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Mr.Jones on the Art Strike
"Cluster round the jukebox for some songs you've probably heard before. It's
nothing if it isn't pure."
Yeah Yeah Noh Stealing in the Name of the Lord
The Art Strike is a good thing only insofar as it produces more radical art,
of which its own propaganda is a perfect example."
Sadie Plant in Here & Now 10
The success or failure of Karen Home's "art strike" propaganda can clearly
not be judged in terms of how many artists do in fact down tools from now
until 1993 - that would be too cruel. However, I cannot accept Plant's
alternative evaluation: a political failure is not necessarily an artistic
triumph. I would argue, on the contrary, that Home's enterprise is a bad
thing all round, reactionary both in what it says (politics) and in how it
says it (art). The Art Strike is a good thing only insofar as it is ignored
completely [1]: any success will be a bad thing. Its importance lies in the
weaknesses which its success has highlighted. This is most obvious in areas
of concepts or art, where the Art Strike has succeeded in popularising a
peculiarly banal and ill-thought-out version of what art is and what good art
is or might be. It is time we got our own ideas on the subject sorted out. As
Mike Peters' article in H&N10 began to suggest, it is not enough simply to
advocate "more radical art". We must first identify what art actually is and
does; then we can consider how it might be capable of being radical.
My position, briefly, is as follows. Jean-Pierre Voyer wrote "Whether the
subject sinks into madness, practises art or participates in an uprising ?
the two poles of daily life - contact with a narrow and separate reality on
one hand and spectacular contact with the totality on the other - are
simultaneously abolished, opening the way for the unity of individual life."
(Reich - How to Use) Well no, he didn't - for "art" read "theory" - but the
description holds good. Finding the language for real communication, as
opposed to both an spectacular understanding of the totality and the
meaninglessness of everyday "life" [2]; going beyond individual isolation and
spectacular collectivity into a genuine commonality: this is the process of
making theory, but also that of making art. Voyer's emphasis on the
subjective experience of making theory, its effects of the theorist's
characters armour as well as on her view of the world, apply here also. Art,
just as much as theory, is a process of making common meanings: to the extent
that those meanings are "radical" this will be a taxing activity, for the
artist as much as the theorist. Contented artists, as much as contented
theorists, should be avoided: they are clearly engaged in reiterating
meanings which are already common. Tortured artists, on the other hand,
should be sought out and encouraged.
Now, it has long been assumed that art and theory are in fact not comparable,
and that anyone involved in the former owes it to the global proletarian
struggle to jack it in and concentrate on the latter. (Ironically, much of
the suspicion with which Karen Home is now regarded arose for precisely this
reason.) Like so much else that affects us today, this goes back to the 5th
conference of the Situationist International (in G?teburg in 1961). On that
occasion, Attila Kotanyi stated that situationist art was impossible under
"the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity": any art produced by
situationists would promptly be recuperated. By way of solution, Kotanyi
proposed that members of the SI continue to produce art but that all such
work be referred to as "anti-situationist". "While various confused artists
nostalgic for a positive art call themselves situationist, anti-situationist
art will be the mark of the best artists".
Whether this could have been, or was intended as, a serious solution is
unclear: its actual effect was the exclusion of several members, the
redirection of the SI's activities onto the plane of theory, and the
longstanding bias against art which was eventually to enable Karen Home to
impress the hell out of a lot of people by dropping names like Gustav
Metzger. (OK, OK, I'd never heard of him either.) Whether it was justified in
its own terms is equally unclear. While one sympathises with Raoul Vaneigem's
call for the SI to cease its involvement in the "spectacle of refusal", it's
hard to share Vaneigem's confidence that the (predictable) alternative - "the
refusal of the spectacle" [3] - can be embarked on by the simple expedient of
producing theory to the exclusion of art. Indeed, the Situationists could
only maintain their own faith in theory as a spectacle-free zone by
continually contrasting theory (hooray!) with ideology (boo, hiss!), a
distinction which does little to illuminate the actual relations of
production of theory, and which is, in any case, difficult to make with any
consistency. However we describe the process of recuperation (and Kotanyi's
statement that situationist art will be recuperated by society and used
against us" contains too much paranoia and too little politics to be really
useful) we need to be clear that it can be applied to everything. Kotanyi's
fear, a school of art called "situationism" never came true [4]; but the
political ideology of "situationism" appeared in 1968 and has never gone away.
