ART AND WORK
51
activity by which the human creature is defined. Man is a maker,
homo faber,
an artist. Put this proposition in reverse- when man ceases
to be a maker he is no longer man-and our present crisis is explained.
The fall began not in Eden, when man was condemned to labor, but
in
the nineteenth century when the machine first threatened him with
leisure. With "soulless manufacture," as Ruskin called it, turning out
endless quantities of copies of objects to which the human touch was
alien, man-the-maker commenced to lose his skills and with them his
dignity and independence. He was converted into an atom. of mass
society, a unit of energy susceptible of being put to use for any purpose
-and to being replaced by other energy units generated from nature.
The dissolution of the human essence based on man's handling of
materials now reaches its climax in automation by which even the most
rudimentary operative skills are eliminated. In regard to man as a tool–
using fabricator the outlook is thus one of absolute blackness. He may
preserve his skills out of sentimentality, and even revive abandoned ones,
but these exercises no longer have a role in the serious realm of necessity
and can no longer hold the human being to an ultimate definition.
If
the arts are identified with the crafts-and they can never be
altogether detached from them- their role too is in doubt. This doubt
pervades the art of the past hundred years and is the essential content
of the advanced writings and paintings of the half-century since the First
WorId War. Our time has given birth to the concept of the last artist.
His work takes the form of reducing to zero the tradition of skillfully
contrived objects. A splash or a ruled rectangle asserts the terminal
proposition reached by the logic of art history. Then art and the artist
are no more.
This doubting of the kind of making called art has turned up in
all the arts. Under the name of anti-art it has exerted a constantly
revolutionizing influence. It has resulted in the endeavor to carry art
beyond fabrication into the realms of action and revelation. In painting
. and the drama it has caused the psychology of the gesture and the meta–
physics of the void to emerge as keys to form. The symbol of art
in
which making has reached its last gasp is the work of the New York
painter who literally conceives art as an all-black picture, which he
repeats in a uniform size, shape and surface: five feet wide, five feet
high, five thousand dollars. This artist could announce if he chose, "I
have met the machine and it is
I."
I should like to be able to prove that the prophecy of mechanized
man and the death of the arts is baseless. As against aristocrats who lost
