art distinguishes itself as much as the sociology of the art as the conceptions laxistes of a "social art".
On the one hand, as active practice in the social field, here and now, resorting to the approaches theoretical that it submits to the prove of the action, putting in work of the strategies in relation to the real, but also in relation to the institutions, to the power, inventing the techniques of its experiences - the sociological art comes out of the setting of the scientific and academic speech. If it resorts necessarily, as to a knowledge, instrument of the action and if it presents in return, with every new experience new materials of analysis, it goes past it dialectically in the elaborated practice.
On the other hand, the sociological art, by the specificity of its relation to the sociology, have nothing to see with the cultural carryall of the theme "art and society", in which some stretch abusing of their authority as critical of art, to dilute it to recover it. Others, as us, today, understand this danger. This confusion cleverly kept constitutes currently the more insidious threat against our process.
Politically committed, our sociological practice distinguishes itself of traditional militant art with which one also wants to confound it. This last express again with the aesthetic formalisms and the pictorial middle-class, to which we want to substitute an active practice of critical questioning. The militant painting was an important stage but prisoner of the clichés and the cultural conformisms who made it inoperative, it lets appear today its limits and its failures with too evidence, so the sociological art binds it on others ways, implying the new media, of the critic educational methods and the fundamental recourse to sociological analysis.
We have defined the sociological art by its epistemologic necessary relation with the sociological science. This relation is dialectic. It founds the artistic practice that experiments it and that objects it in return the force of the social reality. This relation is specific to the sociological art: it distinguishes it of all other traditional steps or avant-gardists. It means, against the traditional expression, the art as mystifying ideology of the irrationality, the will to resort to the scientific speech of sociology and to confront our practice to the rationality of this speech.
The sociological art is a practice that founds on the reversal of the sociology of the art against the art itself, and that takes into consideration the sociology of the society that produces this art. It probably constitutes one of the first tentative (excepts some experiences of socio-dramas), of implementation of a sociological practice known beyond the traditional concept of art. Indeed, sociology, unlike the other sciences as economy, the mechanics, the psychology or the biology, has caused no practice, only establishment to the level of the social field.
The project of the sociological art, it’s at the end to elaborate the sociological practice itself.
But unlike these sciences and their applications, the sociological art doesn't aim to manage the real, present or to come, but to exercise in relation to the social reality and to ourselves, a function of questioning and disruption. This interrogative and critical function implies not to make the questions and the answers. Indeed it aims not at all to justify a dogma, nor to reinforce its bureaucracy, but to cause some non-alienating awareness. It forces to establish, where reign the one-sided diffusion of the information, dilogics structures of communication and exchanges, implying reciprocal engagement of the active responsibility of each one.
The sociological art tempts to put in question the ideological superstructures, the system of values, the attitudes and mentalities conditioned by the massification of our society.
It’s in this goal that it resorts to the sociological theory, to its methods and that it elaborates a educational practice of animation, of inquiry, of disruption of the communication channels.
The concept of sociological art, as we proposed in 1972, as we practiced it since longer again, in an almost general indifference at that moment, imply today as yesterday the rigor of its constituent relation with the materialistic sociological theory, of which it is at the end the consequence and of which it marks the passage to the act as practice operating in the social field.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, May 1975
*Published in the catalog of the Galliera museum, Paris for the exposition of the collective sociological art.
MANIFEST III OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART : METHODOLOGY AND STRATEGY*
The practice of the sociological art substitutes for the affirmative and aesthetic traditional finalities of the art of the objectives bound to the transformation of the ideological attitudes, in the sense of an awareness of the social alienation. It’s not to propose new models of social organization, but to exercise the dialectic power of a critical questioning. This conscientisation must permit, in the moments of rupture of the social system (economic and bureaucratic structure crisis) to put forward the fundamental questioning susceptible to orient the steps of those that want to transform the social links. Such is our deliberated project. The philosophical question of the sense, in a social system that doesn't tolerate its setting in question, is inevitably subversive.
It implies that the collective of sociological art considers the methodology and the strategy as two fundamental concepts of his practice.
1. The methodology of the sociological art. Its fundamental goal is the setting up of deviance devices. Its action field is directly the one of the interpersonal subjective relations. It can’t hardly borrow to the official sociology, in this sense that this one aims to note and to manage, to manipulate the attitudes of the electors/consumers in relation to the alternative and fictitiously propositions of the social system itself, and not to put in question these propositions. The story of this methodology of establishment and bureaucratic is bound to the demands of the governmental and economic organism that financed the social investigations in the goal to assure the exercise of their power. Only the practice of a critical questioning can allow us to use these methods, diverting them.
Our methodology is entirely to invent It aims to make appear concretely the reality of the social relations that determine the individuals, but that the dominant ideology occults variously to the level of the imaginary in the individual consciences, by its political, moral and cultural speech. The sociological art visualizes the social relations that reveal the theoretical sociological analysis and the practice; it makes emerge his abstract structures to the conscience of each, object of the sociological speech, ideologically blinded to the level of the daily lived. This subversive educational practice reveals the working of the real social relations between the social categories, the modes of exploitation, the political logic of the dominating systems of values, their daily mystification, allowing thus to each an critical exercise critical of his judgment and his liberty in comparison with to a social order that presents itself falsely as natural and necessary. This self-management of the thought can be gotten thanks to multiplied effect of different techniques: displacement or transfer of information in comparison with their places or the supports of cultural process belonging to levels or social spheres usually partitioned, synthetic steps provoking subversive short circuits, everywhere where the dominant ideology divides and breaks up carefully to avoid the dialectic confrontations, in short a combinative deviant of the real cultural elements, putting in question their social logic and therefore making appear what their consistency owes to the dominating and repressive political power.
