Relevance of social and democratic art
Summary of the reflection of the artist, François Hers, on the Protocole des Nouveaux Commanditaires, on which the artistic production proposal of Concomitentes is based.
François Hers, wrote in the 90s the Protocole des Nouveaux Commanditaires as a proposal to recover communication between art and society, and to restore art's transformative capacity. This protocol has been used for more than 25 years in different European countries, including Spain.
In a recent text presented here, Hers specifies that “this Protocol gives any citizen who so wishes, without prerogatives or geographical limits, alone or with others, the means to take on the responsibility of commissioning a work from an artist, in any creative field. From that moment on, having become a commissioner, it will be up to him/her to understand and account for the reason for the art and the investment that will be asked of the community”.
According to Hers, this protocol, which connects citizens, artists and patrons, is a way for art to once again become the heritage of all, and for artistic work to recover its value as a constituent element of our society, something that has been lost since modernity. The current situation, Hers continues, demands once again this reinvention of art, in order not only to rethink situations, but to reinvent ourselves, writing together the future of our own history.
To justify his hypothesis, Hers goes back to prehistoric times and argues that even then art played an essential role, through its first manifestations on the walls of Neolithic caves. In those first steps of “pictorial transposition of the visible and the sensible”, man showed that he was capable of relating to the world in a different way, not only to survive, but also to create community and influence his environment. In the course of various civilisations and over several millennia, the arts shaped the great cultural, political and religious orders.
At what point does art lose this transformative capacity? Hers situates it in the modern era inaugurated by the Renaissance, when artists and philosophers emancipated themselves from common modes of expression, ushering in a new era in which individuality became the distinctive and defining feature. According to Hers, democracy thus accelerates this process whereby the individual becomes sovereign by right and a kind of power that can impose a cultural order disappears, so that the role of the artist is in danger of seeking a legitimisation of his work as a mere expression of his individual need.
How to give back to the artist, and to art, that powerful political function? In this reflection by Hers, the answer lies, now more than ever, in society, appealing to an artistic and creative work that responds directly to current cultural and social needs, in a hint of a democratic revolution that is unique until now. In our model of society, which identifies all individuals as free and equal in rights, Hers says that we have to find a model of collectivity to provide an effective response to the most immediate needs and objectives. The tool capable of activating that collectivity is, he concludes, art. And, to give it back its transformative capacity, there is the Protocole des Nouveaux Commanditaires.
Full text here.
