The Artist and the Senses

Two essays published in the 1970s by Jack Lindsay explore the relationship between art and the senses. In his study of ‘Spasmodic’ poet, Ebenezer Jones, Lindsay shows how the heightened sensory and emotional appeal of his verse reveals to the reader the inequality and injustice of bourgeois culture and articulates working-class distress and alienation. In ‘The Role of the Individual in Art’ (1976) Lindsay argued that the artist must not stand apart from society and politics but be at its heart, so that their embodied experience of struggle is the basis of their work. Lindsay struggles with modernist art, seeing it often as aligning itself with capitalism and ‘thingifying’ art; trapped within individualist bourgeois ideology.