|
March 23, 2011 Down with art!: the age of manifestos Future
fetishists and artists who don’t paint: how the revolutionary aims of the
avant-garde led to the ‘sick joke’ of postmodernism Terry Eagleton In the world of polite letters,
literature is the enemy of programmes, polemics,
sectarian rancour, the sour stink of doctrinal
orthodoxies. It is the home of the unique particular, the provisional and
exploratory, of everything that resists being reduced to a scheme or an
agenda. This, one might note, is a fairly recent point of view. That
literature should be free of doctrinal orthodoxy would have come as a
surprise to Dante and Milton. Swift is a great writer full of sectarian rancour. Terms like “provisional” and “exploratory” do
not best characterize Samuel Johnson’s literary views. Nor do they best describe the
views of the various twentieth-century avant-gardes, which set out to
demolish this whole conception of art. From the Futurists and Constructivists
to the Surrealists and Situationists, art became
militant, partisan and programmatic. It was to be liberated from the
libraries and museums and integrated with everyday life. In time, the
distinction between art and life, the playful and the pragmatic, would be
erased. There were to be no more professional artists, just common citizens
who occasionally wrote a poem or made a piece of sculpture. The summons rang
out to abandon one’s easel and design useful objects for working people, as
some of the Russian Constructivists did. Poets were to read their poetry
through megaphones in factory yards, or scribble their verses on the
shirt-fronts of passing strangers. A moustache was appended to the Mona Lisa.
A Soviet theatre director took over a whole naval port for several days,
battleships and all, and commandeered its 300,000 citizens for his cast. Theatre audiences might be asked
to vote at the end of the play, or march en masse on the local town hall.
From agitprop to poster design, art was an instrument in the service of
political revolution. For some avant-gardists,
there were to be no more permanent art objects, since they would only suffer
the indignity of becoming commodities. Instead, one should create gestures,
happenings, situations, stray intensities, events which consumed themselves
in the act of production. “To the electric chair with Chopin!”, fulminated the founder of Mexican Stridentism.
“The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline”, declares Kasimir Malevich in his lengthy Suprematist
Manifesto of 1916, reproduced here. The most obscene word of all was
“academic”. In this cultural revolution, two
broad currents can be distinguished. The more positive strain of
avant-gardism sought to transform human perceptions in order to adapt them to
the new technological age. Avant-gardes tend to take root in societies still
in the first flush of modernization, when the oppressive aspects of the new
technologies are less obvious than the exhilarating ones. History is now
skidding by so fast that the only image of the present is the future. Nothing
is more typical of these activists than a mindless celebration of novelty – a
brash conviction that an absolutely new epoch is breaking around them, that
twentieth-century humanity is on the brink of greater, more rapid change than
at any time in the past (they were to be proved right about that), and that
everything that happened up to ten minutes ago is ancient history. How one
would set about identifying absolute novelty is a logical problem that did not
detain them. This fetishism of the future crops
up on almost every page of 100 Artists’ Manifestos,
deftly selected and stylishly introduced by Alex Danchev.
Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which as Danchev
points out founded not only Futurism but the very idea of the artistic
manifesto, celebrates “the beauty of speed”. “A racing car, its bonnet decked
with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . .
is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” A later
Futurist proclamation incites the brethren to destroy all “passéist” clothes (“tight-fitting,colourless, funereal, decadent”) and invent
futurist clothes instead, “daring clothes with brilliant colours
and dynamic lines”. Like Romanticism, the revolutionary avant-garde was staffed
by the young, full of contempt for their experimentally challenged elders. In
its more flamboyant moments, of which it had more than a few, it raised
adolescence to an ideology. Revolutionaries
singing the praises of technological progress is rather like archbishops recommending adultery. These
cultural experimenters seem to have overlooked the fact that no social system
in history has been more innovative and dynamic than capitalism, and that a
credulous trust in progress was a stock belief of the very middle classes
they sought to outrage. It is true that this faith was coming badly unstuck
in the early twentieth century, and would finally lie bleeding on the
battlefields of the First World War. Even so, turning the middle classes’
belief in technological progress against their own cultural conservatism was
always a perilous tactic. Scandalizing the bourgeoisie,
whose grandchildren were to be charged fancy prices for the very works of art
that did so, meant more than rejecting this or that convention.
It involved an assault on the idea of men and women as autonomous individuals
with rich interior lives. That ripe, Proustian
interiority was to be ripped apart by an art that was externalizing,
mechanistic and deconstructive. For the first time in the history of
aesthetics, fragmentation and dislocation ousted the impulse to unify. The
Old Man (private, spiritual, contemplative) was to be taken apart, and the
New Man (active, collectivist, mobile, anonymous) was to be constructed in
his place. This meant waging an unpleasantly macho campaign against moralism, realism and Romanticism, all of which were
soggy with feminine feeling. The Futurist Manifesto ditches feminism along
with libraries, museums and academies. The avant-garde was a robustly
masculine affair; its hymns to lust and Deleuze-like
cult of desire boded ill for anyone furnished with a uterus. A Manifesto of
Futurist Woman encourages woman “to find once more her cruelty and her
violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished”.
