BASIC INCOME BEYOND WAGE SLAVERY: IN SEARCH OF TRANSCENDING POLITICAL AESTHETICS.
Lasse Ekstrand and Monika Wallmon.
QUOTES:
- “If we understand art, we don´t need it!”
- Art is a social activity and everyone is contributor. Art is not to be “seen”: art is doing.” (J.Beuys)
I like this quote because through this statement Beuys challenges the artist´s role and provokes deep reflections about the importance (or not) of understanding the Art. What really means “I understand art”? How much important is to whome the art is delivered?
On the second quote Beuys focus on thte social and active aspect of art.
“Dear artist, I don´t know what you want to say with this art-piece. My mind cannot recompose the puzzle of your thoughts. I am wondering : Do I really need to understand what you are trying desperately to tell me?Do you want to tell me something?Is it so important?I speak to you, dear artist. Why did you choose this word, this action, this place, this color, this shape? I strive to find something concrete in your art-piece that will reflect a part of myself. What do y0u want from me, dear artist? what do you expect from me?…to react?…..to reflect?…..to empathize? ……to get upset?……..to be confused?….to feel frustrated?…. to wake up? to feel happy?…hmmm….I need to understand… But now I realize that I grow up too much..I am an adult. The child on the other side of the room just looks at your art-piece. ..just looks and feels and seems not to worry to understant what you want to say..this child seems already to know…”
SUMMARY NOTES
- This paper joins the argument for the payment of an unconditional Basic Income to all members of a post-industrial society. It aims to demonstrate how aesthetic philosophy , particularly as developed by the German artist J. Beuys, collaborates with the welfare theory, how important and urgent is the BI discourse.
- Learned helplessness , Social Art, Liberation: three dimensions related to the welfare theory
“Welfare theory”
- Man needs to work in order to produce and reproduce, but work is not per -se labour work, and it must not be.
- Ethic of labour and aesthetics of non- labour
- Theory of “free time”. Liberation of the individual. Creative growth. New ways of thinking an acting.
- Mans own the possiblity to discover his/her own capacities.
Aesthetics and Politics.
- The purpose of the art is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to want and custom, perfect the power to perceive. (Dewey)
- Lyotard: aethetics is the main mode of human Knowldedge.
Beuys.
- Suggests that social action is to be considered as art and art as social action.
- Social Sculpture: Interaction of individuals who start to built a sculpture with a creative and open mind. The do not lasting longer than necessary.
- action.
- The artist´s role.
- ” Art is not here to be understood”. “if we understand art, we don´t need it”. “I hate art!”
- Art is not to be “seen”: art is doing.
- Beuys aim: liberating the individual in realtion to himself and to an oppresive society based on wage slavery.
- Society: a great artistic whole. “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kuenstler”
Art of Liberation
- We can not wait ofr linerations.We have to liberate ourselves, our fate is in pur hands, it comes down to praxis.
- We become an agent of self-government.
- Kunst>Kapital. Human capital is the only capital in that society.
- Full citizenship: full partecipation for everybody in all spheres of social and political life and in the ways and standards of life thata re the predominant in society.
- Basic Income: in not only an economic reform; it is a political reform with far reaching, dynamic effects and it must be connected with the idea of an aesthetically motivated society.
Learned helplessness: thE result of being trained to be locked into a system tha can be the family, the community, the culturem the tradition, the profession or the welfare state. The person feels passive with respect to the system.
We must really want to live our own life and not one prescribed by our family, societym culture, profession or tradition.
Social Art
- Every individual has creativity potential.
- Like ritual, the play creates spatial seperation from the ordinary life.
- Schiller: Art is the result of the “play impulse”.
- Is in the play that the individual can create, be creative, and it is only through being creative that an individual can find the indentity in her/himself.
- Creativity is an attitude to the world of liberation and disobedience. Our acts ” piece of art ” is a vehement protest.