Questionings, debates, energizations, disruptions of the affirmative circuits of communication, provocations, refusal, critical counter-uses fictions, anti-institutions can constitute this transforming practice.
It’s not only direct action, but also an experimentation of which the partial or deferred effect is so important as the confrontation with the hypotheses of the theoretical research theoretical of a critical sociology.
2. The strategy of the sociological art. Realism and diversion are its two principles. It practises specifically against the institutions in place of the dominant system, that it wants to put in question. Constituted in collective, we don't only meet some individuals, we are also confronted constantly to these institutions, that are on the one hand artistic and cultural (galleries, museums, critical of art, magazines, biennials, fairs of the art, etc.), on the other hand politic and administrative (mass media, political parties, unions, townships, polices, organisms of control, of censorship, groups of pressure etc.). The recuperator processes of the market of the art and the justification of our activities by these different institutions make problem. With regard to the market of the art, the collective took the decision not to participate and to contest it radically; with regard to the parties to be held outside and to question all of them refusing the dogmas. Our critical interrogative function is against all militancy.
The strategy of the sociological art aims to rest on the artistic institution permissiveness, to widen its activity to a sociological practice wider than the category of art. The goal is to lay hands on the power of the institutions in place either in resting on some of the men exercising some responsibilities there, either thanks to the logic of the acquired power, to divert this power, so possible to overflow the processes of neutralization of our action that makes in principle the institutional executing of the e micro-environment of the elite, and to return this power against the institutional system that we want to question.
In a society dominated by economic and technocratic high-class to which the majority middle-class delegated its political power, it is possible to rest our strategy on a part of the intellectual class that contests the power of the administrators and their finalities.
The realism of our strategy constantly implies a calculation of the risks in the game of the
institutional guaranties, of the mechanisms of neutralization and recuperation, and of the possibilities
of experimentation or of effective setting in question. If the short-term is not negligible the long-term is a perspective of hope that necessarily legitimizes all will, as derisory that it appears to transform the social contemporary relations. It’s maybe the will to continue in spite of all, that will give its strength to our refusal of a society of men/objects controlled by the cybernetic.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, March 1976,
* Published in the international catalog of the 37th Biennial of Venise, June 1976
MANIFEST IV OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART: ART AND ECONOMY
The art is a complex merchandise. Its market in the industrialized countries is organized to
several levels: speculation of the elite on unique pieces or to limited print, massive diffusion of reproductions (disks, post cards, copies...), packing or conditioning of commodities of consumption (food, house...). This market secreted a network of modern and varied information, and an efficient institutional system (galleries, museums, centers of art and of culture...). World capital of finance and economy, New York detains on this market an imperial power and exports its local culture at the same time as its dollars.
1. The market of the art. Banks, Stock-exchanges, bids, assurances, industry, galleries made of the "supplement of soul" of our civilization a commercial activity to high output, very comparable to all other, with a supplementary function indeed, the one to legitimize spiritually our industrial and commercial society and the class that dominates there. The art recovers there its traditional affirmative power.
The collective sociological of art refuses a society where the art is money and where money is divine. By his interrogative and critical practice, at the opposite of the art merchandise and the culture of consumption, it questions the social conscience.
2. The communication. Confronted to the mercantile and official network of the art (magazines of art financed by directors of galleries, controlled by representatives of the State, published by captains of industry), the collective sociological of art poses the problem of the communication. He must invent marginally his own network of information, against the economic and political powers.
3. The institutions of the market. Opposite the galleries, museums and of the monumental symbol that reigns henceforth on this system in Paris - the Center of Art and of Culture Georges Pompidou - the collective of sociological art must invent a strategy of diversion. He must create his counter-institutions, such the Interrogative Sociological School, to oppose the conscience to the consumption.
4. New York. To the United States also, the cultural regionalism of New York holds the language and the power of the universality. The too near Canada undergoes the yoke, can’t discover its own cultural identity even. Everything that comes from New York is god on the market of the art. The galleries installed their head office at Broadway. They test their products in their European branches, before possible investment on the North American market. Spellbound by New York, the European artists, of United-States and from Japan make the art of imitation to be in the spiral of the before-war. The Centre Pompidou to reach the international statute believes necessary to announce at its opening an exhibition New York/Paris. Unconscious of the economic character of their power, the "stars" of New York ignores superbly the ideas that live elsewhere - to their eyes a way of third hulls cultural.
Yet the crisis reached the imperial capital, and while the prudent merchants welcome temporarily some foreign artists and galleries, the time to pass a crisis they want brief, we throw a third front out New York capable to organize a strategy out of the international market and to invent variously our consciences and our identities, without depending of the windows of bank of New-York.
The market of the art, its system of information and of diffusion, its institutions the Centre Pompidou, the New Yorker imperialism exist. They are there. As characteristic products of our bargain society and of consumption The collective of sociological art hasn’t the power to suppress them. Therefore, his strategy will be to divert them, so that the art is not the sublime expression and the supplement of soul of the economic, political and military power..., but the interrogative conscience of all.
The collective of sociological art,
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, February 1977
CHRONOLOGY OF AN ACTION
10-10-1974 Creation of the Collective of sociological art
Manifest 1 (publication in the Le Monde newspaper).
1975 Organization to the initiative of the Collective of the thematic exhibitions
sociological art:
January 1975 1) The arts and its socioeconomic structures,
Gallery Germain, Paris (with documents of: Art et Language, Willy Bongard, Hervé,
Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, John Latharn, Les Lévine, Lea Lublin,
Jacques Pineau, Adrian Piper, Klaus Staeck, Bernard Teyssèdre, Jean-Paul Thenot).
