Wanderer is the personification of the modern era, from which we now need to escape. Our mountaintop journeyman appears distinct from the world below, defining himself apart from nature and the messy quotidian world beneath the clouds. His back is turned to us, although he is possibly with us or even is us. He faces the horizon and looks longingly to an imagined future that is pictured in his mind. This is the artist as super-seer, sovereign genius and truth seeker; taking us to places we otherwise would not imagine or dare to go. This is the artist at the start of a journey into the unknown, leading us with hope into the light, the charge of the avant-garde.
Friedrich’s painting was my introduction into modern romantic art history. A history presented to me in my younger days as an unfolding, sequential development of form and ideas. This A to B to C art history, for the most part, operated in parallel to the day to day world of politics and economics, indexed to the historical context, but all the while distanced from it, above it—a witness to it, a critic of it, but never presented as an accomplice.
As we unbox our packaging, we find the software engineer behind it: a certain Immanuel Kant. Through the dual architecture of purposeless purpose and the disinterested spectator Kant transformed the idea of art into the most robust of aesthetic systems, operating in an autonomous zone that could reflect the world from a safe distance. It was a beautiful thought experiment that gave privilege to the eye above all else, and a tool that would be complicit in separating man from nature, and art from daily life, for the next two hundred plus years.
Over time this Kantian model of art nurtured a triangulation of artist-spectator-connoisseur and, combined with the rising capitalist, industrial economy and the withering away of religion, this architecture rose to form the twin temples of art market and museum. This ensured that art was maintained in a privileged system of representation, reflection and consumption in opposition to the premodern concept of art as the enhanced utility, ritual and politics of human activity (evidenced by the objects rendered obsolete in the museum itself).
We now find ourselves at the tail end of the modern era, the twin edifices of market and museum look increasingly precarious within the unravelling of economics and politics in the face of the latest technological revolutions and ecological catastrophes. On a local level the public support of an art world that is by self-definition ‘useless’ and autonomous is faltering. The best claims for art right now (apart from wealth and status advancement for a tiny circle in the planetary population) are made to us in terms of regenerative economics, disruptive values, numbers of hotel ‘bed nights’ sold, and the constant refuelling of an attention industry. In reality this is not so convincing, as it becomes clear that the true beneficiaries of this system are somewhere else, not in our neighbourhood.
That art has found itself marooned in this way is, for the most part, a consequence of a compartmentalization of the arts in the age of industry and capital, somewhere downstream from the enlightenment. In this economy ‘high index’ user groups within our society have moulded art to their best advantage and to feed cultural and financial capital. The market-driven spectacle economies of our major museums, whilst reported on and consumed widely, ultimately serve the highest percentiles (the claims to mass participation, more than not, a means to their own ends). Elsewhere other arts, such as craft, architecture and design have followed other trajectories: ‘demoted’ to popular, folk, amateur, cheesy or functional arts. At various moments these arts (once referred to as low art) are absorbed into the higher index economy, but predominately at the behest of those higher up the food chain.
The bifurcation between High and Low is now apparently a thing of the past, but this has merely been replaced with a far more nuanced system of control, approval, and consensus commensurate with the complexity of markets. What not so long ago was termed High Art has mutated; nevertheless, it has maintained a trajectory away from common usership, continuing to serve the interests of its main stakeholders—although we might now describe it as cool, critically engaged or important art.
This case is most acute in the world of the fine arts, which has become the one most removed from ordinary use (a requirement for its index of commercial value). Most people know how to regularly use music, film or architecture in a way that most would not consider applicable to Art. We can happily understand that we can use music to stimulate a mood or to dance to it within the ritualised behaviours of our culture, as part of the way we live, at a wedding or the rituals of a good night out. The static gallery exhibition, art installation or performance is not accommodated into our regular life patterns in the same way, at least for the majority of the population. Habitual usage of the gallery experience would certainly mark out an individual as a culture vulture of a particular metropolitan bent. Its structures are constructed by a highly refined set of users, who have a keen interest in not allowing contemporary art to become too popular.
