The Utopian Globalists

Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919 - 2009

Jonathan Harris

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781405193016
• eBook ISBN: 9781118316795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

THE UTOPIAN GLOBALISTS

"Crossing continents, historical periods and cultural genres, Jonathan Harris skilfully traces the evolution of utopian ideals from early modernism to the spectacularised and biennialised (or banalised as some would say) contemporary art world of today."

Michael Asbury, University of the Arts, London

The Utopian Globalists is the second in a trilogy of books by Jonathan Harris examining the contours, forces, materials and meanings of the global art world, along with its contexts of emergence since the early twentieth century. The first of the three studies, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), anatomized the global art system through an extensive anthology of over 30 essays contextualized through multiple thematic introductions. The final book in the series, Contemporary Art in a Globalized World (forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell), combines the historical and contemporary perspectives of the first and second books in an account focused on the 'mediatizations' shaping and representing contemporary art and its circuits of global production, dissemination and consumption.

This innovative and revealing history examines artists whose work embodies notions of revolution and human social transformation. The clearly structured historical narrative takes the reader on a cultural odyssey that begins with Vladimir Tatlin's constructivist model for a 'Monument to the Third International' (1919), a statement of utopian globalist intent, via Picasso's 1940s commitment to Soviet communism and John and Yoko's Montreal 'Bedin', to what the author calls the 'late globalism' of the Unilever Series at London's Tate Modern.

The book maps the ways artists and their work engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism, throughout the eras of the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the increasingly globalized world of the past 20 years. In doing so, Harris explores the idea that the utopian -globalist lineage in art remains torn between its yearning for freedom and a deepening identification with spectacle as a media commodity to be traded and consumed.

1

Spectacle, Social Transformation and Utopian Globalist Art

‘Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, ­distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles [. . .] Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner.’

Guy Debord, Thesis 60, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books: New York, 1995 [1967, in French]): 38–9. (emphasis in original).

‘For the first time in contemporary Europe no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.’

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (Verso: London, 1990): 21.

‘The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish ­countries and nationalities [. . .] The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.’

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009 [1848]): 25.

Spectacular Cold War Communisms and Capitalisms

Whether or not the victor nation-states of the Cold War after 1991 were identified, or identified themselves, as democratic or capitalist, or as some combination of the two, it seemed clear and final to many commentators in the first half of that decade that communism had been vanquished and that the movement’s appeal to the masses everywhere as a desirable future – utopian, scientific or otherwise – could only wither further.¹ The ‘spectre of Marx’, or, at least, the spectre of Marx’s ‘Communist Man’, had, it seemed, been exorcized, or at least insofar that one understanding, or one distortion of Marx’s writings – that which had become official Soviet doctrine and doctrine in the communist parties of countries affiliated to the USSR – was officially renounced. However, many different understandings as well as selections of less-known writings of Marx and other socialists had existed for several decades during the twentieth century – texts containing perspectives often espoused by leftist movements and parties antagonistic to the USSR and to political establishments within the states since 1917 that had declared themselves to be ‘communist’.²

The term presents some particularly difficult confusions of meaning and use. This is because, historically, it had been adopted, simultaneously, by opposed forces, one half of which – principally, the Soviet Communist Party and its affiliated organizations around the world – saw it, of course, as a positive condition and belief. Some Cold War antagonists, such as the US state department in the 1950s, happily concurred with the dictatorial powers in Moscow that the Soviet Union was indeed a ‘communist’ power, which meant, to them, that it was a tyrannical state power and a social order opposed to the freedom of their own people and democracy in ‘the free world’. This tyranny, indeed, was, they said, what communism ‘really meant’. Propagandists for the USSR would retort that the West was ‘capitalist’, not genuinely democratic and that its claimed freedoms were actually self-destructively anarchic, socially and morally. (This verdict also covered what was termed the ‘decadent’ abstract expressionist art produced in the USA in the 1950s.)³

But independent, or ‘non-aligned’, socialists and Marxists critical of the USSR, both those who in some cases had had highly significant roles in the Bolshevik uprising, such as Leon Trotsky, as well as others from Russia and elsewhere, had for many decades objected, in principle, to the regime’s self-designation as ‘communist’ and, instead, characterized the Soviet Union through a variety of also confusing names linked to particular critiques. These included ‘state-capitalist’, ‘deformed workers’ state’, and (this sometimes intended as a condemnation, sometimes as more of a neutral ­description) ‘state-socialist’.⁴ The Soviet Union was certainly identified by the non-aligned left within these critiques as, in varying degrees, ­anti-­democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian – though its parallel and ­usually more hostile analysis of capitalist power and the state in the western democratic societies often operated a damaging break in both their ­understanding, and public statement of this critique, of ‘actually existing communism’ in the USSR.⁵

Beuys differed fundamentally from Picasso in that his utopian globalism pivoted on a rejection of the USSR as a state to be defended ideologically or morally – Picasso held firm, arguably, on the former grounds, if not on the latter. By the mid-1960s, Beuys had affiliated himself with a counterculture libertarian socialism linked to an emergent ecological activism, but also to spiritual and anti-materialistic ideals and groups which was to provoke later vitriolic condemnation from a variety of commentators ostensibly also speaking from leftist positions.⁶ But many more people holding independent socialist principles in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s shared, with Beuys, a rejection of one particular reading of Marx’s views about a future communist society based on the continued extension of technological forces and an evermore efficient and exhaustive exploitation of human and ­environmental resources – in short, the domination of the world through a materialistic and expansionist industrial ‘mode of production’. Though the concept of ‘mode of production’ remained an extremely important historical and analytic tool in understanding the evolving structures of human societies, critics argued that the institutionally dominant form of Marxism – the USSR’s ruling Communist Party, its related agencies and client ‘eastern bloc’ states between the early 1920s and the late 1980s – had itself become a prisoner of capitalism’s own ‘productivist’ logic that some of its early ­revolutionaries had originally set out to supersede.⁷