March 1975 2) Problems and methods of the sociological year.
Gallery Matthias Fels, Paris (with documents of: Art et Language, Jean-François Bory,
Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, Les Lévine, Léa Lublin, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Rabascali, Maurice Roquet, Jean Roualdes, Sanejouand, Sogno, Jean-Paul Thénot, Tomeck, Horacio Zabala).
May 1975 3) art and Communication, Institut Français, Cologne.
June 1975 4) Sociological art, Galliera museum, Paris.
April 1975 I.C.C. Antwerp: The collective of sociological art.
May 1975 Manifest II of the sociological art.
June 1975 Wspolczesna gallery, Warsaw.
July 1975 Center of art and of communication (C.A,Y.C.), Buenos Aires,
Argentina.
August 1975 Museum of contemporary art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
September 1975 Museum of Modern Art of Rio of Janeiro, Brazil.
March 1976 Manifest III of the sociological the art.
April 1976 Sociological animation of Associations: Kunstverein, Cologne.
May l976 Opening of the Interrogative Sociological School, Paris.
July 1976 Biennial of Venise: Bombardment of Venise. Device of cultural implosion.
September 1976 Urban Intervention, Perpignan.
February 1977 Manifest IV of the sociological art.
June 1977 Intervention documenta 6.
INDICATION & BIBLIOGRAPHIC:
Manifest I of the Collective, October 7, 1974 (Le Monde, 10-10-1974).
Sociological art I: Texts of Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thénot, Bernard
Teyssèdre (Gallery Germain, Paris).
Sociological art II: Talk of the Collective of sociological art with Otto Hahn (Gallery
Matthias Fels, Paris).
Sociological art: Fischer, Forest, Thénot ("+ O" March 1975, Belgium).
Catalog Collective Sociological Art (I.C.C. Antwerp, April 1975).
File on the sociological art: introduction of Bernard Teyssèdre, (Opus internatinal), special
number, April 1975.
Catalog Collective Sociological Art : Museum Ga1liera, June 1975 (Pierre Restany, Edgar
Morin, Marshall Mac Luhan, Jules Gritti, Jean Duvignaud, Vilem Flusser, René Berger).
The Collective of Sociological Art, by Vilem Flusser, Galeria publication, Wspolczesna,
Warsaw, Poland, June 1975).
The Collective of Sociological Art, by Claude Bouyeure "DU" N° 415, Zurich, 1975.
The Collective of Sociological Art (Magazin Kunst, 1975, N° 67/68).
Arte Sociologica (Domus, N° 548, July 1975, Milan, by Pierre Restany).
Photo-Movie-Video catalog: Clarification of the Collective of sociological art "Museum
Modern Art", ARC 2, Paris, November 1975.
Catalog Biennial Venise 1976. Manifest III of the Collective of Sociological Art.
The Collective of Sociological Art. La Opinion cultural, Buenos Aires, October 5, 1975.
The Interrogative Sociological School. Documenta 6, Cayc Editions, 1977.
SOCIOLOGICAL ART I ORGANIZED BY THE COLLECTIVE OF SOCIOLOGICAL ART, THE ART AND ITS SOCIOECONOMIC STRUCTURES
(preface by Bernard Teyssèdre/Exposition Gallery Germain, Paris, January 1975).
The art sociological is not a vanguard.
A vanguard, in art, shoot the other one, hunt the other one. A vanguard, in art, has this of strange, it doesn't include rearward, nor troop. Why? Because to throw a vanguard, in art, it’s provide for the speculators goods with increase rating and for the usurer guarantee after amortization of the stocks. Thus, what follows a vanguard, in art, that won't ever be the army, devalued by its number. It will be another vanguard, whose main merit will be to defer the previous, because this difference is what even allows a new investment, instead to immobilize the capital in the maintenance of an outdated equipment, without competitive advantage in the race to the maximal profit.
The art sociological don’t raise the souls toward beauty.
Beauty, from where the beauty comes? This absolute is the Genius's grant. "Voice of the silence", "Dialogue with the Invisible", teach us the aesthetic, because it’s not without interest to offend, under the aesthetic clouds, his real genealogy to know that his mother to the name Ideology and his father Fang-To-Phynances, both of honest bourgeois birth. To raise the souls toward beauty, it is translated: to attract people (body and soul) toward this grant of the sky that is the domination of the bourgeois taste, in order to better divert the struggle (abjectly material) that would change their conditions of life. "Artistic education" and the "giscardienne involvement " raising of a same strategy. That the good people "participates".
Yes, under condition, only a power of decision! That the good people initiates himself to the beaux-arts, yes, as the slaves domesticate themselves, as the fawns tames themselves, to lick the
master instead of eating it!
The art sociological don’t help to pour out the Culture.
Nowadays, the relation of the men to what surrounds them is canalized by them "Mass Media". The "nature" doesn't designate anymore an idyllic nostalgia or the prospecting of the domestic budget for holidays by the leisures industry. The social life, with the class conflicts, is "sublimated" by the dominant ideology in a humanist community, an Eden of peace. So the culture, losing all link with concrete action, unfolds. On the one hand the creators, on the other hand the receptors. Here the teachers, there the pupil. The information flows in an unique way in the way of the power. The relation of contradictory that it was, becomes hierarchical and it is permitted to whoever to climb the degrees - it is sufficient to him to grow rich, to cultivate himself.
The art sociological is not to the taste nor masses, nor of the elite.
Let's better observe how the culture unfolds in double.
