ART AND WORK
55
nings of human history. Since the Renaissance the studio has also been
linked with the laboratory. The use of art to investigate nature led almost
from the start to investigation of the means of conducting that investiga–
tion-for example, study of perspective as a system for apprehending
the physical world. The research of art into its own means pas constituted
a powerful motive in modern painting, poetry, music, the novel, the
theater.
In
our century artists have often emphasized these means as
part of the content of the work itself-as in the exaggeration of brush
strokes in painting, or in making the composition and acting of the play
part of the plot of the play itself.
Research into the means falls roughly under two heads: 1) experi–
menting with the formal elements of the art in question-space, scale,
and color relations, in painting, non-metrical rhythms in poetry; 2) free
play with the characteristic materials employed by each art-for example,
pigment, sound, words; 3) the introduction of new raw materials, such
as found objects in sculpture or street noises in music.
There can be little doubt that art will continue to experiment with
the means of art and with the independent capacities of these means
to simulate nature and evoke esthetic response.
Perhaps the latest among the conscious interests of art is the forma–
tive effect of its creative processes upon the artist himself and upon his
audience as individuals. Free work, whether in the studio, the workshop,
the laboratory or the industrial plant, is work done because the worker
wants to do it, when he wants to do it, how he wants to do it.
It
is
done not in obedience to external need but as a necessity of the worker's
personality.
It
is work for the sake of the worker, his means of ap–
propriating nature and the heritage of other men's ideas and skills-thus
his means of developing himself.
Faced with the dissipation of local cultures and the mass recruit–
ments of modern industry, art has found in its own practices the discipline
for a continuous formation of individuality, as well as a direct means of
communion with artists of other times, places and cultures. Art aimed at
self-creation has thus been inseparable from awareness of man's changed
relation to production. Conversely, this historical consciousness has led
art in our time toward an increased subjectivity. As against
art
conceived
as the making of attractive objects, or as the vision of things as they
are or are believed to be, history-conscious art has isolated in painting
or in poetry the psychic experience of creation. It is
art
for making
artists.
In
that
it
seeks to change the quality of living it is art that is
political in the deepest sense-as contrasted with propaganda art which
delivers preconceived messages through craftsman-like presentations. At
