Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Why Art Can't Kill The Constructivist International



"A CONSTRUCTIVE LIFE IS THE ART OF THE FUTURE.
ART which has not entered life will be numbered and handed over to the archaeological museum of ANTIQUITY.
It is time for ART to merge with life in an organised fashion.
A CONSTRUCTIVELY ORGANISED Life is HIGHER than the bewitchingly intoxicating art of magicians.
Down with art as a bright PATCH on the medoiocre life of a propertied man.
Down with art as a precious STONE amid the dirty, dank life of the poor man.
Down with art as a means to ESCAPE A LIFE that is not worth living.
LIFE, as a conscious and organised life, capable of SEEING and CONSTRUCTING, is contemporary art.
WORK for LIFE and not for PALACES, TEMPLES, CEMETERIES and MUSEUMS.
Work in the midst of everyone, for everyone, and with everyone.
Down with monasteries, institutes, ateliers, studios, offices and islands."
From Alexander Rodchenko, 'Slogans', 1920/1
Compare:



"1: The Situationist goal is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleeting moments resolutely arranged. The success of these moments can only be their passing effect. Situationists consider cultural activity, from the standpoint of totality, as an experimental method for constructing daily life, which can be permanently developed with the extension of leisure and the disappearance of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).
2: ART CAN CEASE to be a report on sensations and become a direct organization of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us.
3: There is no freedom in the employment of time without the possession of modern instruments for the construction of daily life. The use of such instruments will mark the leap of a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art."
From Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, 1958

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