Subsequently art has drifted away from being commonly understood as something with social value; the wider populace have embraced art, or applied artfulness, in other ways such as gaming, programming, cooking, craft, selfies, protest, NFTs, Cosplay, or creating content for YouTube and other digital platforms. It is pertinent that these forms of art shift more toward the spectrum of prosumerism, making and usership, where meaning is generated collectively.
There is a sense that something quite different is beginning to happen, as the economic system that has supported autonomous art for so long appears to be collapsing, or at least reforming, with the increasing division between the haves and the have-nots becoming more polarizing. The cracks are also showing in the walls of public art museums. These museums are not valued quite enough by the majority and, as such, when the post-pandemic and conflict-induced cuts come they are first in line. The sector can make its claims on economic grounds: regeneration, place making, added value, but it is not enough. An art embedded in all our lives, in consistent usership for social purpose, would survive much better.
The whole shebang of extraction industries, laissez-faire capitalism and so on has brought us seemingly to the verge of annihilation: economic, political and ecological. It is in such times of high anxiety that we often call upon the idea of history to console us, but also to find tools and stories that help us to think of a way out.
So let us picture a parabolic curve to represent modernity, in which the x–axis shows an unfolding linear time (or for that matter universal space-time) and the y–axis an index of something like power, certainty and wealth or a combination of all that. The curve rises from the start of the nineteenth century and descends towards a point we now occupy. We could draw a horizontal line across that intersects the rising curve, firstly at the European revolutions of 1848 and meeting the falling curve in the year 1989, the moment the Iron Curtain falls, turbo capitalism wins the day, the Internet begins to weave itself into our lives and, very softly, the beginning of the 2008 crash is born. Its apex would sit somewhere around the time of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and the end of the First World War. And please note, I am speaking very deliberately and purposefully here from a very European viewpoint.
If we describe ourselves now to be at the tail end of the parabola, in some kind of transition between waves, somewhere in decline or somewhere before an uncertain something else, what is the narrative we construct to steer us through? What if we were to suspend the idea of linear, one-directional history and go back to Friedrich and 1818, look again around us, look under the clouds and on the ground, what would we find and what other routes could we discover?
John Ruskin was born in London in 1819, the year after Friedrich painted the Wanderer. Ruskin is an awkward character; his complexity, contrariness and contradiction don’t sit well with the simple Story of Art. He appears more often as a kind of dodgy uncle/phantom in a series of bad sex cameo appearances in a Victorian rom-com. An eccentric, troubled, mentally ill critic who promoted Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites.
For sure, there was much to dislike about Ruskin, but up against the backdrop of the Machinery Question (the Industrial Revolution) Ruskin was the without doubt the principle voice of conscience, calling for the humanizing of society through art and natural ecology.
Self-described as both Conservative and Communist (the curious movement of Anglican Socialism can be reserved for another day) he was prolific as a writer, artist and social reformer, railing against the systematic control of society through the economic and technological machinery of the industrialists. Unable to be constrained as simply a commentator on art, he gained wider fame for his fervent public critique against the inhumanity of the age, in voluminous publications and highly performative public lectures.
His vision was not the fashionable quest for an idealised future attained by a plan of growth and production, but a humanity based in living artfully, cooperatively, sustainably and truthfully within a natural ecology of perpetual change. He insisted we must understand art, not as an end in itself but as process, the manner of work undertaken—as a tool to effect social, physical and spiritual betterment. Throughout his life his work took him beyond the limits of the field of art discourse, with an aim to build a holistic model of the world through writing, teaching, action, lectures, social projects, painting, agriculture, architecture and craft. In hindsight it isn’t too hard to think of him as the world’s first social practitioner or artivist.
His influence is still felt across our age within the best intentions of modernity, the moments when we have pushed art beyond the false neutrality of the museum into traction with the world outside, inspiring the political Arts and Crafts Movement, along with all the twists and turns of a legacy that runs through the Toynbee Settlement to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bauhaus. He established farms, education programmes, conservation projects, and instigated political and social reform. Through his texts and public lectures his influence is felt through education for all, the Labour Party, environmentalism, equal rights for women, the minimum wage, The National Trust, Welfare State, the preservation of Venice, Gandhi and Rudolf Steiner.
