the integral naturalism
Naturalismo Integral from lauper films on Vimeo.
about the integral naturalism manifest
Integral Naturalism offers an alternative to the placing of art in a critical position by art itself, which is the brand of our time. Through the hygiene of perception and the global rebuilding of sensibility which it implies, integral naturalism answers the great questions of today, the why of art. Nature needs art in order to sensitize man, to recharge his affectiveness and to renew his emotional simulants. Faced with the conceptualization of artistic development, integral nature proposes an ethical kind of alternative.
Through anthropology art returns to morals.
It was in 1913, with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, that art for the first time swung right into the sphere of morals, and aesthetics into ethics. A series-manufactured industrial object was baptized as a sculpture by its inventor, that is, by the artist, who declared it to be such and presented it as such. Why is this power to confer such a status upon a standard object an anonymous until of mass-production? In the name of what is one to assume this artistic baptism of the object if not the responsibility through each of his gestures, at a level of global sensibility? It was by taking ip this moral distinitu of the artist that the creator justified his creation and the powers connected with it. It is in the measure in which Marcel Duchamp fully took up his vocation as an artist that he was able to let loose the < révolution du regard > which he cast upon the world the world. And Duchamps’s world is that of the apogee of the first Industrial Revolution, of the town, the street, the factory and mass-production, advertising and the advent of mass media.
After Duchamp’s ready-mades it took 40 years for his message to be taken up again precisely, at the exact level, of global sensibility. The nouveaux Réalistes took up the adventure of the object on behalf of a generalised consciousness of modern nature, the city, the street, the factory, and advertising, conceived as the constitutive elements of an autonomous whole, of an immediate datum of the consciousness of modern nature. In 1960 Martial Raysse spoke of the hygiene of vision.
The nouveaux Réalistes applied to this modern nature the concepts and methods of integral naturalism: the discipline of sensibility in the revolution of looking, a readiness to look beyond a respect for nature as an independent harmonious structure in its system of interdependencies and as a catalyser of perception. It is because they behaved as integral naturalists towards the world of the consumer society that the Nouveaux Réalistes managed straight away in their different objective languages to occupy essential and general extremist position. Yves Klein appropriated cosmic energy freely circulating in space, through his Monochromy and his Void, the zones of < immaterial > sensitivity; presence in absence. This was the work of a perfect naturalist integralist. The mover of language is communication and communication is energy. He who is the master of energy masters language, for such is the fundamental law of nature. César, after a brilliant career as a < welder >, stepped ahead and assumed responsibility for the compression of mental, creating his famous and by now historic compressed cars in 1960. César used his carcasses of compressed cars in cubes of one ton each, just as they were, because he found them beautiful and because he found them beautiful he turned them into sculptures.
The process of appropriation of reality linked to the sense of nature is the most tangible symptom of imminent anthropological mutation which will radically affect our ways of seeing, thinking and feeling. All the Nouveaux Réalistes have based their language on an act of direct and primary appropriation: accumulation in the work of Arman; mechanical animation of scarp-iron in that of Tinguely; the unsticking of torn posters in works by Hains, Dufrêne, Villeglé and Rotella; packaging by Christo; the <Tableau-piège> (Painting-trap) by Spoerri shooting by Niki de Saint-Phalle and the nature of the supermarket or of the department store in the work of Raysse or Deschamps.
The initial pure concepts of appropriation were succeeded by the syntactic situating of corresponding idioms; languages of quality in quantity. As their naturalist message developed, the Nouveaux Réalistes sometimes were recovered and absorbed by the consumer society, that is to say, by the consumer society, that is to say, by their own nature. Their rapid success, their evolution and their crisis of conscience bear witness to this. What could be more normal than for modern, industrial and urban nature to have been able sometimes to gain the upper hand over the Nouveaux Réalistes’ naturalist conscience? This is part of the strength and of the fundamental prerogatives of nature. The important hing is that Nouveaux Réalistes behaved as true naturalists, as perfect integralists of perception. The epithet
This may be expected, for pop art was born in the U.S.A., in a country that became a nation through its industrial development, when the railroad first joined the East coast to the West coast. For the American artist industry is culture. Pop art is inscribed within the continuity of the sole constant of American vision, which is indeed realism. Since the pioneer days, this metaphoric and dazzled vision of environmental space has never ceased to be perpetuated through styles and fashions - romantic realism, magic realism, social realism, etc. The pop-artist stood within the logical continuity of this perspective, in the stock running from anonymous colonials to Benton, Hopper, O’Keeffe and Ben Shann. Or very nearly, at any rate. Pop art developed at the turn of the 1960s. When the United States’ power, the of the consumer society in the American style, was at its height, when the entire planet had its eyes fixed on the wankee life style - pop song, pop music, pop art, but also pop style in decoration, gadgets, clothes and food… the apogee of the American consumer society promoted pop art to the dignity of world style. The metaphoric trend of American urban provincialism became the international realist style of the 1960s.
Since 1968 the consumer society has lost its prestige. America has been through not so much a moral crisis as a financial one, with the manipulation of the dollar that followed in its wake. This demystification of the American Way of life has in no way detracted from the functional value of pop art, which corresponded to a phase of planetary awareness, but it has put the entire American realist approach back into perspective. After pop art the international vogue of photographic hyperrealism have gone back to their place in the realist, isolationist and provincial perspective of American art. A < sharp focus > on the metaphor of the postcard. It is as a total reaction against this metaphorical self-limitation in the philosophy of looking that Sepp BAendereck has been collecting on-the-spot in the heart of the Amazon, the photographic material that will serve as the basis for the objective organisation of his images.
It is here, amongst other things, that the concept of integral naturalism comes into play. With its integralism, generalisation and extremism of perception structure, integral naturalism today is an open option, a guide line through the chaos of contemporary art. Self-criticism, dematerialisation, conceptualisation and the requestioning of the philosophical materialist outlook, the idealist temptation, a symbolist and occultist subterranean course directed towards redeeming the hidden sense of things - the confusion, which is only apparent, will one day be cleared up as a result of the notion of naturalism, the integral expression of planetary consciousness.
Pierre Restany
Alto Rio Negro, Manaus, São Paulo
3 a 21 agosto de 1978
