This is as good a time as any for taking stock – futile though it may seem to examine old avant-garde strategies in a global context where they are commonly written off as obsolete. The very structures of art are rooted in a modernist idea of the avant-garde; and as with any revolutionary project that has succeeded (whether it be artistic or political is of little consequence in symbolic terms) they have become institutionalised. Has art changed the world? Be that as it may, the world has changed. The art system now runs pretty smoothly – without being outrageously luxurious, it remains comfortable – and thus, confusedly, art would seem to still have something to lose, even as it often seems to spin idly on its own axis. The avant-garde has definitely taken a hit, but its institutions live on – and they are the source of our inheritance.
We know what we owe them, but not really what to do with it.
Seeking to redefine art and its purposes, Rasheed Araeen writes: What we face today are two failures; the failure of the class struggle, and of the avant-garde. Both had aimed at radical change in society. These failures are not so much to do with the nature of ideas of progress and human advancement as to the methodologies, strategies, and the context by which the struggle towards an egalitarian world society took place. The strategy to confront the system in order to bring about a radical change within it – as to improve the condition of the working class – or to overthrow it altogether failed because this strategy of confrontation with the system did not allow the development of alternative material resources that would have empowered the struggling classes and freed them from their dependence on wage-work. It is this failed strategy that is today crippling the whole discourse of class struggle, and with it the development of art as a critical and productive discourse with its own power of legitimation. (Rasheed Araeen, The Art of Resistance: Towards a Concept of Nominalism, in Third Text, vol. 16, Issue 4, 2002)
Araeen begins by dealing with political and artistic action as if they were one – indeed, art has never had a monopoly on attempts to radically change the world. The political avant-gardes developed very comparable strategies – same contexts, same analyses, same pitfalls, even the same regrets. And there too the same watchwords of the avant-garde come to the fore: wipe clean the slate of the past / build a better world.
Though it makes no ostensible reference to it, the dissolution notice of the Red Army Faction (RAF) is a text that has to do with art: The global wave of revolt, from which the RAF also arose, did not succeed, which does not mean that the ongoing destructive and unjust developments cannot still be turned around. The fact that we see no sufficient answers to these developments weighs more heavily upon us than the mistakes we made. The RAF came from the revolts of the last decades, which did not exactly foresee how the system would develop, but which at least recognized the threat that it posed. We knew that this system would allow fewer and fewer people around the world to live their lives with dignity. And we also knew that this system seeks total access to people, so that they subjugate themselves to the values of the system and make them their own. Our radicalism sprang from these realisations. For us, we had nothing to lose with this system. (Red Army Faction, Dissolution Notice, 1998)
Both take up the now relatively common assertion as to the avant-garde’s failure to change the world, while – at least to a certain extent – continuing to believe in its possibility, even if it means rethinking everything: We need to join together to realise what has always been the aim of art, to achieve the universal emancipation and freedom of humanity (Araeen). Our decision to end something is the expression of our search for new answers. We know that we are linked to many other people around the world in this search. There will be many future discussions until all the experiences have been brought together and we have a realistic and reflective picture of history. We want to be part of a joint liberation. (RAF)
Araeen is certainly no terrorist and there is strictly no trace of any call for violence in his text. But that doesn’t prevent him from reasserting a belief in art’s power to conceive and promote a positive political project – one that is tangibly useful – in terms that are ultimately quite close to those used by the former Red Army Faction with respect to direct action.
Joseph Beuys, too, kept his eye riveted on direct political action. For him, initiating a political movement was also a work of art – one that he referred to as “social sculpture”. If his formulations tended to be more prophetic and less classically Marxist than others’, he is not the only one to have thought along those lines. Today it is virtually self-evident – and it is naïve to think that it could be otherwise. But this is merely ephemeral, for what is not immediately destroyed can always be aestheticised and institutionalised later on.
