Constant Nieuwenhuys
[Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005), the Dutch painter, sculptor, graphic artist, author, musician and architect, along with Asger Jorn, initiated the avant-garde art movement CoBrA (1948-51). In July 1948 Constant founded Reflex, Experimentele Groep in Holland with Karl Appel, Corneille and his brother Jan Nieuwenhuys. For Constant, art had to be experimental. He had deducted this from the French word ‘expérience’ and believe that art springs from experience of the artist and is continuously changing.
The first edition of the magazine Reflex was published with a manifesto written by Constant (Reflex # 1-September/October, 1948).This manifesto would become one of the most important texts on art in the Netherlands after WWII. In this manifesto he states that firstly the process of creation is more important to the experimental artist than the work itself.
HUG reproduces the Manifesto in anticipation of the impending publication of Henre Lefevbre’s hitherto unpublished work in any language: Toward An Architecture of Enjoyment (trans. Robert Bonnono, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming June, 2014). Lefevbre was closely connected to Constant and Asger Jorn, and like them, made asceticism his prime target of critique, which they all detected in bourgeois morality, capitalist accumulation, modernist aesthetics, structuralist epistemology, bureaucratic governance, and the political imaginary of the communist Left.
All plates by Constant Nieuwenhuys]
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Translated by Leonard Bright
The dissolution of Western Classical culture is a phenomenon that can be understood only against the background of a social evolution which can end in the total collapse of a principle of society thousands of years old and its replacement by a system whose laws are based on the immediate demands of human vitality. The influence the ruling classes have wielded over the creative consciousness in history has reduced art to an increasingly dependent position, until finally the real psychic function of that art was attainable only for a few spirits of genius who in their frustration and after a long struggle were able to break out of the conventions of form and rediscover the basic principles of all creative activity.
Together with the class society from which it emerged, this culture of the individual is faced by destruction too, as the former’s institutions, kept alive artificially, offer no further opportunities for the creative imagination and only impede the free expression of human vitality. All the isms so typical of the last fifty years of art history represent so many attempts to bring new life to this culture and to adapt its aesthetic to the barren ground of its social environment. Modern art, suffering from a permanent tendency to the constructive, an obsession with objectivity (brought on by the disease that has destroyed our speculative-idealizing culture), stands isolated and powerless in a society which seems bent on its own destruction. As the extension of a style created for the social elite, with the disappearance of that elite modern art has lost its social justification and is confronted only by the criticism formulated by a clique of connoisseurs and amateurs.
Western art, once the celebrator of emperors and popes, turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life. But, just as with a social revolution, this spiritual revolution cannot be enticed without conflict. Stubbornly the bourgeois mind clutches on its aesthetic ideal and in a last, desperate effort employs all its wiles to convert the indifferent masses to the same belief. Taking advantage of the general lack of interest, suggestions are made of a special social needs for what is referred to as ‘an ideal of beauty,’ all designed to prevent the flowering of a new, conflicting sense of beauty which emerges from the vital emotions.
As early as the end of World War I the Dada movement tried by violent means to break away from the old ideal of beauty. Although the movement concentrated increasingly on the political arena, as the artists involved perceived that their struggle for freedom brought them into conflict with the laws that formed the very foundations of society, the vital power released by this confrontation also stimulated the birth of a new artistic vision.
In 1924 the Surrealist Manifesto appeared, revealing a hitherto hidden creative impulse – it seemed that a new source of inspiration had been discovered. But Breton’s movement suffocated in its own intellectualism, without ever converting its basic principle into a tangible value. For Surrealism was an art of ideas and as such also infected by the disease of past class culture, while the movement failed to destroy the values this culture proclaimed in its own justification.
It is precisely this act of destruction that forms the key to the liberation of the human spirit from passivity. It is the basic precondition for the flowering of a people’s art that encompasses everyone. The general social impotence, the passivity of the masses, are an indication of the brakes that cultural norms apply to the natural expression of the forces of life. For the satisfaction of this primitive need for vital expression is the driving force of life, the cure for every form of vital weakness. It transforms art into a power for spiritual health. As such it is the property of all and for this reason every limitation that reduces art to the reserve of a small group of specialists, connoisseurs, and virtuosi must be removed.