File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_2004/avant-garde.0403, message 25


From: "Rick Visser" <rick.visser-AT-greenspeedisp.net>
Subject: RE: the new avant-garde BETA
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:17:33 -0700


I will try to get into this conversation a bit if time permits, but for
now can only this very brief fragment of a poem by Alan Ginsberg; my
artist statement in a nutshell:

And what is the work?
To ease the pain of living.
And everything else?
Drunken dumbshow.

Rick Visser

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-avant-garde-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
[mailto:owner-avant-garde-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU] On Behalf Of David
Westling
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 9:42 PM
To: avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: the new avant-garde BETA


Ann Klefstad:

> Will someone read the 2 articles I mentioned before ("Playing on the
> Barricades" and "Choices: On Art and Politics", on mnartists.org, 
> --scroll
> down to "Articles--" etc.) They're written for a very general 
> readership,
> but are attempting to bring some of this stuff to bear on notions of
> artmaking. . . .
> AK
>

No need to assume I didn't read these articles before I sent my last 
post.  Your sketch of the relation of art to politics is a good 
beginning to the subject, but for me it lacks depth.  It's hard to 
assess just how far it is possible to go in the exploration of this 
phenomenon.  One can hardly disagree with such statements as "A broader 
notion of what constitutes 'politics' will lead to a more grounded and 
far-reaching discussion of the relation of art to politics", but, for 
example,  there is no need, in my opinion,  for "qualms" about treating 
consciously political art and "art that is only accidentally or 
tangentially political" as partaking of the same sort of relationship.  
Ann, I fear you are undercutting your own beliefs about the political 
efficacy of art by asserting that "I've come to expect art may not be 
worth much except to its makers".  It is by art's effect on others that 
art and politics intertwine.

A more considered examination of this difficult subject may be found in 
the _Cambridge Companions to Literature_ series in _The Cambridge 
Companion to Modernism_ (1999).  There are several articles here that 
shed light on this, especially Sara Blair's "Modernism and the Politics 
of Culture".  In it we find W.H. Auden's admonition to 
politically-minded artists that "Art is not life and cannot be/A 
midwife to society", an attitude that was often modified, but not 
necessarily repudiated, by the generation of artists that embraced the 
new ways of seeing starting around 1910 and that have come down to us 
under the name of  Modernism.

Perhaps the most important and celebrated instantiation of the relation 
of art to politics in the modernist period was that developed by the 
Surrealists.  They caught the public imagination in 1925 in the fallout 
from the notorious Saint-Pol-Roux banquet, with which the surrealists 
separated themselves from a previous generation of litterateurs, the 
Symbolists, particularly Madame Rachilde, close friend of symbolist 
luminary (and exemplar par excellence for the surrealist sensibility) 
Alfred Jarry.   A thorough account of this banquet may be found in Mark 
Polizzotti's _Revolution of the Mind_ (1995), an extensive biography of 
Andre Breton.  According to Polizzotti's account, Rachilde had recently 
made pointedly disparaging remarks about the German character, writing 
in the _Paris-Soir_ that it was her conviction  that a Frenchwoman 
could never marry a German.  Polizzotti writes:

"The banquet began with Breton and art critic Florent Fels trading 
insulting quips at Rachilde's expense.  When others around the table 
(including Saint-Pol-Roux) reproached them for their lack of gallantry, 
the Surrealists answered with cries of 'Down with France!', which in 
turn sparked shouts in defense of the fatherland."

Matters quickly escalated as Breton further exacerbated the tensions 
between him and Rachilde by solemnly accusing her of insulting his 
friend Max Ernst by her remarks noted above, and then possibly flinging 
his napkin into her face and calling her a "camp follower".  This 
provocation set off a general meelee, and the police were called, 
Michel Leiris shouted down to the five hundred spectators amassed below 
"Down with France!" for which he was severely beaten before being 
dragged off by the police for inciting a riot, and Rachilde was 
arrested for inciting the disturbance.  Thus was launched a movement 
that focused for a large segment of the public the "dark and bloody 
crossroads" (as Lionel Trilling has termed it) of art and politics in 
this era so ripe for transformation.

The Surrealists, it seems to me, got too close to organized politics; 
many of them joined the French Communist Party around 1930 and tried 
hard to integrate surrealist programmes into its agenda, but they were 
roundly rebuffed after some modest initial interest.   They wanted to 
change life and change the world simultaneously.  But it's just not 
that easy.  The Surrealists believed that social transformation was a 
prerequisite to the liberation of the individual, and so also believed 
that the revolution could proceed  along the lines set by the Communist 
International.    But it makes more sense to put it the other way 
around it seems to me.   At any rate change on a large scale runs hard 
up against the deeply entrenched attitudes of the cultural majority.   
Even Herbert Marcuse abandoned his earlier insistence on a program of 
revolutionary communisim by the time of his 1975 article "The Failure 
of the New Left?"; now he advocated liberal progressivism as the only 
realistic tool available to effect minimally substantive change in an 
anti-revolutionary epoch.  This I cannot stomach personally.  I believe 
this would merely further entrench the status quo in the final analysis.

To get back to Sara Blair's article--she continues by examining 
Modernism's connection to Fascism in the persons of Wyndham Lewis and 
Ezra Pound, with their trenchant critiques of the Christian ethos--as 
Blair puts it--"...[T]he energy of formal and narrative experimentation 
is clearly understood as a political force.  In particular, that energy 
is a salvo directed against Victorian humanist social ideals and the 
contemporary versions of populism, individualism, and liberalism they 
were thought to inform."  This approach to critiquing bourgeois society 
was also utilized by the cultural Left for different purposes.  Where 
Lewis and Pound wished to promulgate "guerilla action" against what 
they perceived as degenerate cultures sullying ways of life in White 
Europe, the leftists, like Wilhelm Reich in the field of psychology, 
wished to expose the authoritarian underpinnings of bourgeois society 
via Freudian formulations concerning the underlying nature of the 
dynamics of the nuclear family.

Ultimately, it seems to me that one must recognize him- or herself as 
situated on one or the other side of the Big Cultural Questions, as an 
artist, or in any other role within our society, one question being:  
Do you beilieve that the human soul is better off, as T.S.  Eliot 
believed,  in denying that the individual soul is better off 
self-directed, that to reject God's stewardship is to damn oneself not 
only in the hereafter, but in this life, by committing the ultimate sin 
of _hubris_?  Or do we follow the trajectory of increasing personal 
autonomy, a project that began in earnest over three hundred years ago 
in the work of John Locke and others and in the subsequent rise, 
initially in  England, of "affective individualism"?  Of course, we can 
always continue to wallow in that no-man's land in between, which seems 
to me to entail a regression to some unholy form of authoritarian 
social structure, now on the horizon?

These issues must be successfully addressed before any meaningful 
political change can occur.  Art can help in this sorting out, I think, 
by keeping in mind such sentiments as are expressed in the words of 
Norman O. Brown, that art invites us to partake in the struggle against 
repression.  We assume at the outset that this struggle against 
repression is a benefit and not a detriment to the health of both the 
individual and the society he or she belongs to.

David Westling




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