My contention, then, is that the situationists were mistaken in labelling art
as spectacular and theory as authentic. The reason why no art exists which
can be guaranteed free of the taint of the spectacle (or of "bourgeois
culture") is that there are no such guarantees. for art or anything else:
there is no "this side" of the spectacle. Theory is not the situationists'
utopian pure negative, nor is art a tool of the commodity economy. Rather,
both art and theory are means of communication - languages of common
meanings. Both come in new, old, subversive and spectacular varieties; both,
if found threatening, will swiftly be recuperated: both can be plagiarised
(or d?tourned, as we pro-Situs used to say) - and the plagiarisms themselves
may be useful or useless, radical or reactionary.
The more attentive reader will by now have realised that I am not in sympathy
with the Art Strike. I can best explain my reasons by referring the reader
once again to that historic meeting in G?teburg: more specifically, to Karen
Home's view of the matter, as given in her The Assault on Culture: Utopian
Currents from Lettrisme to Class War. (Is there any justification for that
"e" on the end of "Lettrism"? I think we should be told.) Home rejects the
SI's verdict in favour of theory and against art, siding with the
Scandinavian and German situationists who were excluded following the
"anti-situationist art" proposal and who later formed a second Situationist
International. Home speaks approvingly of these artists who shared "a belief
in the collective and non-competitive production of art". However, we're not
actually talking about art here: "Overt and conscious use of collective
practices to make "cultural artefacts" do not really fit the description
"art" - at least if one is using the term to describe the high culture of the
ruling class in capitalist societies." Nor, indeed, if one is using the term
to describe pig-farming. The SI's valuation of theory rested on two
oppositions: between theory and art, and between theory and ideology. Having
reversed the terms of the first opposition, Home echoes the second with an
equally mythical dichotomy: all art is either "high culture" (boo!) or
collective cultural artefact production (hooray!), Like its counterpart, this
is not an easy position to maintain empirically.
The significance of all this for the Art Strike is twofold. Firstly, the
terms become blurred: should all "art" cease, or only identifiably "high
culture" forms? Or should art be allowed to continue only if it passes the
Home Test ("overt and conscious use of collective practices")? This last
interpretation might explain why issue 8 of Anti-Clock-Wise contains both
anti-culture material and an article in praise of Mail Art by Mark Pawson.
But material from the Mail Art networks has appeared in galleries before now,
which presumably means that too is now an ornament of the ruling class; and
in any case, Home is currently advocating a complete "refusal of creativity".
Problems, problems! More importantly, if one rejects the picture of art as a
sea of ruling class culture with a few islands of subversive practice dotted
about in it, the whole thing collapses. The entire "struggle against the
received culture of the reigning society" which Home has been conducting
since 1985 [5] is built on the idea that "received culture" disseminates the
values of the "reigning society", with art in particular representing "the
high culture of the ruling class in capitalist societies". This image of
culture as a conveyer belt, carrying the values of the ruling class into
everyday consciousness, is necessitated only by Home's a priori decision to
divide art into sheep and goats. It's certainly not necessitated by the
facts. True, art is a material process within society; true, art is never
innocent of the existing social order, and is always under pressure to
promote it - within the artist's mind as much as anywhere. But this only adds
up to saying that art - and "culture" - is a means of communication and
therefore a region of contestation, or a battleground as we say in English.
The task is not to combat received culture but to get to work on it:
embracing parts of it, emphatically rejecting others, but above all diverting
[6] it to our own purpose.
In fairness, it must be said that there is more to the Art Strike than that.
