PUBLIC WORKS Means Reality
for the Third Millennium
THE GROUP &laqno;PUBLIC WORKS» bears witness that
a third generation is on the march, willing to continue and secure the
modern traditions which have grown up in the course of this century; or,
as Public Works states it: "To put earlier demands into hard and fast
terms and on a still wider social plane."
It was not the rule during most of this tenth of the second millennium
for younger generations to mindfully carry on the work of their forebears.
To do so is new, it means that we are in a time of consolidation. The public,
including those who govern it, is still lacking the artistic, that is,
the emotional training which would only be appropriate for our time. Both
are plagued by the split which exists between advanced ways of thinking
and an understanding of culture that has not caught up with them. The demand
for a special kind of continuity will become more and more the key calling
of this period. "Every day something new" is the heavy inheritance
of this century's disastrous urge. It persists in many ways. Continuity
does not mean standstill or reaction; it rather implies racination and
growth. Every period changes, as does the body, from day to day. Classical,
Jazz, and Baroque were, in all their phases, in constant productive mutation,
by which we mean development. But these changes have to be rooted in other
than purely materialistic thinking. They have to grow from other sources:
the medieval kingdom of God, the absolutism of the 17th century, a political
position or pose, or even an artistic credo. "Every day something
new" reveals near-total helplessness combined with a fundamental lack
of inner conviction, always eager to flatter the most terrifying instincts
of the public. It means art for art's sake, in the form of change for the
sake of high-pressure salesmanship. It means we are all palpably short-changed
and because of this, demoralized, whether we realize it or not.
Public taste today is formed mainly by advertising and its
corollary blood-brother, the news. By these it can be educated, which is
to say, corrupted. Responsible are the art directors in industry and advertising
firms and the buyers for the five-and-dime stores, who act as screeds to
level down the artists' works to their own limited wild guess of the public's
taste. All, it would seem, is cut to a screwy guiding bias. We suppose
they feed the assembly line in the speediest way, and as a safeguard they
judge the public taste lower than it really is.
He who still believes that art has to be defined as a mere
luxury or something far away, remote from real life, had better not touch
the works of Public Works, who, as do we all, regard resourcefulness as
indispensable to a philosophically rich life. Their simple aim is to show
just how the cosmic exclamation point of mid-century (which actually arrived
five years early in 1945) formed our present-day conception of cultural
work and our engrained approach to reality. Public Works show how this
development's form of expression differed in many ways from constructivism
and Dada, serving to bring into the crosshairs the multi-imaged face of
our time. They show why modern cultural workers have had to reject a slavish
obedience to the engineering of sonic moodscapes, graphic wallpaper or
publicity; and why they hated and feared, yet ultimately respected, the
"trompe-la-perception." These different movements have a common
denominator: a new temporal conception. They are not outmoded when they
become silent. Each of them lives on in us.
Step by step, Public Works follow the liberation of plastic
form: waveforms, half-tone screens, among other formats; and the creation
of a fractalized, kaleidoscopic cosmos of forms of their own. The temporal
conception binds together and interplects fragments of meaning and creates
a context nutritious to mentation just as, in another period, the uncovery
of the rules of perspective did when they used a single stationary point
to aid naturalistic representation. We have to note the great care with
which Public Works show the contact of modern cultural work with the inherent
irreality of our age, and how work which, at first appearance, seems so
distant from lived life, are yet yanked bit by bit from its very bloodstream.
These works seem to be addressed to the young generation
which must rebuild the post-Gorbachev world. Public Works seeks to avoid
the previous generations' pitfalls by not being destructive to the social
integument. Public Works seeks to fix and rebuild, to be the socket set
of this age. This rebuilding will be realized only in future years through
great effort. But this cultural work could have an immediate influence
if those who command public taste in the many fields of present-day life
would take time on a quiet weekend to look and listen closely and think
it over.
N. Tykocinski
Poznan, 12 January 1997
