For Robillard, the theme park model of creativity that he believed would displace art was valuable as a kind of lab, a means to stimulate participation. Individualism is what we have in abundance and which proliferates. [135] Contrasting the peasant/tribal song as a happy game against the morose world of post-industrialism, he calls for a humanist industrialism with collective creation, with the model of the ashram and psychiatry taking the place of religion. [141]
The book is important because it crystallizes many of the currents of thought on the role and possibilities of Contemporary Art in the province from the perspective of one of its leading proponents. Robillard was a critic for La Presse, Le Devoir, and Jour among other publications. He was co-founder of Fusion des arts inc. and the module d’Animation culturelle at UQAM, as well as the co-founder and first director of the university’s art history department. Ostensibly a Marxist (at least early in his career) and a tireless advocate for interdisciplinarity, he was also the editor and compiler of the three-volume Québec Underground, one of the most canonical documents in defining the province’s art in the 1960s and 70s.
The point of the 1998 book is to demonstrate that art is a myth, an invention of industrial society, now replaced by a new myth for the twenty-first century, that of the society of creators. One does not simply replace the other and they awkwardly persist together. The importance once accorded to artists has been transferred and spread elsewhere. Artists remain present, in fact, the artworld-as-such produces more and more of them, relying heavily on new technologies to do so. [9] Beyond this, for the greater public, the artist is the film, TV, or music star. [10]
After surveying various meanings of the term myth, he selects that of Jung as his preference thanks to the notion of the collective unconscious, archetypes, etc. Symbols, collective rituals, and archetypes function here as mysterious epiphanies and myths that reflect society and form one of the most necessary parts of his argument. [22-26]
Societies are rooted in their founding myths. The myth of the twenty-first-century is global and multicultural. [27] It is a kind of return to the ancients, with the postmodern functioning as a paganization of American traditions. [27] The postmodern renders all sign systems equal and equivocates between them, playful and promiscuous in its appropriation of styles and signs. It advances the notion of culture-as-model and promotes the aestheticization of the everyday. [67] Rather than being concerned with genius, it is concerned with lifestyle and with the identities associated with it, all of these simply parts of a general consumer culture. If art is demythologized, everything else is aestheticised in the process.
Art in the twentieth-century [arguably earlier] relied on the myth of the genius; the glorification of work over play, keeping with the sway of industrialization. But after automation, work was devalued and play took the central role. Genius became a taboo concept. The reductionism of art (formalism, autonomism, etc.) became déclassé, replaced with the holism appropriate to the fully automated world. Accompanying this was the idea that everyone needed to be creative in some fashion in order to be whole. [12]
Art is a social idea and, above all, an institutional concept. [11] It functions as an organic system (signs, social roles, games, etc.). The problem of art is above all the social function of art and artists. [49] Not a given transhistorical fact, its existence is heavily reliant on theories of art. Conceptual Art etc. helped to fuel the institutionalization of art. Art as a myth of genius was replaced by art as aesthetic expression. Artists will continue to proliferate because they have an integral function to consumerism. [24] In this context, art serves as a moral justification for the amorality of capitalism.
Art is a creation of capitalism in the sense employed by Plekhanov, as a myth of the ideological superstructure and the dominant class. [61] With the initial growth of markets in the early modern era, art began its slow rise to prominence. “The myth of art replaces little by little religion.” [62] The artist became the “superego” (surmoi) of capitalism, functioning as a means of keeping the equilibrium in an otherwise amoral system. This was the function of the myth of art, with its important role in the romantic idea of liberty and the self. [64-65] The artist was thought to be pure, creating for themselves rather than a client, and creating a specific product rather than simple merchandise. As such, their work was imbued with spiritual value. The artist was a sort of martyr. [66] The modern era ended in 1965.
