 Abstract Art as Ideological Critique: Donald Kuspit on Kandinsky Tijen Tunali Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions … but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. Theodor W. Adorno When Donald Kuspit’s article “Utopian Protest in Early Abstract Art” appeared in Art Journal in the summer of , abstract art, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been largely reduced to formalist exercise with no extra-aesthetic import. Kuspit’s dissenting response to the works of early abstract artists, especially to those of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian—the three key utopian protesters in his eyes—was as much a rejection of the interpretive claims of the mainstream New York art world and its overtly narrow conception of “modernism,” as it was a repudiation of contemporary abstract artists, such as the Washington Colorfield School, who had “lost the core of abstract art.”1 Kuspit began his article by giving the reader a brief account of Frederich Engel’s concept of “utopian socialists” before emphasizing the dissident overtones and critical undercurrents of some early twentiethcentury abstract artists—especially Kandinsky. As such, Kuspit contended that these vanguard artists were not necessarily as “historically naïve and thus ineffective” as Engels claimed all utopian socialists automatically were. In relation to the historical materialism of Engels, itself capable of both development and amendment, Kuspit proposed a broader conception of engagé art capable of understanding the “aestheticism” of abstraction as harboring social criticism, if not topical political messages. Should aesthetic languages—the locus of emotional dimensions and even    das Geistige (spiritual)—be seen as antithetical to materialist activities of humanity and the languages of “real life”? What does the term “autonomy of art” mean and would this really entail disconnection from life—or just distance from the practical affairs of life linked to business as usual? Could abstract art nevertheless be a revolutionizing force towards using art to change attitudes and altering worldviews in a more spiritual, less practical manner? At the turn of the twentieth century Kandinsky’s critical reaction and that of other abstractionists was not merely against the materialism of modern society and the conventions of representational art but also against the whole totalitarian social order, which, according to Kuspit, meant enshrining instrumental rationality in the present system over human spontaneity and spirituality. This brings us to the question: Was Kandinsky’s goal to separate abstract notions from materiality to reach the absolute ground of humanity’s being (as Schapiro implies) or was it instead to proclaim that spirituality, mood, and emotions comprise the mental intercourse of humanity that stands in direct relationship to its material behavior, as Kuspit believes? Nevertheless, for Kuspit, Kandinsky’s critical subjectivity in abstract painting is determined by the material subject in the first place and is capable of building a relationship between social existence and individual consciousness, which could develop into a revolutionary potential. Following Herbert Marcuse in his thoughts about the political value of subjectivity as a counterforce against aggressive totalitarian regimes, it could be argued that Kandinsky’s early abstractionism constituted “liberating subjectivity” and was capable of producing, in Marcuse’s terms, “the inner history of the individuals”—that of passions, moods, and emotions.2 According to Marcuse: “Especially in its non-material aspects, it [art] explodes the class framework.”3 Kandinsky’s non-objective aestheticism announced “another reason,” which diminished the inner logic of art that adhered to the relations of production. Thus, according to Marcuse, one of the radical qualities of art is that it is capable of emancipating itself “from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence.”4 Similarly, Kuspit, in keeping with the Frankfurt School, argues that Kandinsky’s abstractions were rebellious precisely because they opened a new dimension of experience, a subjectivity that could transcend the immediate reality of social relations. Kuspit points out that Kandinsky mocked the materialistic values of many contemporary art works and evoked multiple protests against the      anti-aesthetic attitudes of a pragmatic society. The first protest was against absolutist art and against totalitarianism in aesthetics, and the second was against a narrow form of instrumental rationality he saw as imposing mental and spiritual constraints upon an artist. His final protest as an artist was about art as a heightened self-criticism that eventually triggered criticism of society unable to accommodate this alternative concept of art. Deriving his position from Engel’s concept, Kuspit defines those attempts as “utopian protests” because they involved not only particular political elements in society but also general conditions of social existence for humanity as a whole. What is apparent in Kuspit’s reading of early abstract art is that Kandinsky, as well as Malevich and Mondrian, advocated sovereignty of the self and the power of the individual in contesting absolutism on both aesthetic and political terrains. (Let us not forget that Kandinsky began his first abstract works in the wake of World War I, which erupted between the large empires in the name of “national sovereignty;” thus, of subordination of the self to the state.) His dissident forms are usually interpreted as articulating the fear of the coming war; nevertheless, Kuspit rightfully connects them to a broader response to the latest advancements in Western science without which modern militarism would not be possible. He adds that Kandinsky’s shock at the conceptual splitting of the atom made him question the absoluteness of material reality and the “eternal” principles of the universal order. Kandinsky believed that in art the form itself, which emanates nothing but control over artists’ creative activities, could not be the ultimate principle. Not only should there be no absolute truth or “final statement” in art, there should also be the subversive act to destroy the constraints on all art as a search for form and this