Excerpt from Fernand Léger (Yale university press, 1983)
IN SEVERAL RESPECTS IT was the future rather than the past which conditioned many early twentieth-century attitudes of artists to their own epoch. In theory ideological concepts are inherently bound up with such attitudes, and, when intelligently under- stood, can result in an immense intensification of consciousness towards the realities of one's own period. This was true of Léger and many of his early contemporaries. Great art can be produced in a society when the concepts of present and future are psycho- logically fused to maximum intensity. Such periods are always brief, and we are not living in one at the moment. Recent developments in ideas concerned with art either treat the relationship between present and future with a cool and vapid empiricism or tumble into voracious messianic programmes which deny any art activity outside the production of works of revolutionary intent. The denigration of art on the grounds of its inefficacy in modifying or shaping vital contemporary problems is an attractive pastime. In reality it is nothing more than the resurrection of Tristan Tzara's old ideas of ‘humiliating’ art, presented under the renovated guise of a spurious sociology. Crude sociological interpretations of art, with their classificatory systems and elementary reductionism, have been a factor contributing to the general confusion.
A sociology of art – badly needed and sadly lacking – must depend on a complete knowledge of social structures and social psychology. This knowledge is usually fragmentary or incomplete. The role of myth, for example, as an engenderer of models for the understanding of cultures is often in art history presented in ‘sociological’ terms, either ignored or placed within the context of Jungian psychology. The situation gives rise to a curious – and specifically contemporary – phenomenon. ‘Sociological’ material of one kind or the other is frequently introduced into works. But its use is dictated more as an aid to critical appraisal than through any necessity required by the content of the works themselves. Excavated, like an archaeological site, the work reveals its quota of sociological evidence: planted, fraudulent, or at best misleading.
Stravinsky once defined certain types of music as being able to survive only ‘by continuously renewed neglect’. His remarks are unfortunately not heeded by the speculative interests involved in the promotion of the visual arts. Yet the questions concerning the present cultural crisis are frequently formulated in such a way as to produce answers that are false from the start, for instance, as to whether art is 'useful' or not, or if the acquisition and ownership of art force it (and its practitioners) into the role or function of superficial élitism. These are important questions, but ones which in the long run are of minor relevance. ‘Because things are as they are’, Brecht once stated, ‘they will not remain as they are.’ The creating of great art in terms of ability or talent is probably a specialist activity. The use that is made of that art is another matter. In the Hegelian sense art is a partial system depending on the multiple significance given to objects of a privileged nature. These objects act as mediators between all other systems making up society. Our crisis is not due to the ‘privileged’ nature of art, but to the breakdown of the organic components constituting society. The role of art can only be re-established by the restructuring of these societies.