The Bolsheviks are coming! The Bolsheviks are coming!
or,
Would Altoids be Uncle Joe's favorite breath mint were he still alive today?
Dear Dr. Green,
I am reading and re-reading your email between gulps of strong coffee
and yet still find myself blinking, bewildered and wondering to
myself: "did he really mean to write what he wrote, or did I miss
something here?"
You write that the concept of the avant-garde is:
"indissolubly complicit ·with the violence and coercion of
Stalinism; art for the people; the artist's job to serve the people;
the artist as part of active bolshevist cadres."
Not since the mid 1970s when Hilton Kramer obliquely called on
commercial gallery owners to pull their advertising out of Artforum
because the magazine had been 'overrun by marxist radicals' (I am
paraphrasing,) have I run across someone linking socially committed
art and art scholarship (of any sort) with the red terror! Yowee!
Still, I will qualify my remarks here by saying that your very short
email, no doubt written with haste, is not necessarily representative
of the range of your ideas on artistic collaboration, work that I
admit coming to only recently and thus far only in fragmented form. I
hope to remedy that soon. I would like to second Grant Kester's
request that you elaborate on your bookkeeping model of artistic
collaboration.
Nevertheless, with regard to Stalinism, you certainly know that the
chaotic artistic landscape of post-revolutionary Russian was far more
contested than your one size fits all depiction. Furthermore, you are
aware that in the 1920s, perhaps the "golden age" of politicized,
20th century avant-gardism, that the Proletkult denounced
Constructivism and that Social Realism (Stalinist aesthetics if you
like) denounced both of these only to eventually become the official
art of the USSR.
I can not imagine you, or anyone else, calling Socialist Realism
avant-garde. And yet all three of these tendencies sought in very
different ways to make art serve 'the people,' 'the revolution,'
and/or the hoped for 'new, socialist man.' And even this admittedly
reductivist sketch of mine does not touch on the overt political
commitment of artists in other parts of Europe including dadaists or
later the Surrealists: all of whom certainly can lay claim to the
title avant-garde, no? Of course one could, using your logic, argue
that non-marxist or anti-utilitarian oriented avant-garde art of Dada
for example is somehow "indissolubly complicit" with fascist violence
through the anarchic politics of the Italian Futurists? (As Marinetti
proposed, "Divert the canals to flood the museums!" even if we now
know such a project is better left to the US military who use rivers
of thieves rather than canal water!)
But I am with you however when you call avant-gardism, or at least
the way it has been canonized by institutional discourse, a doctrine
with a bad name. Except that my reasons for asserting this are
exactly the opposite of yours.
I would ask you to consider for example how to reconcile what you
call the avant-garde's "historical genealogical link with left
terror" and its modern day array of well heeled capitalist suitors
ranging from Philip Morris to Hugo Boss to Charles Saatchi? Surely it
is not the immutable, blood soaked lineage of bolshevism that has
made contemporary, neo-avant gardist art the official culture of the
new managerial class? As Chin-tau Wu pithily states in her book
Privatising Culture:
"the irony is, of course, that while contemporary art, especially in
its avant-garde manifestations, is generally assumed to be in
rebellion against the system, it actually acquires a seductive
commercial appeal within it." (Wu Page 161.)
You go on to write:
"For myself, the bankruptcy of avant-gardist models lies in the use
of art as instrumental-as the means to an end"
My next question to you therefore is:
How do you extricate the ends from the means when contemporary art is
used for corporate public relations? Is there more slippage when the
work serves the interest of consumerism? More space for freedom than
would be the case for artists who see their work serving more
populist, community oriented or extra-artistic activist goals?
Shifting gears a bit, permit me to reflect on the work of some
modern-day "interventionist" artists and art groups. (And contrary to
your assertion artist groups are far larger in number today and have
been since the 1950s than you apparently realize, but that is a
different debate.) I wonder just how much of a bolshevik odor for
instance arises from the work of Yomango who design flamboyant and
colorful "ready to revolt," clothing filled with hidden armor for use
in public demonstrations? Or the Snail Shell System of the Danish
collective N55: a disk-like housing unit that offers the modern nomad
mobile sanctuary and that echoes, if in earthbound ways, Tatlin's
wonderfully eccentric yet utilitarian autonomous flying bicycle of
the 1930s? Or the work of Michael Rakowitz and his cohorts Bill
Stone, George Livingston and Freddie Flynn who create inflatable,
polyethylene tents for urban homeless that, like transparent
parasites, are inflated from the heating vents of city buildings? Or
what of Temporary Services who provide sundry public systems for
disseminating free artwork and informational zines on contraceptives,
counter-global politics and community gardening primarily in Chicago?
Yes, the call for art to dissolve into life, along with the call to
liquidate art, were slogans of the pragmatic, revolutionary oriented,
post-revolutionary Russian art scene that was itself, as you
certainly know, itself a victim of Stalinism. And in many ways those
same avant-garde agenda's are present in much "engaged" and
collectivist art today. But to my mind this tendency that frequently
dissolves individual art objects into larger systems of circulation
and public deployment, ostensibly the focus of your letter, appear to
deploy notions of utility for BOTH practical as well as symbolic
purposes. That is to say, they are pragmatists of a sort but with a
twist. They use humor and play and call on the public to "do it
yourself" while appearing more as enablers or service providers than
lock-step cadre. Incongruity, pluralism and informality and not
appeals to unanimity or some party line fuel this new collectivism.