would be the abandonment of “total” form in an a priori sense. This, to Kandinsky, meant to disavow any attempt to make a statement related to the logic of linguistic form as opposed to meaning. Style, then, had to be freed from such restrictive structures through the emancipation from “essential” formal problems that always placed a limit on what art could be. As Kuspit reminds us, Kandinsky did not attempt to create a different style, but tried to change “the ground of art.” In order for art to be a dissenting force despite its ideological inner logic, the ground of this logic had to be deconstructed. The creative potential of art against its rigid language is what makes art contradictory to its own inner dynamics. Because there is no material content for artistic creation, it is innately subversive to the empirical reality. Therefore, art could break the coercion of its own logic by its own    means once the limitation of those means is stripped away. What Kuspit means by “the core of abstract art” is that a spiritual or non-practical pulse is inherent to abstract art and that it is capable of transforming the art work. The abstractionist achieves that by refraining from trying to exercise “power over nature”—in opposition to what the classical principle of academic art did—and by developing instead towards unification with nature by “orchestrating its spirit.” This spiritual act does not involve power over color or line, pure technicality per se, but the power of natural associations (blue with the heavens, for example). This kind of relationship, Kandinsky believed, could be achieved through the “free expression of spontaneity” that is inherent to all humans. In order to explain this spontaneous relationship with nature, Kuspit brings forth Kandinsky’s fascination with flexible legal systems, especially the Russian peasant law, versus the inflexibility of Roman law used by the national state. Russian peasant law, as Kuspit elucidates; “could ignore the ‘rigidity’ of the external deed of the criminal and rise to seeing him as a soul,” that is, as a concrete subject, not as an abstract citizen. For Kuspit, this analogy demonstrates Kandinsky’s opposition towards superficial rules and structural forms (or laws) not only in society but also in art. According to Kuspit, Kandinsky protested the rigid structuralism of modern society and asserted instead that neither abstract domains such as thought, ideas, or spirituality should have autonomous existence nor could the absolute laws of society alone determine them for the subject. Although his attempt to go beyond mere materiality might be considered a “religious” activity, his aim was, in fact, to combine a series of experiences in the art work: the perceptions that arose from the individual artist’s inner world in relation to the impressions artists received from the outer world.5 Far from making art merely autonomous from the real, Kandinsky’s principle was to seek the real within the synthesis of the inner (unconscious and spiritual) and the outer (ideas, morals, etc.) elements of a visual form. This coincides with Theodor W. Adorno’s ideas of the Wahrheitsgehalt (the internal truth content) of the art work that is neither a metaphysical idea nor a merely human construct. Thus, the formative language of an art work reveals the relationship between its truth content and its ideology. The more spontaneous the art work is the more transgressive this relationship becomes. In order to understand Kandinsky’s view of flexibility and spontaneity, Kuspit refers to the artist’s notes previously published in Reminiscences—      his autobiography at mid-career: “This spontaneity or personal initiative is one of the happiest … sides of a life that has been pressed into rigid forms … Corporative organizations should be so constituted that they have the most open form possible and incline more to adopt to new phenomena and to adhere less to ‘precedent,’ than has hitherto been the case.”6 This is an apparent call for the liberation of the human being from both the structural and the spiritual constraints. Disavowing figuration, for Kandinsky, was a protest against rules, limits, rigidity, and reductionism. Kuspit argues that Kandinsky transformed this social criticism into his aesthetic protest, yet it could also be argued that it occurred the other way round. Kandinsky was interested in revolutionizing the whole aesthetic attitude of the contemporary society to generate a new attitude to life through art. He lodged a social protest, yes, but this protest was innately flexible because it was spontaneous, unstable, and transformative. Thus, what could make it revolutionary was precisely that. For him, spontaneity deconstructed rules for color interaction because the artist’s spirit and the paint (color) spoke together to the viewer, thus communicating with renewed immediacy between “impractical” subjects. Kandinsky brought chaos into the existing “order” of the society. As a “visual anarchist” creating spatial dislocations in the picture plain, he placed the destructive lines against fleeting forms and powerful colors next to washed-away hues. Although he made disordering arrangements in the picture plane, he created a spiritual harmony through color, paving the way to a new attitude of artistic creation and a new vision for the viewer. For Kandinsky, anarchism did not mean mere “lack of order.” Rather, it meant that under the artificial structures of the authoritarian systems lay the truth to be recovered. And, thus, to him it was the art work’s creative power that could ignite critical stimuli in ordinary people. The material nature of the color was secondary to Kandinsky, while primary importance was given to the color’s psychological effect on the viewer. However, he also believed that the effect of color would be fleeting and ephemeral and thus it would leave no lasting impression if the viewer was not free from reducing everything to instrumental thinking. Kandinsky believed socially that just relationships in material life could only be achieved through redemption of the masses aesthetically. Thus, a free society could emancipate individuals from their blind subjection to the forces of material relationships. As Adorno argued in his essay “Commitment,” abstract art had been criticized