To one of the extremes, there is the culture of mass. The masses are not deprived of art, on the contrary, never in the history they have been bathed to this point, flooded by the art: the TV serial, the "music" of Sylvie Vartan, the "literature" of the ex-minister Druon or the ex-convict Papillon. To return the art (the "true" ) accessible to the masses, it’s forget that the dominant class, if he remains dominant, it’s because he knew how to instill to the dominated masses his own tastes, his own ideas. It’s because he is expert to model them by his press, his radio, his television, his urbanism, his advertisement. In France, to make the art accessible to the masses, insofar as the tastes of the masses are the most often only the belated repercussions and damaged of the bourgeois taste, it will be produce an art that, even politically argumentative, reinforce on the masses the ascendancy of the bourgeois taste.
To the other extreme, her "true" culture is the privilege of the experts. A handful of artists leads, parade with his/ cortege, directors of galleries, civil servants of museums, criticals of specialized magazines. This co-opted elite detains the knowledge, therefore the power. This elite detains by intimidation and intellectual terrorism, the right of "to see" and "to declare", what in art is living, of international range, of universal value. "Living" art because, believe me, this newborn of the fashion that I throw will become big. "International", because my appetite of glory doesn't tolerate any shabby borders. "Universal" because such is my personal taste, to me the possessor of the universal knowledge. Of this art, them "masses" don’t have to do, it is without link with what they can and want to make: to change their conditions of life. Them "masses" prefer to "Support surface" the pictures of Paris-Match, to whom the mistake? They haven’t read Art Press, Opus, Artitudes, Art Vivant! They disregarded to learn to the contact of the elite! Only, that elite don’t appreciate that we disassemble the cogs of his power.
The sociological art is not beautiful. An art that dares to say the truth on the art, this is not beautiful.
The artists of the past had a holy boss: Chéri-Bibi. They lived "surrounded" of contradictions - "Fatalitas"! They succeeded, or they failed, for motives that didn't depend weakly of their work, well more of the merchants, of the criticals, of the collectors, suddenly they saw themselves either carried or released by the fashion "Fatalitas"! The essence of the sociological art it’s that the contradictions, from outside and passively undergone, became interior. The sociological art puts the art in question. It makes it while returning the art to its ideological, socioeconomic and political context. It makes it while attracting the attention on the channels of communication (or non communication), on the circuit of diffusion (or eclipse), on their possible disruption or subversion. It doesn't intend to be pleasing to the tastes such they are of the public such he is, but to modify the public and his tastes. This is not beautiful.
The exhibition "the art and its socioeconomic structures" opens a cycle of demonstrations of sociological art in France and out of France, in the galleries and out of the galleries. One won't see here of "beautiful pictures", that would please to the "masses"; nor even "surprising works", exciting a "elite" with the blasé taste. One will find some documents there, and not works, only if this treated as document. Materials of a put in question. Instruments for an awareness. And it must be noted, nothing to sell.
MANIFEST V SOCIOLOGICAL ART by Fred Forest(published by the Le Monde newspaper February 7, N° 10894, 1980)
The sociological art takes for materials the sociological data provided by its environment. It acts on these data by a multimedia practice. It reveals the features of the society by a methodology and a critical questioning. The own characters of the sociological art have been defined, put on work, experienced, verified in a first phase by the collective of sociological art.
TODAY THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART ENTERS IN THE SECOND PHASE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
>From now, it affirms in priority its symbolic function within the society in the domain of the representations of its time (convenient of the semblance and critical distance), in relation to its first picture, too exaggeratedly scientist, it operates a displacement toward a bigger sensualization of the lived, the playful exaltation, the human exchange quality. It resorts to three concepts in function of which it reorients its step in a meaningful way.
CONCEPT OF RELATION.
A new mental attitude encourages interference between the partitioned sectors. A will of indisciplinarity gave birth in the domain of the sciences to the theory of the "systemic". In the artistic field, this relational "data" also affirms itself. The work like open structure introduces uncertain and involvement of the public in interactive processes of communication. The artist doesn't impose himself anymore as the manufacturer of an artistic object materialized but founds his step on a particular relation that settles between himself and his context. Agent of communication, working on this one, the artist becomes a beneficiary of service.
CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION.
In sociological art all is played in this relation to the context. Each of the projects requires the creation of an operational device and the development of a strategy adaptable to different scripts. This practice leans therefore, entire, on the setting up of "systems of actions". The achieved work is embodied in a conceived device, programmed, animated within the daily reality. This type of work is called to substitute itself for the physical art object (sculpture, painting, photograph, strip video) or to the event isolated art in the micro-environment (performance, happening). Who says device, says organization. Art of organization, the sociological art is more attentive to the functions that to the objects.
CONCEPT OF INFORMATION.
The successive apparition of the techniques of transformation of the material, of the techniques of the energy and today of the techniques of information hired the being human in multiple shapes of expression. The most recent, the technique of information doesn't produce a material object but messages. Broadcast, receipt, arrangement (diversion) of messages, the sociological art is production of messages, thought, provocation. Imagination on the social communication of its time.
The sociological art is an art of information.
Fred Forest
Managing the Territory of the M2
MANIFEST I OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART *
Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot decided to constitute a collective of sociological art that can function like a structure of reception and of work for all those having for fundamental theme of the research and of the artistic practice the sociological fact and the link between art and the society.
The collective of sociological art notes the apparition of a new sensitivity for the given social, bound to the process of massification. The present settings of this sensitivity are not anymore those of the link of the individualized man to the world, but those of the link of the man to the society that produces him.
The collective of sociological art, by his artistic practice, has the tendency to put the art in question, to put in evidence the sociological facts and to "visualize" the elaboration of a sociological theory of the art.
The collective of sociological art fundamentally resorts to the theory and to the methods of social studies. He also wants, by his practice, to create a field of investigation and experience for the sociological theory.