Underpinning Ruskin’s work is his vision of culture as nature, and nature as culture. Learning to see the world in all its truth was a first principle of a moral life, rather than succumbing to the idealized and perfect forms of the post-Renaissance. The bedrock of this vision was the study of geology, flora and fauna, mountains, waterfalls and rivers—their constant variation and ‘imperfection’, essential to constructing a good society. It is a scheme in which man and his actions do not operate above and beyond the natural world, but within it, contingent on it, subject to the same laws and conditions.
From 1851 to 1853 Ruskin published The Stones of Venice, his three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture as a commentary on society and labour conditions. Here he discusses the Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance periods as a parable of decline. Against the prevailing trend for building our civic architecture, homes, engine houses and factories in the logical and mechanical forms of the Renaissance, Ruskin championed the highly unfashionable medieval Gothic for its natural variations, ethical craftsmanship and, importantly, the social and ethical bonds fostered by such works. In the chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ he forces the point home:
We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
Stones of Venice presented for the first time a complete view on the relation between art and life as a perpetual and necessary struggle with human imperfection. ‘We may expect that the first two elements of good architecture should be expressive of some real truths. The confession of Imperfection and the confession of the Desire of Change.’
His vision presents a critique of capitalist society’s ambition to resolve human imperfection through standardized production and management. However, Ruskin suggests that instead of worrying about a predetermined outcome we should focus on the process, aesthetics and ethics by which we live, and this will shape our society through responsive organic design as it grows and mutates. In this way we must live life artfully and experience our work not as toil for reward, but as an inherent part of a total ecological system of life and work.
In the Arts and Crafts Movement Ruskin envisioned such a system, yet inevitably the prevailing impetuousness and social conditioning of the market system meant that the movement was ultimately co-opted into an emerging consumer lifestyle, exemplified by William Morris’s ultimate fate as producer of luxury goods, rather than an effective agent of reform.
We can contrast the development of an industrialized cultural machinery with Ruskin’s persistent but somewhat flawed attempts to create genuine alternatives to those on offer. These include his education programme for Winnington school for girls, museums for the working classes, road building projects for his students at Oxford University and the agrarian communes of the Guild of St George. In the Lake District village of Coniston, where he resided from 1871 until his death in 1900, he encouraged the development of the local mining and farming community around the Coniston Mechanics Institute as a hybrid centre for community, art and education.
The Mechanics Institute movement was created as part of the rapid technological expansion of Britain. It was to educate the workforce in the new emerging technologies, sciences and arts and, in doing so, nurturing innovation, creativity, growth and a healthier more contented population—both instrumental and altruistic.
Whilst driving the nation forward as a global superpower fuelled by education, skills, cooperation and entrepreneurship, they inadvertently created the crucible for true democracy. As the population came together within, they also learned to self-organise, initiating voting rights for workers, unionization, equal rights for women, education for all. In fact, it could be cited as the reason the United Kingdom avoided revolution, because these Institutes instilled the belief that progressive change could be shaped through their own evolution of the system from within.
By 1850 there were over 700 institutes in Britain with equivalent numbers in the United States and the Commonwealth Nations. In Ruskin’s own Coniston Institute he shaped local
culture according to his philosophy of art as a way of living: a combination of hand, heart and head. The Institute had a community bath house, library, assembly hall, kitchens, collections of art and artefacts (for educational use and decidedly not for entertainment) and workshops which hosted Home Craft Industries—an Arts and Crafts school for miners, farmers, and their families who learned through making, drawing, wood carving, metal work and lace.
Products of the school were humble, competent, not especially refined but ‘good enough’. From this an internal sustainable economy for the village grew to supplement and enhance their labour on the farms and in the mines. In contrast to the publicized success of the Arts and Crafts, this was a truer reflection of Ruskin’s philosophy: art working and making as part of an ordinary life for ordinary people, as a fellowship, as part of the ebb and flow of daily living and learning.
