Camus

Albert Camus “Creation and Revolution” from The Rebel. 1953 reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 626-629

“In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism nor commentary. Revolution, in its turn, can only affirm itself in a civilization and not in terror or tyranny. The two questions posed, henceforth, by our times to a society caught in a dilemma – Is creation possible? Is the revolution possible? – are in reality only one question which concerns the renaissance of civilization.” p 626

“Language destroyed by irrational negation becomes lost in verbal delirium; subject to determinist ideology it is summed up in the word of command. Half-way between the two lies art. If the rebel must simultaneously reject the frenzy of annihilation and the acceptance of totality, the artist must simultaneously escape from the passion for formality and the totalitarian aesthetic of reality. The world today is one, in fact, but its unity is the unity of nihilism. Civilization is only possible if, by renouncing the nihilism of formal principles and nihilism without principles, the world rediscovers the road to a creative synthesis. In the same way, in art, the time of perpetual commentary and reportage is at the point of death, it announces the advent of creative artists.” p. 626-7

“But the fact that creation is necessary does not perforce imply that it is possible. A creative period in art is determined by the order of a particular style applied to the disorder of a particular time. It gives form and formulae to contemporary passions.” p. 627

“”Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run, therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its alloted span. Each time the revolution kills a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in moulding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quality is king but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair.” p. 628

“History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most distinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy his hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the seas and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labour. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to resist the real while conferring unity upon it, is also the procedure of rebellion. It is possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one which lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place, – far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history – to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we now have to define in the face of a world which insults it.” p. 628-9

‘Creation’ provides the measure of effective art for Camus. He simultaneously recognizes creation as a historical process, limited by material events (see the secton on conquerers and their relationship to art), but also an organic, almost mystical impulse. The tension between these two explains why truly revolutionary ‘effective’ art happens so rarely – it must contend with the intersections of history and the machinations of politics, as well as embody a universal creative genius that makes humanity human.

The first quote says that art embodies rebellion as an act of pure creation, similar to the ‘affirmation’ of rebellion, instead of engageing in criticism or commentary. To me, this makes sense in terms of the last section copied out here – creation connects to the universal appreciation of beauty that all humans have, and the polemic style of commentary limits the potential of art within divisive narrow bounds. So, effective art exists primarily for itself, insofar as this means that it attempts to unite people in their appreciation of beauty. Here Camus demonstrates how political art differs from normative conceptions of how politics works (discussion, debate, power struggles) – by refusing discussion and instead creating an aesthetic object which can/should be appreciated by all.

Camus discussion of nihilism and realism expands this further. Merely realistic art is confined to engaging with what already ‘is’ and must limit within the frames created by power – the “acceptance of totality.” Simuntaneously, the artist should avoid the self-destructive fervor of a radical who destroys themselves (or in this case, destroys intelligibility) for what they believe to be true. Effective political art attends to what is, but only in the hope of changing it by way of affirming universal human creative capacities. In a way, Camus explains effective political art as that which skirts the dual traps of being merely “political” or merely “art.” One keeps the artist from producing new forms of communication and being because it is trapped by the what proceeded it and a narrow way of thinking about human nature; the other ignores how states of war and revolution led to its possibility, losing its potential to create by falling on deaf or incarcerated ears.