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Title: Rocks In My Pillow Author: Ron Sakolsky Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: art, review Source: Retrieved on November 12, 2009 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080325133048450
Berlin Wall , by Allan Antliff, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007
“Do you believe,” she went on, “that the past dies?”
“Yes,” said Margaret. “Yes, if the present cuts its throat.”
Leonora Carrington
When I first heard about this project, I was excited at the prospect of
a book entirely devoted to the history of anarchy and art. Sadly though,
the result is a disappointment. Politically-speaking, the book rides the
fence between the anarchist milieu and the authoritative voice of
academia when what is needed is a sturdy pair of wirecutters, perhaps a
catapult, or maybe even a battering ram. For me, the most positive
aspect of the book is that its essays stimulated my critical thinking in
response to its arguments. To be fair, attempting to write a history of
the confluence of anarchy and art from the Paris Commune (1871) to the
fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) is such a monumental project that much of
the story will inevitably fall into the cracks of the eight episodic
chapters that comprise its less than 200 pages. When I initially skimmed
the book, I expected to be writing a basically positive review with my
main critique being about the way in which surrealism is handled.
However, upon actually reading it with some care, I soon realized that
the book is problematic from start to finish.
The pivotal first chapter of the book, “A Beautiful Dream,” centers
around a discussion of the ideas of the Realist artist, Gustave Courbet,
and his friend, the anarchist philosopher, P.J. Proudhon, with respect
to the tensions which exist at the crossroads of political engagement
and free artistic expression. Are these tensions to be positively
resolved in the creation of an anarchist Federation of Artists like the
one Courbet was associated with during the Paris Commune (as Antliff
suggests), or are they to be suppressed by a Stalinist bureaucratic
policy of Socialist Realism like the one that we read about in a later
chapter?
Or do these tensions merely represent the two poles of a continuum in
the never-ending debate between the proponents of artistic freedom and
social critique, whether or not they call themselves anarchists? Where,
then, is an anarchist response to the “radical form vs. radical content”
debate that understands that neither must dominate, but that each must
be respected? As I see it, there are lots of brilliant cooks and no
perfect recipe that applies to every situation. The ideal measure of
each ingredient is not predictable, but there are shining historical
moments worth noting which flare up here and there when the mix seems
just right for the occasion. Yet, strangely, while he emphasizes the
institutional place of art in the Paris Commune’s federated structure,
Antliff is silent about one of those inspirational moments — the wild
array of artistic expressions of anarchy spontaneously appearing in the
streets during that Festival of Revolt.
We might wonder why Antliff doesn’t just leave the administration of
museums and exhibition halls behind and take to the streets to examine
the murals, which included announcements and denouncements, political
posters, engravings, and affiches in a riot of colors and styles that
covered the walls of Paris during those heady days, none of which needed
to be approved by even the Federation of Artists. “Such was literature,”
said the poet Arthur Rimbaud, as he surveyed the carnivalesque scene.
Instead of rhapsodizing about the beauty of Proudhonian federation, why
not celebrate Courbet’s role in the radically poetic act of the toppling
of that hated symbol of war and empire, the Vendome Column? About a
century later, the situationists would try their hand at superseding art
by intentionally “creating situations” in the streets as Paris again
erupted in an insurrection with undeniable anarchist implications in the
merry month of May. It seems remarkable to me that absolutely nothing is
said about any of these events in the Antliff book.
As to the legacy of the Commune, it seems to be assigned by Antliff to
the stalwart social anarchism of such Neo-Impressionist painters of
fin-de-siècle France as Paul Signac, Camille Pisarro, Lucien Pisarro,
George Seurat, Maximillien Luce and Henri Edmund Cross. Theirs is
certainly an important stream that flows from the wellsprings of the
Commune, but the Neo-Impressionist “wandering” motif — which Antliff
finds so fascinating that he names his second chapter after it — has
literary antecedents. These can be traced from the phantasmic
“otherness” of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a gothic
tale combining the legends of Faust and the Wandering Jew to the
enduring popularity of Eugène Sue’s socialistic novel, The Wandering Jew
(1845), who, as the archetypical marginalized outcast, is identified
with the downtrodden and oppressed workers of the world. In fact, the
motif of the Wandering Jew had been used by Courbet himself in a lost
portrait of Jean Journet, the itinerant disciple of utopian socialist
Charles Fourier. Or perhaps our starting point should be Courbet’s 1854
realist self-portrait, The Meeting in which he transformed the familiar
image of the Wandering Jew as persecuted social pariah into a painting
of himself as a combination of assertive vagabond and self-confident
traveling artisan on the road to artistic independence. But all these go
unacknowledged by Antliff.