Ruskin became an increasingly popular performer in the 1850s, filling halls with up to 2000 people on national lecture tours. He frequently used them to goad and provoke the industrialists and politicians running the Victorian empirical machine. His 1857 lecture Joy for Ever on political economy delivered to the new capitalists of Manchester was a direct attack on the illth (not wealth) he saw emerging all over the new Britain.
Subjects were pointed. More often his talks were like sermons: performative and illustrated with props and numbered lecture diagrams drawn by himself, the artists and his household, all thrown around the stage in the manner of a wayward nineteenth-century PowerPoint.
In 1861 Ruskin was invited to give one of the prestigious lectures at the Royal Institution, the great theatre of science where luminaries such as Michael Faraday, Humphry Davy and Henry Cavendish presented their discoveries to the world.
On this occasion Ruskin chose to present on the apparently more humble subject of tree twigs. To the slight bemusement of the scientifically minded audience, he proceeded to give an account of the growth of trees and their leaves, and in particular drawing attention to the unfolding development of the horse chestnut tree, describing in detail the extent to which each unique leaf in its individuality and imperfection, finds its way to full growth always in relation to a cohesive whole, in the interests of the complete tree and forest.
Despite considerable derision from those assembled, on this night his real point is simply made: that society, its economy and culture are not universal, manufactured and perfect, but an inherent part of an ecological cosmology subject to continual changes and modulation. In this scheme art (that is, human activity, including the technosphere), are not distinct from nature, but a process intertwined within the very fabric of the universe.
In a wider context Ruskin speaks extensively about how to acquire, and how to employ art for social effect, arguing that England had forgotten that true wealth is virtue, and consequently art is an index of society’s wellbeing. As such, individuals have a responsibility to consume wisely, stimulating beneficent demand. Economics is not simply fiscal, but in its original sense ‘good housekeeping’ and governance of the natural and cultural ecology over which we have custody. In this way we can look again at Ruskin as the first true environmentalist and a principle voice that helps us untie the bindings of spectatorship and separation programmed through Modernity.
Jumping now to the post 1989 moment, Arte Útil has emerged as a quasi-movement, or concept, initiated by artist Tania Bruguera. It convenes a growing international network of people who have the ambition to reintegrate art into society, away from an artist-centred, market-oriented paradigm, into an effectual manifestation of creative collectivity. This is a proposal of art beyond pictorial representation that works in the world, as part of the nature of the world, on a 1:1 scale. This, as Bruguera states, is art as a verb.
My involvement in this constellation came from working at Grizedale Arts, an organisation in the English Lake District village of Coniston, where Ruskin lived out the last thirty years of his life. The projects undertaken there came from a desire to reassert the idea of the artist as contributory citizen, working beyond the confines of the art world and to work in ordinary life, in this small rural community (Coniston is a place, like most, where the Art World has no currency). Here we worked with artists and non-artists to make not art but things more artful, to respond to the needs and urgencies of our fellow residents. The aim was not to give artists the freedom and space for individual expression but, contrarily, to utilise artistic competencies—collective, communal expression. Outcomes of purposeful artists residencies led to outcomes that included the establishment of a community shop, the restoration of the Coniston Mechanics Institute, regenerating the annual harvest festival in the church, a new cricket pavilion, a farm, a cheese making school, a Youth Club, a new self-service public library—all employing strategies and tactics derived from art practice and applying them to enhance daily life. Such projects were not particularly recognizable as ‘art’, however, they were welcomed by our community because they could be valued for what they did, what they contributed to conditions on the ground in tangible, useful ways. In the development of this way of working it was clear that the art did not lie in any particular object or thing, but in the way processes (a shop, festival, library, etc.) were changed by the application of artists’ thinking. The key was how artfully (with care and consideration) something was done, rather than whether it was art or not.
This work grew into working relationships with likeminded souls such as Bruguera, the writer Stephen Wright and the team at the Van Abbemuseum, all of us striving to escape the architecture of a system that was increasingly failing to take part in the evolution of social systems and merely looking to preserve the status quo, repeatedly, emptily acting out the rituals of the radical ‘Zombie Modernism’.