The collective of sociological art takes into consideration the traditional ideological attitudes of the publics to which he asks. He resorts to the methods of animation, inquiry and pedagogy. At the same time that he puts the art in relation with its sociological context, he attracts the attention on the channels of communication and diffusion, new theme in the history of the art, and that implies also a new practice.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, October 7, 1974
*Published in the Journa1 Le Monde, October 10, 1974.
MANIFEST II OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART*
The sociological art, that we were again alone to defend a few months ago, cause various obstructions, that tempt to get involved in the confusion. Therefore, it’s time to make some recalls and to reaffirm the sense that we always gave to the concept of sociological art.
Indeed, the sociological art distinguishes itself as much as the sociology of the art as the conceptions laxistes of a "social art".
On the one hand, as active practice in the social field, here and now, resorting to the approaches theoretical that it submits to the prove of the action, putting in work of the strategies in relation to the real, but also in relation to the institutions, to the power, inventing the techniques of its experiences - the sociological art comes out of the setting of the scientific and academic speech. If it resorts necessarily, as to a knowledge, instrument of the action and if it presents in return, with every new experience new materials of analysis, it goes past it dialectically in the elaborated practice.
On the other hand, the sociological art, by the specificity of its relation to the sociology, have nothing to see with the cultural carryall of the theme "art and society", in which some stretch abusing of their authority as critical of art, to dilute it to recover it. Others, as us, today, understand this danger. This confusion cleverly kept constitutes currently the more insidious threat against our process.
Politically committed, our sociological practice distinguishes itself of traditional militant art with which one also wants to confound it. This last express again with the aesthetic formalisms and the pictorial middle-class, to which we want to substitute an active practice of critical questioning. The militant painting was an important stage but prisoner of the clichés and the cultural conformisms who made it inoperative, it lets appear today its limits and its failures with too evidence, so the sociological art binds it on others ways, implying the new media, of the critic educational methods and the fundamental recourse to sociological analysis.
We have defined the sociological art by its epistemologic necessary relation with the sociological science. This relation is dialectic. It founds the artistic practice that experiments it and that objects it in return the force of the social reality. This relation is specific to the sociological art: it distinguishes it of all other traditional steps or avant-gardists. It means, against the traditional expression, the art as mystifying ideology of the irrationality, the will to resort to the scientific speech of sociology and to confront our practice to the rationality of this speech.
The sociological art is a practice that founds on the reversal of the sociology of the art against the art itself, and that takes into consideration the sociology of the society that produces this art. It probably constitutes one of the first tentative (excepts some experiences of socio-dramas), of implementation of a sociological practice known beyond the traditional concept of art. Indeed, sociology, unlike the other sciences as economy, the mechanics, the psychology or the biology, has caused no practice, only establishment to the level of the social field.
The project of the sociological art, it’s at the end to elaborate the sociological practice itself.
But unlike these sciences and their applications, the sociological art doesn't aim to manage the real, present or to come, but to exercise in relation to the social reality and to ourselves, a function of questioning and disruption. This interrogative and critical function implies not to make the questions and the answers. Indeed it aims not at all to justify a dogma, nor to reinforce its bureaucracy, but to cause some non-alienating awareness. It forces to establish, where reign the one-sided diffusion of the information, dilogics structures of communication and exchanges, implying reciprocal engagement of the active responsibility of each one.
The sociological art tempts to put in question the ideological superstructures, the system of values, the attitudes and mentalities conditioned by the massification of our society.
It’s in this goal that it resorts to the sociological theory, to its methods and that it elaborates a educational practice of animation, of inquiry, of disruption of the communication channels.
The concept of sociological art, as we proposed in 1972, as we practiced it since longer again, in an almost general indifference at that moment, imply today as yesterday the rigor of its constituent relation with the materialistic sociological theory, of which it is at the end the consequence and of which it marks the passage to the act as practice operating in the social field.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, May 1975
*Published in the catalog of the Galliera museum, Paris for the exposition of the collective sociological art.
MANIFEST III OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART : METHODOLOGY AND STRATEGY*
The practice of the sociological art substitutes for the affirmative and aesthetic traditional finalities of the art of the objectives bound to the transformation of the ideological attitudes, in the sense of an awareness of the social alienation. It’s not to propose new models of social organization, but to exercise the dialectic power of a critical questioning. This conscientisation must permit, in the moments of rupture of the social system (economic and bureaucratic structure crisis) to put forward the fundamental questioning susceptible to orient the steps of those that want to transform the social links. Such is our deliberated project. The philosophical question of the sense, in a social system that doesn't tolerate its setting in question, is inevitably subversive.
It implies that the collective of sociological art considers the methodology and the strategy as two fundamental concepts of his practice.
1. The methodology of the sociological art. Its fundamental goal is the setting up of deviance devices. Its action field is directly the one of the interpersonal subjective relations. It can’t hardly borrow to the official sociology, in this sense that this one aims to note and to manage, to manipulate the attitudes of the electors/consumers in relation to the alternative and fictitiously propositions of the social system itself, and not to put in question these propositions. The story of this methodology of establishment and bureaucratic is bound to the demands of the governmental and economic organism that financed the social investigations in the goal to assure the exercise of their power. Only the practice of a critical questioning can allow us to use these methods, diverting them.