He opposes formalism as the logic of “big A” art to art as an imitative means. The 1970s were a period of reaction against formalism. Yet, however critical he may be of formalism, he recognizes that it is almost impossible to discuss art without it. Formal analysis and definition is what allows for style. The establishing of style exceeds the specific artist and grows to be tied to fashion and consumerism more broadly. As much as the artists of the 1960s and 70s privileged the status of concepts or ideas, it is the style that is remembered and survives. Even social historians of art cannot do their work without the formalist reliance on style. [54-57] All the same, he still characterizes the formalist attitude as one that risks schizophrenia. [57]
The other side of the art myth is that of criticality. To maintain cohesion, societies need to balance antagonisms. [71] Art and critique have this function. Together, they maintain equilibrium between intellect and sentiment. The myth of genius serves to provide “solutions” when science fails to. This myth comes with that of free expression and rule-breaking. The more materialistic a society becomes, the more artists will fill museums with “genius,” although technological advances have to some extent robbed artists of dominating this role. [72]
Theories of art were only literature and with the rise of Conceptualism, artists took on this role as well. With this, explanation and justification became parts of the work while art’s social role was exemplified in its function as protest and in the reception of the work. This was all part of a shift in the market as capital cartels further overtook the artworld.
With the decline of the church, an obsession with the social and moral function of art in the 1960s became essential to its function within capitalism. It was a functional form of critique/protest. [76] Art also was returning to its function in the age of Vasari; it was becoming synonymous with a model of pure intentionality. The market thrived on the proliferation of interpretation and the art system emanated from the communications system. The influence of semiology and linguistics on art production allowed it easily to be reduced to the emission of signs. [79] In this situation, the artist became a “researcher” and their work was increasingly hard to distinguish from that of marketing. What distinguished them in their role was as a preserver of “purity.” [80] The fundamental problem of the artist was to preserve their purity under capitalism.
Critical spirit and intentionality were also foregrounded in art historical practice as it integrated psychology, sociology, and semiology while mostly abandoning concerns with beauty and form. He dismisses this critical tendency as another myth, one opposed to the holism that he associates with postmodernism. Rejecting any foundational theory of art, he claims a primary interreationality and compatibility to all things and their synthesis.
The futurist image of art that he constructs seems largely lumbered together through a variety of cliches from the 1960s and 70s (Global Village, neo-primitivism, etc.). [9-10] The future comes off as the lag of the long twentieth-century.
Appealing to the futurism of Toffler and Roszack, he stresses decentralization, the collapse of the traditional nation-state, interconnectivity, regionalism, the idea of the ecosystem, the rise of NGOs, and the creation of a new kind of person bred through multiculturalism who will no longer be predatory, disciplined by “technonature” as part of the reign of the new creativity. [96] If art was only a social myth and society no longer needs art, then the aesthetic will go elsewhere. [98]
The myth of genius was replaced by that of self-expression and aesthetic expression, with aesthetics here meaning consciousness and the conscience of the body. [114] The aesthetic then functions as the link between cognitive science, AI, psychology, etc. [117] Art can then replace the spiritual. The art of the future will be an art where the message reaches everyone. (He rather bizarrely cites Bosch as an example of where this was the case in the past).
Attacking galleries and museums as centres of consumerism, he advocates for happenings, libraries, video conferences, and debates with the “artist” no longer a master but a designer who helps integrate all of these aspects into society. This is a way of advocating for holism, for the mall as the model, where the genius is replaced by “free expression.” [102-103] This is a space that can offer transformative tools for “biopsychic energy” through re-enactments and modes of reconciliation along Amerindian models. The society of creatives he imagines is best approximated by the theme park. [109]
Essentially, if you could cross the West Edmonton Mall with an ashram and have some shamans hang out around the food court, you would have the Robillard dream come true. [125] That is the ultimate model of aesthetic education. This is not an exaggeration, nor is it intended as an insult. There is an enormous amount one can say in favour of malls after all, although the fate they have suffered says a lot about his powers of prognostication.
For Robillard, the utopian mall marks a new stage of capitalism which corresponds to a generalized aestheticism, the artificial environments of the society of the spectacle, the ludic attitude promoted as the motor of creativity. [126] Collective creative expression is best seen in edutainment and eduleisure. He rejects out of hand that the turn to virtual reality is a sign of alienation.