On the back of these conversations the criteria of Arte Útil were honed and used as a barometer by which to asses projects that could be accessioned into a growing archive and Museum of Arte Útil—a repository of over 500 case studies that includes urban development, political activism, education, environmental action and scientific solutions.
The common criticism of useful art or Arte Útil is that it is subservient to a neoliberal agenda, or even ‘not art’—simply providing the services traditionally supplied by the state and now being withdrawn within a framework of a right-wing ideology.
However, this view is mistaken on the grounds that Arte Útil comes distinctly from the ground up, creatively responding to urgencies within specific contexts, more often as an anarchic challenge to unfavourable social conditions. Furthermore, it might be more strongly argued that nothing kowtows to the neoliberal agenda more than the idea of individual creative expression, reinforcing the sovereign artist, cut free of any obligations to get their hands dirty in the struggles of the day to day. This critique of Arte Útil also reinforces the system of division engineered two hundred years earlier that serves the market so well, polarizing positions into them and us, art and not art.
A more productive critique could be that Arte Útil in its current form is still quite divisive, separating art projects that are ‘useful’ from those that are not. For me one of the key propositions that comes out of the Lexicon of Usership is that we can be finally liberated from the idea that art is simply a set of things designated as ‘art’ and move toward a more accurate and universal concept of art as way of doing something, in which we can talk of the degree to which something is art, or in what sense something is art, rather whether it is art or not. This is art as coefficient not designated form.
Asserting art as a process implicit in all human activity, to one degree or another (yet still at times creating art products) allows us to reintegrate useful and useless, high and low art, neo-conceptualism with folk art, music and architecture, sculpture and craft. It facilitates the holy grail of a holistic system operating in four dimensions, where the degree to which something is art would be dependent on a complex of multiple factors, which we could visualise as vectors between multiple points within the matrix of all activity. Consequently, diverse things such as an urban vegetable patch, a painting by Poussin, the Shangahi Yu Garden and seed bombing could all be described as art to a degree, but occupy quite different trajectories within the interconnected system we inhabit.
Criticisms of Arte Útil have also exposed the difficulty that many have had with the idea of the word ‘use’, which in itself has been misused with its negative implications. However (as language clearly illustrates that meaning is created by use), this is a word that should be reclaimed or reused within a user-generated world that enables emancipatory usership and mis-usership.
If Arte Útil can only exist in isolation, or as a counter to the mainstream romantic conception of art, it limits its chances of a wholesale impact that would reintegrate and reclaim the value of art for broad society—and of course maintain the danger that it could be recaptured by the market system as a movement alongside Futurism, Constructivism and Pop—also movements that strove like many to bring art back into life.
Therefore to negate this it is a vital project to conceive a holistic theory of art that would accommodate both Arte Útil and the post-Kantian history we have inherited. This would mean a recalibration of ‘aesthetics’ as a complete system of transformation, no longer an idealised autonomous system based on the fallacy of disinterested spectatorship, and transform it into an integral part of our way of living founded in the reality of interests behind every action and thought in nature.
Such a possibly bewildering and expansive conception would at least reveal that all art is, and has always been, useful to someone somewhere—even Kant himself provided the break clause of purposeless purpose to acknowledge the necessity of function. The world of art before the market and industrialized production was one embedded in ritual, craft, design, architecture and enhancement. But we can also articulate a matrix of usership around the most traditionally autonomous objects created under the flag of modernity. This would include, for example, the manipulation of Abstract Expressionism in Cold War politics, museum education programmes to substantiate public value and funding or the indifferent use of a Warhol to make money. There are always constellations of users around any given art process or object, which offer benefits to users in varying degrees. Even in a museum the broader usership encompasses its staff, the Friends Association, school groups, couples on a date, aesthetes and connoisseurs, even the drug user who furtively finds his way to the top floor bathroom. To date it has been the wealthy who know how to use art best: for social status, wealth management, demonstrations of power. Equally, at other points in the ecosystem, we might look at other forms of art as mechanisms to gain sociopolitical effect: graffiti art, union banners, amateur water colours. Indeed we could go way beyond the plastic arts to include music, theatre, cinema, horticulture, cooking and, in fact, all human activity as constructions of interconnecting uses and users.