Just how elastic is this category of the wanderer? Does it include
Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur as well as the ragged dispossessed? After
all, the poet and dandified aesthete Baudelaire does make a cameo
appearance in Courbet’s painting The Studio, and Michael Bakunin, whose
wandering ranged across the insurrectionary map of Europe, darkly hovers
in the shadows. Both were on the barricades during the 1848 uprising
which was not only in opposition to the Empire, but was directed against
time itself as insurgent sharpshooters took aim at the clocktowers of
Paris. If such poetic revolutionary acts ought to be acknowledged, where
then is the poetry of the streets in this book? Where can we find the
rebellious insouciance of the barbed street argot used by the
anarchist-oriented cabaret singers — the real Moulin Rouge of Bruant,
Paillette and Rictus? Why not even include the bombastic performance of
the anarchist Ravochol singing the “Père Duchesne” on his walk to the
guillotine, belting out the blasphemous words about cutting the priests
in half, razing the churches, dethroning God and hanging the landlord?
And where is Charles Maurin’s woodcut of Ravochol at the gallows?
Where, oh where, is the voice of the poet? Where are Mallarmé and the
Symbolists (anarchists for all their aesthetic pretensions) to rock us
in the Dionysian embrace of the unbridled imagination? Who needs Emile
Zola’s pity when we have Baudelaire’s correspondences: the sound of
color, the fragrance of thought? Through the historical haze I can see
the artist, Toulouse-Lautrec, making an absinthe toast to those
anarchist dandies Oscar Wilde and Félix Fénéon, who are standing at his
side in the decadent demimonde of Montmartre. And what of the bohemian
environs of Montmartre, like the “floating world” of the Japanese
printmakers whose work Lautrec so admired? Where are his
unsentimentalized portraits of his friends among the lesbian can-can
dancers and prostitutes, and of all the flotsam and jetsam of that
déclassé milieu? Why are they not featured here alongside his
contributions to the anarchist reviews and the street posters of the
day?
Where is Max Blechman’s “revolutionary romanticism” when we need it
most? What has become of Alfred Jarry, whose absurdist life was his
major work, sadly reduced to being merely a “French satirist” in
Antliff’s book. (More like French satyrist I would say.) Where is his
obscene laughter which would later be an inspiration to Jacques Vaché in
carving a pataphysical path toward what would one day become surrealism
by means of his own “umourous” attack on the Debraining Machine of
militarism? And where is Vaché’s jailbreak from the Bastille of
“pohetic” aestheticism recorded?
Jarry was a friend of Picasso in his anarchist days, when the Spaniard
signed his paintings with the egoist “Yo.” Both were staunch
anti-colonialists, which was evident in Jarry’s King Ubu and in the
fierce “primitive” masks worn by the prostitutes in Picasso’s
groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Though both artists are
mentioned in a limited way in the Antliff book, where is their vigorous
challenge to colonialism, or even Eurocentrism, in its pages? Its index
includes neither word. Nor is the word “imperialism” to be found there
either. Silence reigns with reference to the anti-militarist newspaper
collages of Picasso’s anarchist years in Barcelona. Alas, no pre-World
War I Bottle of Suze to be imbibed as an aperitif of refusal is
available in the dry pages of this book. When faced with conscription,
Picasso’s path was evasion and Vaché’s was “desertion from within”?
And what of Jarry and Picasso’s other anarchist friend, Guillaume
Apollinaire, the coiner of the word, “sur-réalisme.” Though he boldly
challenged artists and critics alike to “speak in the present in the
words of the future,” Apollinaire remained wedded to the literary
aestheticism of the day, a stance which so irked Vaché that he later
would become Apollinaire’s arch antagonist. Yet if you look for the
story of this historic confrontation in the Antliff book, you will not
find it there.
