A Quick Quote out of Russia

A quotation from a famous, perestroika-era Russian playwright named Alexandr Gelman that appeared in a recent article by Michael Kimmelman, the NY Times lead art critic, struck me the other day as being germane not only to the current situation facing artists in Russia today but to the history of art in general. In response to Kimmelman's pondering over the increasingly volatile relationship between artists and the Kremlin Gelman muses: "The less democracy, the more cultural figures matter. If the tendency against democracy continues, cultural figures will gain more influence." Later Gelman concludes: "It's a disgrace for Russia that writers would replace political parties...But maybe that is what will have to happen." This is, interestingly enough, precisely the situation that existed in 19th century Russia under the Tsar. Because all oppositional political discussion was, in effect, silenced by the Tsar's censorship regulations and his police forces (both open and secret), most progressive ideas were disseminated through literature. In the absence of any true public sphere of political debate, writers such as Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinksy, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Chernyshevsky embodied the progressive forces of their era because they took up pressing social issues in their work and attempted, at times, to put themselves in the service of the people. That this notion of 'the people' turned out to be little more than an abstraction when put into practice partially explains the failure of these artists to turn their ideas into reality. None were effective politicians, primarily because none could conceive of revolutionary change as being more than an ethical program or a sectarian, putschist movement (e.g. the Decemberists). The rise of Marxism in Russia amongst the intelligentsia would, of course, change all this.

Outside of the Russian context I think Gelman's comment also provides food for thought in relation to the historical rise of the bourgeois in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Memorializing Politics

Artist Mark Wallinger won the 2007 Turner prize yesterday (the UK's most important contemporary art competition) for his installation State Britain, a meticulous re-creation of the signs, objects and debris that formed anti-war activist Brian Haw's one-man protest against the escalation of the 'war on terror' before it was demolished by the London police in May 2006. Haw began his protest directly across from the houses of parliament in 2001, before the US invasion of Iraqi, but subsequently condemned the British government's involvement in the war and later occupation, as well as highlighting local socio-economic struggles. (I saw Haw's ramshackle outpost when I was in London in 2003 and remember how popular it was with tourists.) After passing the 'Serious Organized Crime and Police Act,' which forbids all unauthorized demonstrations within a kilometer of Parliament Square, Haw's belongings were taken and destroyed. Fortunately, Wallinger had taken hundreds of photographs of the
encampment before the material was confiscated. Working with a team of assistants, Wallinger produced replicas of all the material Haw had amassed, all the signs, all the flyers, even the stove that Haw used to make tea. These replicas were then installed in early 2007 at the Tate Modern, half of which just so happens to lie within one kilometer of Parliament Square. As art, its seems, Haw's protest could live on in a way it could not as a demonstration.

This paradoxical situation is apparently one of the reasons why State Britain was awarded the 25,000 pound prize (just over $51,000). According to the Guardian Unlimited the Turner judges praised the work for its 'immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance,' and noted its combination of 'a bold political statement with art's ability to articulate fundamental human truths.' What 'truths' exactly is not clear, but it seems that Wallinger's piece is championed both for its ability to explicitly present a political view as well as distance itself from this view. This seemingly contradictory quality is nothing more, however, than an objective fact: the original political view is Haw's, not Wallinger's. Wallinger has merely appropriated Haw's political view and placed it in a new context, an art gallery (in a museum). Cut off from its original context and isolated within the gallery, the materials are no longer seen entirely in terms of their content, i.e. what they say or the message they try present. Within this new context the formal qualities of the materials take on a new found importance. Suddenly how the message is presented and the kind of materials used to make this presentation dominate the discussion, since it is precisely these formal qualities that allow us to step back from the particular content of the original protest and instead address the universal content that lies within the artistic copy. Adrian Searle, art critic of the Guardian Unlimited, said something much the same when he wrote in a Jan. 16th review of State Britain that "By bringing the protest inside an institution, Wallinger gives us a chance almost to freeze it, presenting it as a simulacrum of itself."

The formalization of Haw's protest does not, however, empty it of all political content or value. Ben Street, writing in Artnet back in Jan., argued that Wallinger's installation functions as a memorial, "a monument to the idea of public protest against the war." Street, I think, has the right idea in comparing State Britain to a memorial rather than a ironical appropriation piece à la Richard Prince. Yet, as Street writes, this memorialization of Haw's protest generalizes his demonstration for a specific demand (an end to the occupation of Iraq) into the unspecific idea of public protest. Street goes on to say that "the survival of Haw's camp as art object and its death as protest are one and the same." This perhaps overly fatalistic conclusion assumes that the formalization of Haw's protest (i.e. its being made into art) equals the complete decontextualization and depletion of his message. In a partial sense, of course, Street's conclusion is valid. But the fact that Haw's message is presented in the Tate Modern at all is important insofar as it reflects a growing recognition of the anti-war movement and a broader shift in public discourse. It is politically significant that Wallinger's work has been awarded the Turner prize even if its own political value is limited or questionable (I think it is both).