There is also an argument about artists as people, alleging that their status
as pseudo-radical high-culture merchants gives them Elitist delusions about
"the superiority of their "creativity" over the leisure and work pursuits of
the social majority". Without the prop of the anti-"culture" argument,
though, this looks less like radicalism and more like guilt-tripping. Elitism
is a disfigurement of the character; it's almost as bad as spots. If artists
are worried about it, though, the answer is simple: go away and get it
cleared up. We don't want them moaning to the rest of us about how ugly they
are and all the parties they're missing ("I couldn't go out looking like this
- what would all those beautiful workers say?") In any case, ?litism is a
sign of incipient co-option and co-option means that your work is being
misappropriated. Don't give it up - take it back! Just say no!
So much for the overt - political - meanings of the Art Strike. There is,
however, more to it than that: there is a sense, as Sadie Plant implied, in
which the Art Strike is an art work. This can best be appreciated by looking
again at the question of success or failure, our assessment of which depends
entirely on how we interpret the Art Strike itself. Taken straight, it's
clearly a miserable failure. It is unimaginable that an actual Art Strike
will materialise; even the idea has made very little headway outside the
pages of Smile and none at all outside the anarchist mileau. Talking about
"the Art Strike" at all is doing it a fairly large favour: what exists is a
campaign for an art strike, or more precisely propaganda in favour of a
campaign for an art strike. That propaganda has no more popular support than
the calls for a general strike that issue from time to time from the organs
of the corpse of Leninism, and as such deserves the same oblivion.
Alternatively, we can take the whole thing as a rather deadpan joke at the
expense of "political artists" (If you're so radical let's see you on the
picket line) but this doesn't improve matters much: hardly anyone has either
got the joke or fallen for it.
However, these are not the only possibilities. In between lies the whole
terrain of irony, of saying one thing and meaning two or three others;the
terrain where meanings split and proliferate, where the distinction between
"theory" and "art" ceases to make sense. This, clearly, is the area where
Home's promotion of the Art Strike [7] operates; this too is one of the areas
where really new meanings get made [8] and an area where Here & Now [9] has
squatter's rights. In other words, despite Home's post-Situationist
attachment to a rigid division between art and theory, the disjunction
between the Art Strike's apparent meaning and its real impact mean that it
works, if it works at all, as a combination of art and theory; or rather, as
a demonstration of the impossibility of separating the two.
In makes sense, then, to refer to the Art Strike's propaganda as "radical
art", at least in the sense of "unprecedented art". But this is not the only
consideration: not all new meanings are good ones. So what is the Art Strike
really saying? Two main themes are apparent: a complete abandonment of
politics, associated with an impression of a kind of ultimate and
unsurpassable radicalism. The first can best be approached by considering the
hypothetical political impact of a realised art strike. Industrial action
works to counteract the isolation and passivity endemic in this society:
strikes are a collective rejection of the strikers' role as workforce and an
affirmation that they're worth more than that. A strike by artists, though,
would actually promote both passivity and isolation: the strikers would not
be a group refusing work but a scattering of individuals doing nothing. To
this picture we must add the facts that an art strike will not happen, and
that very few people either know or care what artists do with their time
anyway. A call for inaction, which is bound to be ignored, and which is
addressed to people whose actions nobody notices: what is this but an
elaborate demonstration of the futility of politics? The Marxists aspired to
change the world; the point, it appears, is to withdraw from it.
This relates closely to the second point. Home has made an easy reputation
out of radicals' tendency to confuse the concepts of "qualitative
supersession" and "reductio ad absurdum": that is, to assume that all
previous radical practice can be superceded simply by "taking it further".
This generally takes fairly sophisticated forms: talking about "situationist
ideology", for example, or alleging that radical art is part of ruling class
culture. Latterly though, Karen Home has specialised in the most
radical-looking strategy of all: negate everything. The tendency of the Art
Strike is to argue that outside itself there is no authentic opposition: that
all oppositional activity, radical art included, is a form of social
integration. The empirical difficulties here are obvious and major: it is
hard to see how anyone other than Karen Home could ever prove that they were
actually opposing existing society and not merely indulging in oppositionism
- except perhaps by supporting the Art Strike, reading Richard Allen and
slagging off the SI... The strategy which Home has "taken further" here is
the division between the Seventh Day Adventists and all other "Christians".