There is a good deal of such sub-Nietzschean swagger in the current as a
whole. The decadent values of pity and compassion – mere fronts for the
predatory bourgeoisie – must give way to a certain spiritual brutalism. Alongside the more positive strand
of avant-garde revolt, with its complex relations to Bolshevism, Trotskyism
and (in the case of Marinetti) Fascism, flourished a more negative, even
nihilistic strain, which held that the cultural establishment could absorb
attacks on this or that meaning; what it could not withstand was an assault
on meaning as such. It followed that the most lethal revolutionary weapon was
absurdity. In a period of savage irrationalism stretching from the Somme to
the rise of Hitler, only the lunatic could be said to be sane. Reason itself
was an oppressive force, and the title of madman was one to be cherished.
Logic was the preserve of those incapable of creation. Since manifestos made
a kind of sense, they, too, were to be junked. “No more manifestos”, demanded
a Dadaist manifesto. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, announced another. The term “Dada” soon became the
ultimate floating signifier, applicable to anything of which one happened to
approve. “DADA's face is broad and slender and its voice is arched like the
sirens’ tone”, states one of its champions informatively. Some manifestos, as
Danchev notes, came to resemble modernist poems,
full of typographical high-jinks and obscenity-sprinkled obscurantism.
“Tragic humour is the birthmark of the North”,
Wyndham Lewis wrote, meaninglessly, in a manifesto in his journal Blast. Ridiculing all this ultra-leftism,
however, is as risky as it is easy. One Dadaist document calls for “daily
meals at public expense for all creative and intellectual men and women on
the Potsdamer Platz”, and
goes on to demand “immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to
the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual
centre”. Those who dismiss this kind of stuff as preposterous are in much the
same position as the eighteenth-century bishop who is said to have thrown
Gulliver’s Travels into the fire, declaring that he didn’t believe a word of
it. For it is, of course, intended as self-parody; and it is never easy to
decide when these artistic incendiaries are in deadly earnest and when they
are sending themselves up. Outrage, extravagance and over-the-top polemic are
built into the very genre of the manifesto, which is itself a kind of
fiction. When the Communist Manifesto, which provides the prototype for all
these cries of rage, proclaims that the workers of the world have nothing to
lose but their chains, we are not meant to take this as we would a statement
that eating too much treacle will make you sick. Marx and Engels were well
aware that working people who rose up against their masters might end up
losing their lives rather than their chains. The statement is a piece of
rhetoric, the point of which lies in its effect. These artists’ manifestos,
likewise, are performances rather than propositions. They are examples of the
aggressive, absurdist art they advocate. And that art was by no means just a
puerile affair. Artists associated with the groups who produced the documents
in this volume include Rodchenko, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Vertov, Eisenstein,
Brecht, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Max Ernst, André Breton and a good many other
illustrious names. The Futurists, the Surrealists and the rest could be
embarrassing in print but supremely accomplished in practice. If they were
sometimes callow, buffoonish and ludicrously self-important, some of them
also produced works which rank among the most
audacious and imaginative of their time. They were certainly never dull. What links most of these sects,
many of which evaporated almost as soon as they emerged, was a demand for
what Mayakovsky called spiritual revolution. They
were aware that a social transformation which failed to cut deep enough,
embracing economic change but sidelining the whole question of human
subjectivity, was bound to founder. Their prediction was to prove tragically
accurate. Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930,
disenchanted with life in the Soviet Union. Avant-garde art may be a poor
joke in the eyes of some conservative academics, but it was scarcely so in
the eyes of Joseph Stalin. It was a threat to the State which had to be
destroyed. When the mantle of the Bolshevik cultural pioneers passed to their
contemporaries in the Weimar Republic, the Nazis stepped in and squashed it
there, too. Most of it, at any rate. In
diminished form, the avant-garde has lived on to this day. 100 Artists’
Manifestos starts out with Marinetti and Kandinsky and ends up with Gilbert
and George. One might claim that the classical avant-garde ended in 1971 with
the demise of the Situationists under their leader
Guy Debord, dedicated boozer and brilliant
strategist. Charles de Gaulle was another politician who looked on cultural
revolutionaries as more than just a joke, since in the guise of Situationism they masterminded much of the student
rebellion of the late 1960s. The surreal slogans of May ’68 are in a direct
line of descent from Mayakovsky and André Breton. Alex Danchev’s
book also reprints the manifesto of the anti-Brit Art Stuckists,
which contains the subversive suggestion that “Artists who don’t paint aren’t
artists”. Today, rejecting the easel is as conventional as the iambic
pentameter, and has become all the easier given that quite a few celebrated
artists never took it up in the first place. Postmodern culture is, among
other things, a sick joke at the expense of the tradition recorded in this
collection. Art has indeed been integrated with everyday life; but this has
happened in the form of advertising, public relations, the media, political
spectaculars, the catwalk and the commodity, which is not quite what the
Futurists and Surrealists had in mind. Alex Danchev,
editor Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Visiting Professor in English at the
Universities of Lancaster and Notre Dame as well as the National University
of Ireland. His Why Marx Was Right is forthcoming. |