Our methodology is entirely to invent It aims to make appear concretely the reality of the social relations that determine the individuals, but that the dominant ideology occults variously to the level of the imaginary in the individual consciences, by its political, moral and cultural speech. The sociological art visualizes the social relations that reveal the theoretical sociological analysis and the practice; it makes emerge his abstract structures to the conscience of each, object of the sociological speech, ideologically blinded to the level of the daily lived. This subversive educational practice reveals the working of the real social relations between the social categories, the modes of exploitation, the political logic of the dominating systems of values, their daily mystification, allowing thus to each an critical exercise critical of his judgment and his liberty in comparison with to a social order that presents itself falsely as natural and necessary. This self-management of the thought can be gotten thanks to multiplied effect of different techniques: displacement or transfer of information in comparison with their places or the supports of cultural process belonging to levels or social spheres usually partitioned, synthetic steps provoking subversive short circuits, everywhere where the dominant ideology divides and breaks up carefully to avoid the dialectic confrontations, in short a combinative deviant of the real cultural elements, putting in question their social logic and therefore making appear what their consistency owes to the dominating and repressive political power.
Questionings, debates, energizations, disruptions of the affirmative circuits of communication, provocations, refusal, critical counter-uses fictions, anti-institutions can constitute this transforming practice.
It’s not only direct action, but also an experimentation of which the partial or deferred effect is so important as the confrontation with the hypotheses of the theoretical research theoretical of a critical sociology.
2. The strategy of the sociological art. Realism and diversion are its two principles. It practises specifically against the institutions in place of the dominant system, that it wants to put in question. Constituted in collective, we don't only meet some individuals, we are also confronted constantly to these institutions, that are on the one hand artistic and cultural (galleries, museums, critical of art, magazines, biennials, fairs of the art, etc.), on the other hand politic and administrative (mass media, political parties, unions, townships, polices, organisms of control, of censorship, groups of pressure etc.). The recuperator processes of the market of the art and the justification of our activities by these different institutions make problem. With regard to the market of the art, the collective took the decision not to participate and to contest it radically; with regard to the parties to be held outside and to question all of them refusing the dogmas. Our critical interrogative function is against all militancy.
The strategy of the sociological art aims to rest on the artistic institution permissiveness, to widen its activity to a sociological practice wider than the category of art. The goal is to lay hands on the power of the institutions in place either in resting on some of the men exercising some responsibilities there, either thanks to the logic of the acquired power, to divert this power, so possible to overflow the processes of neutralization of our action that makes in principle the institutional executing of the e micro-environment of the elite, and to return this power against the institutional system that we want to question.
In a society dominated by economic and technocratic high-class to which the majority middle-class delegated its political power, it is possible to rest our strategy on a part of the intellectual class that contests the power of the administrators and their finalities.
The realism of our strategy constantly implies a calculation of the risks in the game of the
institutional guaranties, of the mechanisms of neutralization and recuperation, and of the possibilities
of experimentation or of effective setting in question. If the short-term is not negligible the long-term is a perspective of hope that necessarily legitimizes all will, as derisory that it appears to transform the social contemporary relations. It’s maybe the will to continue in spite of all, that will give its strength to our refusal of a society of men/objects controlled by the cybernetic.
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, March 1976,
* Published in the international catalog of the 37th Biennial of Venise, June 1976
MANIFEST IV OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART: ART AND ECONOMY
The art is a complex merchandise. Its market in the industrialized countries is organized to
several levels: speculation of the elite on unique pieces or to limited print, massive diffusion of reproductions (disks, post cards, copies...), packing or conditioning of commodities of consumption (food, house...). This market secreted a network of modern and varied information, and an efficient institutional system (galleries, museums, centers of art and of culture...). World capital of finance and economy, New York detains on this market an imperial power and exports its local culture at the same time as its dollars.
1. The market of the art. Banks, Stock-exchanges, bids, assurances, industry, galleries made of the "supplement of soul" of our civilization a commercial activity to high output, very comparable to all other, with a supplementary function indeed, the one to legitimize spiritually our industrial and commercial society and the class that dominates there. The art recovers there its traditional affirmative power.
The collective sociological of art refuses a society where the art is money and where money is divine. By his interrogative and critical practice, at the opposite of the art merchandise and the culture of consumption, it questions the social conscience.
2. The communication. Confronted to the mercantile and official network of the art (magazines of art financed by directors of galleries, controlled by representatives of the State, published by captains of industry), the collective sociological of art poses the problem of the communication. He must invent marginally his own network of information, against the economic and political powers.
3. The institutions of the market. Opposite the galleries, museums and of the monumental symbol that reigns henceforth on this system in Paris - the Center of Art and of Culture Georges Pompidou - the collective of sociological art must invent a strategy of diversion. He must create his counter-institutions, such the Interrogative Sociological School, to oppose the conscience to the consumption.
4. New York. To the United States also, the cultural regionalism of New York holds the language and the power of the universality. The too near Canada undergoes the yoke, can’t discover its own cultural identity even. Everything that comes from New York is god on the market of the art. The galleries installed their head office at Broadway. They test their products in their European branches, before possible investment on the North American market. Spellbound by New York, the European artists, of United-States and from Japan make the art of imitation to be in the spiral of the before-war. The Centre Pompidou to reach the international statute believes necessary to announce at its opening an exhibition New York/Paris. Unconscious of the economic character of their power, the "stars" of New York ignores superbly the ideas that live elsewhere - to their eyes a way of third hulls cultural.
Yet the crisis reached the imperial capital, and while the prudent merchants welcome temporarily some foreign artists and galleries, the time to pass a crisis they want brief, we throw a third front out New York capable to organize a strategy out of the international market and to invent variously our consciences and our identities, without depending of the windows of bank of New-York.
The market of the art, its system of information and of diffusion, its institutions the Centre Pompidou, the New Yorker imperialism exist. They are there. As characteristic products of our bargain society and of consumption The collective of sociological art hasn’t the power to suppress them. Therefore, his strategy will be to divert them, so that the art is not the sublime expression and the supplement of soul of the economic, political and military power..., but the interrogative conscience of all.
