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The role of the artist has changed considerably over the past century,
due both to shifts from a modernist to a post-modernist paradigm,
and because of what might be described as the effervescence of technology.
While it would not be untrue to state that the twentieth-century
can be characterised as having witnessed the introduction of new
communication technologies, we should not forget that the same might
be said of the nineteenth-century - which acted as midwife to the
railway and the telex. Recently there has been much wild talk about
"expanding globally dominant cultural industries", and
I would emphasise that this phenomenon can only be understood as
a part of global capitalism. I'd also like to suggest that Stalinism
and Maoism imposed capitalism on what had been peasant societies,
and so one of the chief characteristics of the twentieth-century
was a shift from the formal to the real domination of capital on
a global scale. As a result, industrial production was shifted around
the planet, and some of the most advanced industry is now found
in what were once considered "backward" countries, just
as regions that were previously heavily industrialised - such as
the American Mid-West and British Midlands - have become rust belts.
All of which has had an immense impact on the production of art.
Some of the declining industrial nations have transformed cultural
production and real estate into key generators of wealth. As well
as being global, the culture industry is also highly localised -
being both centralised and localised in places such as Los Angeles,
New York and London. Furthermore, cultural production is closely
tied in with the gentrification of what were traditionally working
class areas in these cities, and the meteoric rise of property prices
has destroyed much of what gave these places their character, and
thus what initially made them attractive to the artistic vanguard
among the gentrifiers. Having established a material basis for my
critique, I would like to move on to a very one-sided suggestion
that I've encountered numerous times in recent years, viz, that
the practice of the early twentieth-century avant-garde has been
normalised within contemporary art. This is true, but only to a
very limited extent, for while the technique of bricolage, and the
treatment of the entire history of art as source material for the
production of new work has become normalised, the critique of the
institution of art that accompanied it has been jettisoned. Here
I should reference the work of Hegel and Peter Bürger, as well
as the involvement of the Berlin Dadaists and the Situationist International
with the communist left. The avant-garde wished to integrate art
and life, and this project failed precisely because neither the
dadaists nor the surrealists (not to mention the Frankfurt School)
properly understood that art gains its appearance of ideological
autonomy from its commodification.
To greatly condense my analysis, if capitalism provides the material
conditions for art, then German idealism supplies it with its ideological
legitimation. Drawing on the same philosophical sources, Marx concluded
that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis; truth
is process, the process of self-development; or, as Marx more famously
put it, the rounded individual of mature communism is a hunter in
the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a critical critic
at night - without being hunter, fisherman or critic. Since it is
shackled by commodification, artistic practice is a deformation
of the sensuous unfolding of the self that will be possible once
we've achieved real human community. The goal of communism is to
overcome the reification of human activity into separate realms
such as work and play, the aesthetic and the political. Communism
will rescue the aesthetic from the ghetto of art and place it at
the centre of life. Where, then, does this leave the role of the
artist? Since under capitalism everyone reproduces the conditions
of their own alienation, while art as we know it continues to exist,
it would be ridiculous to expect those who seek its abolition as
a separate sphere of activity not to engage in and with it. However,
progressive artists must always keep in sight the fact that their
role as specialist non-specialists must be negated. Art cannot be
reformed, it can only be abolished. Therefore, our cultural strategy
in this transitional period must be to autonomise the negative within
artistic practice. We must live out the death of the avant-garde
not just in theory, but also in practice. We learn nothing from
the dead art of living men. We learn everything from the living
art of dead men. LONG LIVE THE DEAD!
Stewart Home
London
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