“Art Must Act”:
Instead of delineating an artwork’s place in the unfolding of historical tendencies, or revealing its interest as a lens onto social problems, the critic must judge the artist’s action for how it reveals a life.
[E]xtremist ideologies of the Right and Left responded to the real problems of modern society by offering illusory collective identities and narratives that substituted for genuine action and an authentic self. Liberals who opposed these ideologies, they warned, were no less susceptible to such illusions.
In promoting a smug conformism disguised as free thinking, the little magazines, he warned, were drifting into dithering liberalism that substituted a cozy in-group identity for real possibilities of intellectual and political action.
Proponents of the ‘new painting’ responded to this situation by abandoning both politics and aesthetics – the goal of either changing society or of creating beautiful, interesting or otherwise significant objects. They sought instead, with ‘a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion’, to ‘act’ through the creation of artworks ‘in the form of personal revolts’.
In referring to them as action, he stressed that these experiments should be judged for their effectiveness in changing the situation and character of those performing them.
He was sceptical whether the ‘personality-myth’ of the ‘lone artist’ was a true resource for resistance or a lure by which artists would let themselves be co-opted.
The only way to reconnect with the experience of the latter, Newman posited, was to use techniques of abstraction as a kind of ascetic purification bypassing art history, moving the spectator ‘beyond the aesthetic into an act of belief’, in a sublime without theology, ideology, ritual or creed.
If both the pose of the isolated, marginal creator defying social conventions and that of the freethinking intellectual rejecting mass society had become deceptive guises for a failing liberal order, then perhaps the solution, after all, was to work out paths for action from within, and not outside of, the structures that seemed to thwart it.
One of the few forms of action is for intellectuals, putting aside any claims to expert knowledge, to express in a compelling, personal ‘style’ their own reactions to what they see – with honest disgust and outrage, rather than cool, dispassionate investigation or critique. Instead of reaching for the mask of ‘the expert’ posing as a master of impersonal facts (a role for which the public now had only well-earned contempt), the intellectual who wants to reach the public should become a ‘participant in the family table talk’, speaking straightforwardly (albeit in an ‘unusually brilliant’ way) about things we all see and feel. In an era that no longer believes in truth, Rosenberg warned half a century ago, the intellectual must become a kind of populist, just as the artist might become a comedian.
What’s most significant about Rosenberg’s criticism is that, as he shifted attention from one artist to another, he consistently sought to evaluate what a given artist’s work revealed about how an individual in our society can use the cultural and institutional resources available to pry themselves out of their old personae and craft a new, more expansive and enfranchising identity. Throughout decades of writing about art, he always held that artists were to be judged for their success or failure at acting – that is, in finding ways to resist routine, cliché and conformity on the one hand, and self-deluded escapism and fantasy on the other. These twin evils, he never stopped arguing, arise from the very nature of our capitalist society.
But his friend Hannah Arendt took up many of his ideas in her opus The Human Condition (1958), which argues that political life, like aesthetics, is characterised by an innate, albeit now widely ignored, human need for self-display through performances that are not labour, or routine, or ritual, but what she, following Rosenberg, called ‘action’.