The re-discovery of the centrality of gaming is the key to the new creativity, with its stress on simulation, war games, and psychodrama. All of these things would serve a totally urbanized, automated world of leisure ultimately governed by cybernetics that he terms, the New Babylon. [154] Appealing to notions of “vibrant” matter and the privileging of Amerindian ways (which he conflates with cutting-edge physics), he makes it clear that art is reduced to therapy and pedagogy; the society of creation is one that is made and maintained through these ritualized forms. [159]
The book operates as a summation of arguments that he’d been making somewhat more ambivalently and experimentally over the previous three decades in various media. As a result, the attempt to condense often feels incredibly superficial rather than rigorously formulated or argued and his claims often seem more half-baked as arguments-in-general than they ever appeared as specific, localized, journalistic statements.
Of course, even in 1968, and even simply in Montréal, it was clear that the historical bifurcation he suggests was nonsense. The romance of automatism and the avant-garde was hardly about salvation from mechanization any more than the multimedia art of the 1960s was. And the idea that “communications” somehow meant that there was a real “social” or “cultural” universe that bound people together was clearly an illusion. Even the oft-cited McLuhanite notion of the Global Village spelled out the fact that such an idea was a preposterous delusion. This didn’t prevent the eventual evolution of things like internet utopianism and the cult of the digital, both of which Robillard succumbed to.
Looking over the breadth of his work, it is impressive that he barely changes his mind from his late twenties onward but seems to live in that moment for half a century. His charm has always been in his passion for misrecognizing things. Most of what he dreamed of in utopian terms happened in practice, even long before his death in 2012, and has mostly demonstrated his vision’s total detachment from reality.
It is entirely unclear (his brief historical exegeses do not justify it) why the aesthetic is any more necessary or less contingent than art, and it is generally unclear what the distinction between simple consumerism and creativity is, and even less clear why “creativity” should evolve the way he predicts. More importantly, it is far from evident what role history is playing in the permutations of the collective unconscious and vice versa, or why holism is advanced and is only justified by his circular appeal to creativity. Explicitly, he insists on providing no theory of creativity other than that it is a “spirit,” a consciousness of the generosity of life. [161]
Unless one takes this as a wholly apocalyptic vision -- the apocalypse as a mall of creatives (the culmination of existence in the universe becoming a shamanic Complexe Desjardins) -- this moment in the history of “spirit” is only another ephemeral contingency, one which seems wholly symptomatic of a moralization (through the ludic and participatory) of globalizing capital, and leaves one to wonder what the post-creative world would be and what this would suggest about the “aesthetic” that he privileges over art.
I am not mocking this vision of his. After all, he was a Marxist (of a sort), and the real, concrete vision of socialism was to transform the world into something very like McDonald’s, as has been nicely explained in Jukka Gronow’s Caviar and Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (2004). That War Communism and its aftermath intervened -- in other words, that the historical contingencies of creativity ended up being something entirely different than their utopian imagining -- should give one serious pause about the dialectic of historical development.
Although he claims to take a “relativistic” position, in part to justify treating “art” as simply a historically contingent category, in doing so he universalizes as transhistoric the existence of the social and cultural in order to justify this as a metahistorical claim when the same critique applies as well, if not better, to both of these categories. This goes along with his transhistorical claim for the collective unconscious as the leading explanation for all of this.
Beyond this, one could cite his arguments as a cosmological justification of the arts policies of the Canadian state initiated at the start of his career, a naturalization of what were deeply contingent and orchestrated political actions which, like Robillard’s argument, had a vaguely Hegelian undertone at the back of them.
Similarly, one could criticize his entire notion of the aesthetic as holism. There is a substantial tradition of thought, particularly among loosely “Modernist” critics who would argue that the value of aesthetics is that they create a disillusionment with the notion of holism, which is either a metaphysical-historical delusion, or a kind of totalitarian ethos. Robillard at least hints at the latter, as did curators and critics who seemed to varying degrees to embrace the Robillard ethos in ongoing work for the MAC like the triennials.