The modernist project regarding the autonomy of art and politics didn’t so much fail as it succeeded all too well – the aestheticisation of politics, even and above all in the form of spectacular leisure, remains more than ever the distinctive mark of fascism. All is not so well… but where is Plan B? …And it reminded me of something in a book by Don DeLillo about how terrorists are the only true artists left, because they are the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people. (Laurie Anderson, in The Cultural Ambassador – track 17 of The ugly one with the jewels, 1995)
Now that’s not quite what DeLillo said – There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. (…) Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (Don DeLillo, Mao II, 1991) – but Anderson’s synthesis is revealing. She points out the fact that art has always been tempted by direct, violent, radical action; and moreover that the temptation is reciprocal.
On the symbolic level, the links between an art embodying a revolutionary project and political activism – even in its most radical forms – are obvious. Art is concept and representation, but it is not only that; it also supposes a practice in the here and now, in other words, genuine experimenting with those concepts and those representations in the real world – to the point that the image changes the world, and goes from being representation to becoming presence. The anarchist theory of propaganda through action follows a parallel logic – that of the gesture that produces the image.
When Beuys offered, from the information bureau of his party for direct democracy, to personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V so that they could be rehabilitated – by whom? and how? – he was implying that art offered a more propitious terrain for their creativity. It would also do less damage. A generation later, long after Baader’s, Meinhof’s and so many others’ deaths, the RAF’s dissolution notice would seem to prove him right. Except that meanwhile, Beuys himself has died, and direct democracy with him, and corners of fat in his office in Düsseldorf ended up in the garbage. The mythology lives on.
Given the overall balance of power, and its strictly military outlook, the Red Army Faction had lost from the outset. But, retrospectively, that wasn’t ultimately what it was all about. Schleyer’s kidnapping was a raid on consciousness, as were Beuys’s actions. Rupture, radical gestures, consciousness-raising – the avant-garde’s vocabulary was taken from aesthetics.
Araeen might argue that the urban guerrilla emerged from the same Western-bourgeois soil as modern art – just another avant-garde amongst others. But above all, that what is considered a failure is actually a dissatisfaction linked to a lack of immediate efficacy – to the fact that art’s effects simply cannot be measured: the results are critical of us (RAF). The idea just doesn’t work, not anymore, or not really – even if the audience applauds or whistles, it’s all just spectacle.
…In the end, even terrorism comes as no surprise. It reached its limits as a strategy of production of political meaning and social change. Terrorism has changed, its agents, its principles and its purposes are no longer what they were. As it takes the form of random mass murders, its reception has shifted from a paradigm of problematic perplexity to one of familiar spectacle. A tenuous feeling of meaningless terror is now part and parcel of our everyday lives – a figure of substitution for the generalised insecurity upon which the powers-that-be seek to found their legitimacy. If a certain brand of terrorism had a structural proximity with art, now it cannot but share the same model of spectacular entertainment.
Araeen is right: resistance is not enough. To satisfy oneself with resisting is to defend existent positions which one knows are already lost. Something more is required. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, graffiti on the pedestal of a statue of Marx and Engels (or was it Lenin’s?) nicely summed up the situation: Next time everything will work out better. Maybe. Provided that next time everything is completely different.
Are we capable of being former artists? One can always entertain the fantasy of a press release proclaiming the self-dissolution of art (but who could speak in the name of art as a whole). The belief in a heroic and romantic figure of the artist is too easy (let’s leave such things, with other pretexts, to other believers – like the Bush administration, amongst others – for current events are troubling). If art still has a reason for being – other than producing and becoming the image of power – it is certainly not in order to propose a model of ideal social organisation, which would necessarily, in the long run, be an institutional and totalitarian calling.
Nevertheless, before its recuperation by institutions and spectacle, before its necessary and inevitable dissolution, there is a short period of latency: a space where everything is possible – where everything has to be, once again and every time, reinvented. In a world where power is in the hands of believers, the possibility of art is no longer in the construction of certitudes, but in a critical and radical practice of doubt. To that end, we need first of all to satisfy ourselves with art having a noxious, trouble-making purpose: and after all, systematically undermining the representations upon which the powers-that-be are based is no mean feat.
(first published in Livraison 9 / as if all were well / Strasbourg and Montréal / 2008 / translated from French by Stephen Wright)