The collective of sociological art,
Hervé FISCHER, Fred FOREST, Jean-Paul THÉNOT, Paris, February 1977
CHRONOLOGY OF AN ACTION
10-10-1974 Creation of the Collective of sociological art
Manifest 1 (publication in the Le Monde newspaper).
1975 Organization to the initiative of the Collective of the thematic exhibitions
sociological art:
January 1975 1) The arts and its socioeconomic structures,
Gallery Germain, Paris (with documents of: Art et Language, Willy Bongard, Hervé,
Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, John Latharn, Les Lévine, Lea Lublin,
Jacques Pineau, Adrian Piper, Klaus Staeck, Bernard Teyssèdre, Jean-Paul Thenot).
March 1975 2) Problems and methods of the sociological year.
Gallery Matthias Fels, Paris (with documents of: Art et Language, Jean-François Bory,
Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, Les Lévine, Léa Lublin, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Rabascali, Maurice Roquet, Jean Roualdes, Sanejouand, Sogno, Jean-Paul Thénot, Tomeck, Horacio Zabala).
May 1975 3) art and Communication, Institut Français, Cologne.
June 1975 4) Sociological art, Galliera museum, Paris.
April 1975 I.C.C. Antwerp: The collective of sociological art.
May 1975 Manifest II of the sociological art.
June 1975 Wspolczesna gallery, Warsaw.
July 1975 Center of art and of communication (C.A,Y.C.), Buenos Aires,
Argentina.
August 1975 Museum of contemporary art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
September 1975 Museum of Modern Art of Rio of Janeiro, Brazil.
March 1976 Manifest III of the sociological the art.
April 1976 Sociological animation of Associations: Kunstverein, Cologne.
May l976 Opening of the Interrogative Sociological School, Paris.
July 1976 Biennial of Venise: Bombardment of Venise. Device of cultural implosion.
September 1976 Urban Intervention, Perpignan.
February 1977 Manifest IV of the sociological art.
June 1977 Intervention documenta 6.
INDICATION & BIBLIOGRAPHIC:
Manifest I of the Collective, October 7, 1974 (Le Monde, 10-10-1974).
Sociological art I: Texts of Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thénot, Bernard
Teyssèdre (Gallery Germain, Paris).
Sociological art II: Talk of the Collective of sociological art with Otto Hahn (Gallery
Matthias Fels, Paris).
Sociological art: Fischer, Forest, Thénot ("+ O" March 1975, Belgium).
Catalog Collective Sociological Art (I.C.C. Antwerp, April 1975).
File on the sociological art: introduction of Bernard Teyssèdre, (Opus internatinal), special
number, April 1975.
Catalog Collective Sociological Art : Museum Ga1liera, June 1975 (Pierre Restany, Edgar
Morin, Marshall Mac Luhan, Jules Gritti, Jean Duvignaud, Vilem Flusser, René Berger).
The Collective of Sociological Art, by Vilem Flusser, Galeria publication, Wspolczesna,
Warsaw, Poland, June 1975).
The Collective of Sociological Art, by Claude Bouyeure "DU" N° 415, Zurich, 1975.
The Collective of Sociological Art (Magazin Kunst, 1975, N° 67/68).
Arte Sociologica (Domus, N° 548, July 1975, Milan, by Pierre Restany).
Photo-Movie-Video catalog: Clarification of the Collective of sociological art "Museum
Modern Art", ARC 2, Paris, November 1975.
Catalog Biennial Venise 1976. Manifest III of the Collective of Sociological Art.
The Collective of Sociological Art. La Opinion cultural, Buenos Aires, October 5, 1975.
The Interrogative Sociological School. Documenta 6, Cayc Editions, 1977.
SOCIOLOGICAL ART I ORGANIZED BY THE COLLECTIVE OF SOCIOLOGICAL ART, THE ART AND ITS SOCIOECONOMIC STRUCTURES
(preface by Bernard Teyssèdre/Exposition Gallery Germain, Paris, January 1975).
The art sociological is not a vanguard.
A vanguard, in art, shoot the other one, hunt the other one. A vanguard, in art, has this of strange, it doesn't include rearward, nor troop. Why? Because to throw a vanguard, in art, it’s provide for the speculators goods with increase rating and for the usurer guarantee after amortization of the stocks. Thus, what follows a vanguard, in art, that won't ever be the army, devalued by its number. It will be another vanguard, whose main merit will be to defer the previous, because this difference is what even allows a new investment, instead to immobilize the capital in the maintenance of an outdated equipment, without competitive advantage in the race to the maximal profit.
The art sociological don’t raise the souls toward beauty.
Beauty, from where the beauty comes? This absolute is the Genius's grant. "Voice of the silence", "Dialogue with the Invisible", teach us the aesthetic, because it’s not without interest to offend, under the aesthetic clouds, his real genealogy to know that his mother to the name Ideology and his father Fang-To-Phynances, both of honest bourgeois birth. To raise the souls toward beauty, it is translated: to attract people (body and soul) toward this grant of the sky that is the domination of the bourgeois taste, in order to better divert the struggle (abjectly material) that would change their conditions of life. "Artistic education" and the "giscardienne involvement " raising of a same strategy. That the good people "participates".
Yes, under condition, only a power of decision! That the good people initiates himself to the beaux-arts, yes, as the slaves domesticate themselves, as the fawns tames themselves, to lick the
master instead of eating it!
The art sociological don’t help to pour out the Culture.