What are the limits of Wallinger's 'bold political statement'? First of all, the formalization and decontextualization of Haw's protest is not solely the result of moving the protest into an art gallery but is instead an integral aspect of Wallinger's appropriation. Part of the problem is that Wallinger has mistaken 'bold political statements' for politics. Reproducing the statements and placards of a demonstration does not equal a demonstration, both in terms of political effectiveness and 'boldness'. That the Turner judges have incorrectly taken Wallinger's attempt to be both engaged and aloof as evidence of his ability to both make a 'bold political statment' and a work of art that articulates 'fundamental human truths' is only a further indication of the artworld's blind obedience to political abstractions. Second, the appropriation of Haw's protest in the name of art and the subsequent celebration of this act confirm the broad consensus amongst artists and critics today that art, by definition, is the posing of questions. Wallinger's installation raises a lot of questions, so the reports say, and that makes it effective art. That art has primarily become a means of asking critical questions about society without having to provide any answers is both the result of historical development and the misguided belief that art has no laws of its own. Art has always reflected society, never directly, but always in an oblique way. Yet it was only with the rise of modernism that artists begin to consciously address social issues in their art, either directly or indirectly (or even, one could argue, unconsciously). Today, on the other hand, art is social commentary since no one is certain anymore whether it can be defined in terms of formal charateristics. What remains from older, modernist traditions of art is the belief that art requires no justification for its existence outside of itself. Thus today we get art that asks questions, art as social commentary but without any requirement to justify itself or ground itself in reality.

Berlin Dada Abstract

I am posting an abstract I wrote for the Berlin Dada project. Much of this information already appeared in an earlier post, but I have condensed it and more or less laid out my argument.

Abstract:

Generally speaking Berlin is recognized as having been the most 'political' of the regional centers of the international Dada movement. Whereas a wholesale rejection of 'bourgeois' culture and its vapid aestheticism was more or less the common program of Dada, only in Berlin was the movement's cultural politics deliberately linked to revolutionary socialist politics. Prominent Dadaists such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Wieland Herzfelde joined the German communist party in 1918 and strove to align Dada with the broader struggle to win the working class to socialism. This politicization of Dada should come as no surprise given the fact that it occurred during a period of heightened political and social struggle when many artists in Germany were radicalized. Nevertheless, there is little or no consensus amongst art historians as to how we are to conceive the relationship between the Berlin Dadaists and their social context. What role did their art play in their politics? What role did their politics play in their art?
I will address these questions by focusing on Berlin Dada's relationship to the contemporaneous Proletarian Culture movement (known as Proletkult) in the recently formed Soviet Union. Proletkult, which began as a cultural and educational organization independent of the Soviet government, agitated for a complete renunciation of 'bourgeois' culture and the fostering of a new culture built upon a pure proletarian ideology. This call for the immediate implementation of a cultural revolution as a buttress or even a necessary prelude to the political and social revolution spread throughout Europe soon after the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917 and influenced several left-wing artist groups. The Berlin Dadaists saw the theory of Proletkult as means of transforming their rejection of art into a cultural revolutionary project.
To better explain this transformation I will first discuss how Dada came to Berlin in 1917 and was swept up in the prelude and aftermath of the revolutions of 1918 and 1919. Second, a look at how the Berlin Dadaists responded to the Proletkult movement and began to assert themselves as 'revolutionaries'. Third, I will take the First International Dada Fair mounted in 1920 as indicative of the limits of Berlin Dada's cultural politics. Finally, a comparison of Berlin Dada and the expressionist movement, which many also saw as a revolutionary art movement. The problem of Berlin Dada's politics is as much a historical issue as it is a methodological issue. While some art historians view Dada's rejection of aesthetic value and the objet d'art as being inherently political, I base my analysis on the contention that there is no revolutionary art. Political value is not an inherent attribute of art or some aspect of an art work's form; rather, whatever political value a work of art may have is in relation to a broader political context, and the effectiveness of that value is in relation to a broader political struggle. Thus, rather than investigating the 'radicality' of formal innovations, my paper provides insight into how the Berlin Dadaists reacted to a revolutionary situation they could not control and did not comprehend.