Flash to 1915, New York dada, and the chapter on “Obscenity.” Antliff’s
focus is on Francis Picabia’s “object portrait” of a sparkplug, a sort
of one-dimensional illustrated version of the dadaist “readymade,” which
he wittily called Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of
Nudity. Enter fellow anarchist, Marcel Duchamp, the supposed inventor of
the readymade. But can we even discuss readymades at this late date
without reference to the outrageous dada presence of the Baroness Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York? Where is Baroness Elsa, the
originator of the genre with her 1913 found object/readymade, Enduring
Ornament? Why doesn’t Antliff take the opportunity to debunk, once and
for all, the masculinist myth that it was Duchamp who invented the
readymade with Fountain, a urinal which was androgynously and
anonymously signed “R. Mutt,” yet was probably done, or at the very
least inspired, by Duchamp’s intimate friend, the Baroness Elsa. Her
readymade, God, also done in 1917 and signed in her own name, used a
plumbing metaphor as well. In fact, seeing the two as sister pieces is
corroborated by the Baroness’ prophetic remark, “America’s comfort —
sanitation — outside machinery — has made America forget [its] own
machinery — body.”
Upon reflection, the obscenity scandal surrounding Picabia’s Young
American Girl pales in comparison to the obscenity charges leveled
against a magazine to which the Baroness contributed her gender-bending
scatological poetry, The Little Review. The editors of the Review were
the confirmed anarchist Margaret Anderson and her cross-dressing lesbian
lover Jane Heap. Together, these three women destabilized the gender
norms of their day with no holds barred, especially the Baroness, whose
sexual anarchy was the living embodiment of dada. As a radically
dandified female flaneur, her body itself became a kind of readymade.
She walked the streets of New York with a bald head dyed brilliant
vermillion, while wearing decontextualized industrial detritus, junk,
found objects, shoplifted commodities stripped of their utilitarian
function and conventionality, gilded vegetables (she preferred beets and
carrots) and surrounded by an entourage of five dogs. From the rear, she
could be recognized by the discarded automobile taillight she had once
found in the gutter and fastened to her bustle. This bodily bricolage
was a public performance of radical androgyny rather than a piece of
artwork to be displayed in a gallery, and the contrast couldn’t be
clearer between her body festooned with organic vegetables and the male
dada machine-centered fantasies of Picabia.
Vaché probably would have loved the Baroness’ outrageous dada
performance of gender, but she scared the pants off poets Ezra Pound and
William Carlos Williams, who didn’t have his sense of “umour.” Her own
poetic rants appeared in The Little Review, alongside an unabridged and
sexually explicit serialized version of Ulysses by the young novelist,
James Joyce, who considered himself a philosophical anarchist. For such
crimes against sexual repression, The Little Review was duly censored
and burned by the U.S. Post Office authorities, then brought to trial on
obscenity charges in 1921, and finally shut down. Yet in his dada
chapter on “Obscenity,” Antliff fails to mention The Little Review or
the Baroness though they both had anarchist credentials, preferring to
concentrate instead on Picabia, and to a lesser extent, Duchamp, at a
time prior to their involvement with surrealism.
Similarly, Antliff loses the opportunity to illuminate the sexual
politics of anarchist art during the early years of the Russian
Revolution by concentrating his attention on the rise and fall of
Alexander Rodchenko rather than his fascinating wife, Varvara Stepanova.
She only appears in his “True Creators” chapter as an adoring helpmate
and, in the following “Death to Art!” chapter, as an apologist for the
betrayal and co-optation of anarchist principles by her collusion in the
false codification of Soviet constructivism as “anti-art.” We hear
nothing of the ways that she challenged the gender norms of her day
during her lifetime. Where is the Symbolist Stepanova, decadent and
androgynous, or the neo-primitivist Stepanova, who, in her painting,
Self Portrait, looks angrily at the viewer through a “primitive” mask
reminiscent of those worn by the prostitutes in Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon? And where is the “Frenzied Stepanova” as she was
affectionately referred to by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky?
Even though Vasily Kandinsky was so impressed with her work that he
coined the term “varvaric art” to describe it, we get no insights as to
what made it “varvaric” from Antliff. While we sense the tragedy of
Rodchenko in his conversion from proud wearer of the anarchist pseudonym
“Anti” to compromised propagandist for the Soviet state, we are deprived
of understanding Stepanova’s fall from anarchist grace. And, by the way,
where is the Decadent bisexual diva, Ida Rubinstein, of
pre-Revolutionary Russia who was prevented by the Tsarist authorities
from dancing the seven veils in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé?
Did she dance them for Romaine Brooks, the American painter who was her
lesbian lover in Paris, or for her male lover, Gabriele D’Annunzio, at
the temporarily autonomous Republic of Fiume?