Nowadays, the relation of the men to what surrounds them is canalized by them "Mass Media". The "nature" doesn't designate anymore an idyllic nostalgia or the prospecting of the domestic budget for holidays by the leisures industry. The social life, with the class conflicts, is "sublimated" by the dominant ideology in a humanist community, an Eden of peace. So the culture, losing all link with concrete action, unfolds. On the one hand the creators, on the other hand the receptors. Here the teachers, there the pupil. The information flows in an unique way in the way of the power. The relation of contradictory that it was, becomes hierarchical and it is permitted to whoever to climb the degrees - it is sufficient to him to grow rich, to cultivate himself.
The art sociological is not to the taste nor masses, nor of the elite.
Let's better observe how the culture unfolds in double.
To one of the extremes, there is the culture of mass. The masses are not deprived of art, on the contrary, never in the history they have been bathed to this point, flooded by the art: the TV serial, the "music" of Sylvie Vartan, the "literature" of the ex-minister Druon or the ex-convict Papillon. To return the art (the "true" ) accessible to the masses, it’s forget that the dominant class, if he remains dominant, it’s because he knew how to instill to the dominated masses his own tastes, his own ideas. It’s because he is expert to model them by his press, his radio, his television, his urbanism, his advertisement. In France, to make the art accessible to the masses, insofar as the tastes of the masses are the most often only the belated repercussions and damaged of the bourgeois taste, it will be produce an art that, even politically argumentative, reinforce on the masses the ascendancy of the bourgeois taste.
To the other extreme, her "true" culture is the privilege of the experts. A handful of artists leads, parade with his/ cortege, directors of galleries, civil servants of museums, criticals of specialized magazines. This co-opted elite detains the knowledge, therefore the power. This elite detains by intimidation and intellectual terrorism, the right of "to see" and "to declare", what in art is living, of international range, of universal value. "Living" art because, believe me, this newborn of the fashion that I throw will become big. "International", because my appetite of glory doesn't tolerate any shabby borders. "Universal" because such is my personal taste, to me the possessor of the universal knowledge. Of this art, them "masses" don’t have to do, it is without link with what they can and want to make: to change their conditions of life. Them "masses" prefer to "Support surface" the pictures of Paris-Match, to whom the mistake? They haven’t read Art Press, Opus, Artitudes, Art Vivant! They disregarded to learn to the contact of the elite! Only, that elite don’t appreciate that we disassemble the cogs of his power.
The sociological art is not beautiful. An art that dares to say the truth on the art, this is not beautiful.
The artists of the past had a holy boss: Chéri-Bibi. They lived "surrounded" of contradictions - "Fatalitas"! They succeeded, or they failed, for motives that didn't depend weakly of their work, well more of the merchants, of the criticals, of the collectors, suddenly they saw themselves either carried or released by the fashion "Fatalitas"! The essence of the sociological art it’s that the contradictions, from outside and passively undergone, became interior. The sociological art puts the art in question. It makes it while returning the art to its ideological, socioeconomic and political context. It makes it while attracting the attention on the channels of communication (or non communication), on the circuit of diffusion (or eclipse), on their possible disruption or subversion. It doesn't intend to be pleasing to the tastes such they are of the public such he is, but to modify the public and his tastes. This is not beautiful.
The exhibition "the art and its socioeconomic structures" opens a cycle of demonstrations of sociological art in France and out of France, in the galleries and out of the galleries. One won't see here of "beautiful pictures", that would please to the "masses"; nor even "surprising works", exciting a "elite" with the blasé taste. One will find some documents there, and not works, only if this treated as document. Materials of a put in question. Instruments for an awareness. And it must be noted, nothing to sell.
MANIFEST V SOCIOLOGICAL ART by Fred Forest(published by the Le Monde newspaper February 7, N° 10894, 1980)
The sociological art takes for materials the sociological data provided by its environment. It acts on these data by a multimedia practice. It reveals the features of the society by a methodology and a critical questioning. The own characters of the sociological art have been defined, put on work, experienced, verified in a first phase by the collective of sociological art.
TODAY THE SOCIOLOGICAL ART ENTERS IN THE SECOND PHASE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
>From now, it affirms in priority its symbolic function within the society in the domain of the representations of its time (convenient of the semblance and critical distance), in relation to its first picture, too exaggeratedly scientist, it operates a displacement toward a bigger sensualization of the lived, the playful exaltation, the human exchange quality. It resorts to three concepts in function of which it reorients its step in a meaningful way.
CONCEPT OF RELATION.
A new mental attitude encourages interference between the partitioned sectors. A will of indisciplinarity gave birth in the domain of the sciences to the theory of the "systemic". In the artistic field, this relational "data" also affirms itself. The work like open structure introduces uncertain and involvement of the public in interactive processes of communication. The artist doesn't impose himself anymore as the manufacturer of an artistic object materialized but founds his step on a particular relation that settles between himself and his context. Agent of communication, working on this one, the artist becomes a beneficiary of service.
CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION.
In sociological art all is played in this relation to the context. Each of the projects requires the creation of an operational device and the development of a strategy adaptable to different scripts. This practice leans therefore, entire, on the setting up of "systems of actions". The achieved work is embodied in a conceived device, programmed, animated within the daily reality. This type of work is called to substitute itself for the physical art object (sculpture, painting, photograph, strip video) or to the event isolated art in the micro-environment (performance, happening). Who says device, says organization. Art of organization, the sociological art is more attentive to the functions that to the objects.
CONCEPT OF INFORMATION.
The successive apparition of the techniques of transformation of the material, of the techniques of the energy and today of the techniques of information hired the being human in multiple shapes of expression. The most recent, the technique of information doesn't produce a material object but messages. Broadcast, receipt, arrangement (diversion) of messages, the sociological art is production of messages, thought, provocation. Imagination on the social communication of its time.
The sociological art is an art of information.
Fred Forest
Managing the Territory of the M2
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