Even more important is the end result. So complete a negation results in a
politics not of negation but of abstention: if nothing is authentic nothing
can be done.
This is the true message of the Art Strike. Ultimately Home, like
Baudrillard, is advocating silence and inaction [10]; is promoting, as the
ultimate negative, alienation from one's own capacity to act. This has its
own interest for theory-collectors and the terminally disillusioned [11]; its
main interest for the rest of us is that it makes Home out as a practitioner
of theory for theory's sake, political activity taken up in the belief that
it is pointless. To describe this as radical would do violence to the meaning
of the word: the word "reactionary" fits much better. "Boring" does quite
nicely too [12]. As with the theory of Baudrillard, as with the "art for
art's sake" espoused by aesthetes from Walter Pater to the Neoists [13], the
Art Strike's only real achievement will be the entertainment it gives its
audience - and, of course, the careers it makes.
Mr. Jones
Notes:
[1] Damn!
[2] "Life's about as wonderful as a cold" - Mark Perry, 1977. Perry is not
known to have been familiar with the situationists' theses on the
banalisation of everyday life, but being a "punk" he was doubtless influenced
by them anyway.
[3] Cf the following comment on the Unification Church mass wedding of a few
years back: "A spectacle or pairs, assuredly. Let us not forget, however,
that this was also a pair of spectacles." Taken from Alec Douglas H's The End
of Finality (Improbable Books, 1989) The situationists, we must conclude,
never got much beyond the reversal of terms. It will be for others to create
the terms of reversal.
[4] Partial disproof: "Before Pop and after Abstract Expressionism there was
a still-born movement, based in continental Europe... Called Situationism,
this movement expressed a rebellious need to counterpose the creative and
irreverent with the anticipated [sic] homogeneity of media society.
Essentally a non-starter as art per se the movement had, nonetheless, an
influence on French cinema and architecture." - Philip Core reviewing an
exhibition at the ICA in New Statesman and Society (30/6/89) Of course, the
curators invited this kind of misinterpretation by staging the exhibition in
an art gallery rather than simply getting out and creating situations.
[5] Not single-handedly, of course! Home's struggles have been shared with
the PRAXIS group, a guy called Tony from Cork and numerous magazines from
around the world all called Smile. In addition, many interesting uses have
been made of that famous general-purpose pseudonym or "multiple identity",
"Geurge Eliot".
[6] Or detourning it. Next week: deriving for beginners.
[7] My knowledge of the originators of the Art Strike - the PRAXIS Group - is
woefully inadequate; however, I suspect they actually took the Art Strike
seriously (but that's Americans for you). Only on its arrival in England was
it transformed by Karen Home's creative genius into the polyvalent
multi-media event that we all know so well.
[8] Burroughs half-realised this when he asserted that cut-ups foretold the
future: simply rearrange some words to make an unknown phrase or saying and
"the future leaks through". Certainly, new meanings could be created by this
method: it's a kind of automatic writing. I don't know though - call me
old-fashioned but I prefer meanings which have been consciously made to the
kind that leak out of the end of a random process. You can't beat a good work
of art, that's what I say.
[9] A magazine of radial tyres.
[10] Articles in Smile have advocated "sensuous inactivity" for the duration
of the Art Strike. Idle buggers!
[11] At the ICA exhibition a couple of copies of Smile were shown, exhibited
under glass so that we could appreciate the witty and amusing cover art.
Those responsible are believed to fall into both categories at once.
[12] Though, to be fair, this is a difficulty encountered from time to time
by the greatest of theorists. "If the element of boredom I have experienced
in writing this finds an echo in the reader, what else is this but one more
proof of our failure to live?" as Raoul Vaneigem asked in his foreword to The
Kids' Book of How To Do It (or The Revolution of Everyday Life as it's
sometimes known). How true that is, how very true. And what a cop-out.
[13] Home once described a reference to "situationist ideology" as a
"calculated insult". To judge from Home's account of their activities,
describing the Neoists as artists is more in the nature of a calculated
compliment.
By 'Mr Jones' from Here & Now 11 1991 - No copyright