Ibram Lassaw “On Inventing Our Own Art” 1938, reprinted in reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 397-398
“Until the invention of printing on a mass scale, and the development of photography, painting and sculpture were the only means of conveying ideas (outside of speech” to the millions of people who were completely illiterate. Now photography and the cinema have been brought to such a high state of perfection that painting cannot hope to compete with them in either description or story telling. Stripped of these superimposed tasks, the underlying structure of art becomes clear. Colors and forms alone have a greater power to move man emotionally and psychologically. It becomes more and more apparent that art has something more and something much greater to offer” p. 397-398
“The new attitude that is being formed as a result of these searches is concerned with the invention of objects affecting man psychologically by means of physical phenomena. it is a new form of magic. The artist no longer feels that he is ‘representing reality’, he is actually making reality. Direct sensual experience is more real than living in the midst of symbols, slogans, worn-out plots, cliches – more real than political-oratical art. Reality is something stranger and greater than merely photographic rendering can show. Jean Cocteau has very aptly said in his film Le Sang d’un Poete: ‘ a plaster cast is exactly like the original except in everything.’ We must make originals. All aesthetic phenomena produced by artists belong to the field of art, whether they fit into the former concepts and definitions or not. A work of art must work.” p. 398
This essay previews/echos many conclusions raised by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and my conclusions follow from a reading through Benjamin’s work.
Effective art for Lassaw engages with the world through the medium that best suits its goals. The act of representing is secondary to the change in perception a work of art imposes on viewers, either by eliciting an immediate emotional response or by making certain things newly in/visible. The final sign-off “A work of art must work” means that art need not make a claim about representation to change the world. A representational relationship to the world displaces the primary site of labor away from the work of art itself, and only makes the art a conduit of meaning created elsewhere – effective art must look at itself as a productive, meaning creating, rather than meaning conveying, act.
This essay also continues the argument about a generalization of art into a variety of spaces, which becomes both an imperative for artists to put their focus on spaces outside museums, but also a reflection of the material reality of post-industrial capitalism which aestheticizes decisions about life through consumer objects.