Motherwell and Rosenberg

Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg “The Question of What wWill Emerge is Left Open” 1947 reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 659

This is really interesting

“This is a magazine of artists and writers who ‘practice’ in their work their own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic, group or political formulas.
Such practice implies thathe belief that through conversion of energy something valid may come out, whatever the situation one is forced to begin with.
the question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris said: ‘You are lost the instant you know what the result will me.’
Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enourmous presure.
The tempotation is to conclude that organized social thiking is ‘more serious’ that the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that experience has made possible.
One who yeilds to this tempotation makes a choice among various theories of manipulating the knwn elements f the so-called objective state of affairs. Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course be given up.
Whoever geniuinely belives he knows how to save humanity from catastrophe has a job before him which is certainly not a part-time one.
Political commitment in our times means logically – no art, no literature. A great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the sampace between art and political action.
If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps have the extremest faith in sheer possibility.
In his exremism he shows that he has recognized how drastic the political presence is” p. 659

Poltiical art kind of politics that accepts limitations of human perception and tries to create art as a non-instrumental response to the world. The ‘deadly political situation’ here refers to the developing cold war that made aesthetics and art a battleground – I don’t believe this section ties to defend the sanctity of art as apolitical, but instead wants to identify a kind of open politics that doesn’t support the efforts to instrumentalize art by forces acting purely in self interest. It also suggests that human beings don’t live in a way that would reduce art to determined, meaning-bound statements. The open-ended approach to art responds to the Cold War by refusing to create meanings that could be used to purpetuate a conflict that would destroy the world.

Which leads us to the question of how this concerns thinking about the efficacy of political art. In the terms of Motherwell and Rosenberg, political art works when it can’t be readily identified as political (insofar as this would show associations with parties, states, etc.), and/or creates its own politics that cannot be understood except in the process of doing.