for lack of provocation and social aggressiveness.7 It is because    in committed art the meaning is usually thought to be hidden in physical forms that appear on the surface rather than through an explicit metaphysical meaning. Thus, the affirmation that the art is “saying something” involves pertinent signifiers and the meaning being subordinate to them. Therefore, abstract works are usually thought to be without political content. However, Kandinsky thought that the key to transforming society through individual acts resided in the creative potential of art, not in its actual message. In abstract art, because the rules of the artistic language were broken, to experience a novel dimension where the relationships among human beings and between them and nature no longer adhered to the law of established reality could be possible. For Kandinsky, the fact that abstract art lacked any pertinent signifiers did not make it less political or less “truthful.” Yet, it made art less subordinate to the social reality and more revolutionary. Adorno thought that overtly committed works run the risk of being too political and less aesthetic than practical. He states: “Works of art that react against empirical reality obey the forces of that reality, which reject intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves.” How then, could an art work be in opposition to society while being a part of it? Early abstractionism by Kandinsky offered subjective freedom to a non-objective, anti-material world. It offered an escape from the “irrationality” of the existing order without having a rigid “rationality” in itself. Abstract art for Kandinsky, as Kuspit demonstrates, offered art’s self-criticism suggesting that it was not the negation or affirmation in art’s message but the elements of the aesthetic form that could trigger a social struggle. Kandinsky’s colors intended to lose their materiality just like the splitting of the atom signified dematerialization. Moreover, they meant to make a very strong impact—almost like the atom bomb—on the individual psyche, allowing them to be aware of the new possibilities. Kandinsky charged the forms and colors with such a driving energy that they communicated not only with the viewer’s consciousness directly, but incited a response to the “internal truth content” of the art work. He wanted the viewer to be disoriented and even “shocked” to a point that he/she would recognize the struggle and transformation between the elements of the painting. Most important of it all was that the viewer recognizes that it was not the artificial surface of social law but the spiritual realm of the art work that could show mankind how to live in harmony and love. Kuspit lucidly demonstrates how, according to Kandinsky, abstract art      allowed mediation between nature, individual, and society transcending any structural domain. Thus, abstract art had the possibility to generate a counter-societal experience in the individual and obliterated established social law. Kandinsky’s abstractions were autonomous yet subjective, antimodern within the modernist canon, and they were inherently transcendental, but that did not make them apolitical. He saw freedom as the liberation of men from material and spiritual constraints; yet, he believed that artistic expression as well as spiritual emancipation were blocked by the absolutist ideals—be it mainstream capitalist or authoritarian socialist—of the modern society. Artistic freedom meant for him an uninhibited color perception, and social freedom meant being a flexible society open to transformations, mutations, and metamorphosis. He departed from conventional doctrines of “classical art” and turned to folk, medieval, and primitive art in search of overcoming the limitations of contemporary society.8 Kandinsky also emphasized spirituality in art as a driving force for a change. For him, color was a physical manifestation of feelings, feelings were a pathway for spiritual experience, and that experience contained an alternative way to generate critical stimuli. In , in the advent of soulless “postmodern” art, Kuspit’s essay is a reminder of Kandinsky’s revolution, and it challenges the reader even now to wake up from the nightmare of materialism that turns the art world into a corporate circus, the artist into a media clown, and the art work into a market fetish. At present, art works, more and more, are made to cater to marketing materialism. Kuspit, in this essay, struggles along with Kandinsky against the spiritual and human crisis of the twentieth century. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is almost “naïve” and “absurd,” if not banal and conventional, to talk about the spirituality in art. Why? Corporate capitalism needs soulless bodies to operate the machinery of exploitation. When Kandinsky came up with his first abstract works, it was not the main concern of canonical modern art to give spiritual and creative freedom to the individual who was being crushed under Western modernization. He challenged the aesthetic attitudes of his times and left an important aesthetic heritage behind. We should ask ourselves today: Why are we afraid to be charged by a spiritual energy that would make us feel awakened, get up from our comfortable chair, and allow us to become a real human being, rather than an automaton? If the revolutionary drive and the innovative inspiration do not stem from the creative pulse in the art work, where do they stem from? Kandinsky wanted to produce art works that are “alive” in the literal sense.    It is certainly crucial for contemporary societies to feel alive in order to recover from the materialist mutilation, environmental holocaust, and spiritual annihilation. Notes         Donald B. Kuspit, “Utopian Protest in Early Abstract Art,” Art Journal, / (Summer ), –. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ), . Ibid. Kuspit, “Utopian Protest in Early Abstract Art,” . This coincides with Theodor W. Adorno’s ideas of the Wahrheitsgehalt (the internal truth content) of the art work that is neither a metaphysical idea nor a merely human construct. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, ), . Ibid. Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future,” Art Journal, /: Mysticism and Occultism in Modern Art (Spring ), .