The emphasis within utopian globalist art on imaginative desire, subjective will, expression from the body and somatic sensation, symbolized the rejection of an objectivistic determinism associated with both Soviet communism and western capitalism. But it also figured and embodied a transformed arena for revolutionary political action in the 1960s and 1970s. Though the Cold War had entrenched and sharpened antagonistic and competing economic systems in political, ideological and military terms, those systems were nevertheless both driven by a common logic of accumulative materialism. A society’s ‘mode of production’ ­comprised its primary organization of human social relationships and activities within the physical environment. Libertarian socialists, ecological activists and many other movements and groups from the 1960s onwards came to reject in principle, and as a basis for the practical organization of a future truly alternative society, a rapacious triumphalism in the exploitative transformation of nature that official Marxism shared with capitalism.⁸ In contrast, any desirable and actually obtainable (not simply utopian) ­radically alternative future would have to be, in economic, social and political terms, self-managing and self-renewing, lived on the basis of people primarily caring for each other. Such a society would be ‘need-oriented’, not ‘market-driven’, offering a form of life sustained, not determined, by its economy, and one crucially that recognized the limits of the environment and its ecological systems.

Beuys drew attention to the collaborative nature of this emergent movement by calling, in 1971, for the creation of a ‘Fifth International’. This was a subtle act of reference and deference, both to the long history of global organizational forms the communist movement had generated since the mid-nineteenth century, and to Tatlin and his model tower, designated a ‘Monument to the Third International’, of 1919. It was this congregation, after all, that had appealed to the Russian artist who, a few years earlier, had proposed his own revolutionary slogan, ‘Art into Life!’, anticipating by sseveral decades Beuys’s later pronouncements.⁹ The so-called ‘First International’, founded in London in 1864 as the International Working Men’s Association, had been brought together and then divided by disputes between many different kinds of socialists and anarchists. Marx’s own ­supporters of a centralized socialist movement later regrouped in the USA. During the 1880s, the anarchists, suspicious of the nature of all social groupings, ceased to meet as an organized entity at all and the ‘Second International’, established in 1889, was assembled on the exclusive basis of national parties and unions. This, too, eventually collapsed over arguments about the causes of the First World War and the issue of support for the Bolshevik uprising. As an association formed with the purpose of promoting world revolution following that war of nations over imperial ­possessions, the 1919 Third International’s perspective initially had been anti-statist and libertarian. Beuys, in calling for a new ‘International’, was positioning himself and utopian art in relation to all the previous Internationals of the communist movement. However, his ‘Fifth’ also implied a difference from, and rejection of, the ‘Fourth International’, a political movement constituted in the mid-1930s by supporters of Trotsky – opponent and victim of Stalin but who earlier, as a central member of the Bolshevik Leninist leadership, had led the Red Army and overseen the violent repression of anarchists and other left-wing dissidents in Russia in the years immediately after 1917.¹⁰

With regard to the antagonisms within the communist movement, Debord, by the later 1960s, was adamant that the capitalist and communist states had evolved a symbiotic system, whatever the reality of their ­differences and conflicts in other respects. He would later claim, as I have noted, that they had effectively merged into a single ‘integrated spectacle’ of power and social alienation. A few years after that observation in 1988, his judgement was, in one sense, confirmed by the abrupt self-termination of the Soviet Union. This led to declarations of the ‘new world order’ of our own time based on the supremacy of global capitalism led by the USA, the sole-surviving superpower.

Consider the following statements drawn from Debord’s writings in this period, remembering the question of the literal and metaphoric meanings one might attach to the core concepts with which my study is concerned (I have italicized the claims to focus on):

• Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next.
• With [. . .] capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history has become a reality [. . .] This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and thus also to the global spectacle.
• Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle.
• . . . the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.¹¹

It was certainly the case that by 1990 the USSR and its satellite states were abandoning their ideological reliance on a communism wrought in Marx’s name. But Debord’s account of the nature of the social order that capitalism had generated and proclaimed victorious over Soviet communism harks back to a dual emphasis on ‘totalization’ and global exploitation insistently present in that nineteenth-century revolutionary writer’s most well-known polemic from 1848, The Communist Manifesto. The bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels observed:

by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap price of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.¹²

One can see from these statements by Debord and Marx and Engels that social and cultural factors intermesh within the totality constituted by capitalism. Within the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, for instance, notions of ‘space’, ‘image’ and ‘representation’ are as indispensable as they are to accounts of capitalism’s markets understood as a ‘unified space’, or the spectacle of consumption understood as a sphere of ‘image’ production. In art and society, therefore, questions of the relations between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The World in a Work of Art
• 1 Spectacle, Social Transformation and Utopian Globalist Art
• 2 The Line of Liberation
• 3 Picasso for the Proletariat
• 4 Some Kind of Druid Dude
• 5 ‘Bed-in’ as Gesamtkunstwerk
• 6 Mother Nature on the Run
• 7 Nomadic Globalism
• Conclusion
• Index