And with "brand names" such as the Bureau of Inverse Technology, The
Biotic Baking Brigade, Center for Urban Pedagogy, RTmark, NYC
Surveillance Camera Players, Ha Ha, Wochenklausur, Critical Art
Ensemble, The Center for Land Use, Atlas Group and The Icelandic Love
Corporation one thing becomes evident: collectivism today is an
identity to be performed, rather than a doctrine of conformity.
Collectivism is today much more likely the legacy of rock and roll in
other words than it is of Stalinism.
But if the inheritance of avant-garde art remains an open question
surely its ability to thrive, even decorate institutional cultural
spaces is less unclear. Or is it?
Bringing me to my final contention with your email:
You write that the Tate and other, mainstream institutions sometimes
make space for anti-institutional, activist or collectivist art NOT
out of a conspiratorial ideology, but from a combination of,
"·sheer confidence, power, inclusiveness, size, and even, yes,
generosity,."
Does not this chain of adjectives self-destruct, in so far as the
concept of generosity means giving to others what you could just as
easily keep yourself? What I mean by that is, I do not think these
institutions have a choice in the matter of philanthropy. Nor do I
think this munificence, is theirs to keep in first place. Allow me to
explain and please bear in mind that I too have been a museum curator
(at the New Museum in NY) and now sit on the board of a major
contemporary art organization (the College Art Association):
Is not the largess of powerful cultural institutions, art galleries,
private collectors and corporations itself the transformed labor,
creativity, ideas, artworks, public monies (in the form of tax
deductions) appropriated from artists and intellectuals as well as
often citizens in the first place?
And does not a powerful institution today absolutely have to appear
generous? I mean, isn't this the essence of corporate sponsorship of
high culture? Starting way back with John Rockefeller who, following
the PR disaster of the Ludlow Massacre (1914) in which armed soldiers
and strike-breakers murdered nine children and two wives of striking
miners who were seeking to unionize one of his Colorado facilities?
But hey, I love visiting the Museum of Modern Art here in NY as well
as the Met and Guggenheim and so forth, yet that does not alter the
complex relationship these institutions have to an increasingly
privatized and concentrated apportionment of capital: both cultural
capital and the real thing. Nor does it erase any links to a brutal
and barbarous history. However, does any of this mean that the
employees, administrators, or the work inside these institutions is
ruined? That it can not function as a form of complex communication
or aesthetic experience?
Therefore despite this reality I would never suggest such
institutions simply be abandoned as sites of struggle. And in this
sense we overlap you and I somewhat I think Dr Green. But at the same
time it seems to me the power of museums and the art world is fueled
by what they draw into themselves - that being among other things us
as cultural producers, critics, resistors, re-toolers, public artists
and so forth. Which means that there is also power on our side of the
equation as well: to give, withhold, reroute, mutate. However, this
can only be developed as a serious option in my opinion if our
critical, oppositional discourse and cultural practice seeks to
escape the circumscribed institutional framework of the art world
itself. That is to say: we can not FAIL to take into account and be
responsible to a "non-aesthetic set of criteria." So along with
enjoying its aesthetic function the museum/art world nexus is also a
place from which to DRAW OUT power for other, extra-artistic,
socially progressive purposes. (Sounds a bit stalinist does it?
tough.)
I could take issue with other aspects of your comments: including its
depiction of recent past interactive, audience engaged "political"
art as exemplified by "post-colonial" theory (identity politics?) in
so far as this sidelines many other vital examples of socially
critical art including artists working in community settings, or with
labor unions, of inside schools, hospitals and health care centers. I
would also challenge your insistence that anything more needs to be
said about T. Hirshhorn zzzzzzz: please wake me when that is over
thank you. And I should raise the notion here, as I have done in
several recent essays on what I call the "dark matter" of the art
world, that there are other ways of historicizing activist,
collectivist and engaged art other than the bankrupt avant-gardist
model. But I have already rambled on far too much and will leave it
at that.
Oh, except to quickly finish the story I started out with about Hilty:
As it turns out Kramer's not so subtle call for a boycott actually
worked and Arftorum's "subversive" editors, Max Kozloff and John
Koplans were fired. This paved the way for the glossy magazine's
return to the generous arms of the "art world" following its
dalliance with the dark (read red?) side. Of course by today's
standards the writings that inspired Kramer's red-baiting, including
those of Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach among other "revolutionaries,"
are now respected exemplars of social historical revisionism that
counts among its affiliates T.J. Clark.
Best regards,
Gregory Sholette
(and you can quote any of this or email to others if you like.)--
gregory g. sholette
Associate Professor
Arts Administration;
Visual, Critical Studies
The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago
http://www.artic.edu/~gshole/
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New York City, NY 10025
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