Given the omission of queer anarchy from the first five chapters of an
eight chapter book, Antliff finally addresses the subject in Chapter 6,
“Gay Anarchy,” by focusing a portion of the chapter on an openly gay
anarchist couple, the poet Robert Duncan and the visual artist Jess
Collins. With all of Duncan’s poetry to choose from, Antliff instead
selects a prose article, “Reviewing View, An Attack.” The American
magazine View had been started in 1940 by another “out” gay poet named
Charles Henri Ford as a chic commercial magazine of avant-garde art,
including surrealism. At this juncture, the chapter’s real purpose
becomes clear. It is not primarily about gay anarchy but about Antliff’s
desire to bash surrealism. Here Antliff unsuccessfully attempts to
position Duncan as his cat’s paw, making him not merely a critic of View
magazine, but of surrealism itself.
Questions abound in the mind of anyone reading this chapter with more
than a cursory interest in surrealism. Why doesn’t Antliff let the
reader know that View was not a surrealist magazine, but, rather, a
“surrealist-influenced” magazine under Ford’s editorship? In fact,
cultural historian David Roediger has characterized the magazine as
having a “surrealism lite” approach. If Antliff realizes that Duncan was
actually deeply influenced by surrealism himself, particularly in
relation to Antonin Artaud’s writings about the peyote ceremony of the
indigenous Tarahumara people of Mexico, he doesn’t let on. Why aren’t we
made aware that Ark, an anarchist magazine of the arts which Duncan
compares favorably with View in his article, was produced by his
Libertarian Circle comrade, Philip Lamantia, who himself was a
surrealist poet? Antliff is careful to call Ford a “surrealist
enthusiast” rather than a “surrealist.” However, he implies that
Duncan’s critique of View not only takes a potshot at what the San
Franciso poet considers to be the “deviant” images portrayed in Ford’s
magazine, but that this criticism is meant to be applied as an
accusatory blanket statement to surrealism itself.
Antliff distorts the picture even further by resharpening that old saw
with which he hopes to cut down surrealism: homophobia. Yet, whatever
might be said about the homophobia of individual surrealists, the idea
of surrealism is not any more homophobic than the idea of anarchism,
even though some people who profess to being anarchists are homophobic.
Moreover, while many anarchists would balk at scholarly research about
anarchism that was strictly limited to the writing of non-anarchists,
that is exactly what Antliff does in relation to his own research in
surrealism, leading to his many omissions and misrepresentations in
relation to the movement. Antliff’s ploy of using Duncan as a pawn in
order to vilify surrealism for its supposed encouragement of a
“homosexual cult” of “freakishness” is especially problematic. How can
we take Antliff’s critique of surrealism seriously when it seems fueled
more by his deep-seated contempt for that movement than any attempt to
truly understand its many affinities with anarchism?
Ford and surrealist André Breton had differences about more than sexual
preference. While the latter identified surrealism with revolution, the
former preferred the more reformist term “cultural renovation” for his
magazine. The high point of Breton’s collaboration with View was the
Oct-Nov 1941 issue which was entirely devoted to surrealism, and edited,
not by Ford, but by the Greek surrealist, Nicolas Calas. By the time of
Duncan’s 1947 attack on View, which Antliff makes the centerpiece of his
story, Breton had already departed New York City for liberated post-war
France the year earlier. As early as 1942, fed up with relying on View
as a vehicle for surrealism because of its art market commerciality,
Breton had founded a full-fledged surrealist publication, VVV, which was
completely independent of Ford, with surrealist photographer David Hare
as editor, and with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and himself as editorial
advisors.
Had he bothered to do the math, Antliff would have realized that VVV’s
debut issue predated Duncan’s attack on View by five years. It seems
likely, then, that if Duncan had wanted to attack surrealism per se, or
even target Breton specifically, he would have gone after VVV, not View.
In fact, one writer, among the few American surrealists who were
published in VVV was the 15 year-old poet, Philip Lamantia, later to be
editor of the very same Ark magazine lauded by Duncan in relation to his
critique of View. Yet, not only does VVV not exist in Antliff’s book,
but he actually blames View’s orientation of “surrealism for consumers”
on Breton, who emphatically disowned that approach.
In this same chapter, Antliff notes that Duncan’s lover, Jess Collins,
once was the student of an art teacher who he valued highly, the
anarchist and Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. This insertion of
Still into the story at this point seems to be aimed at making a
distinction between his encouragement of Collins’ desire to apply a
libertarian abstractionist aesthetic to the gay male body versus
surrealism’s supposedly less salutary approach to homosexuality. Yet why
is there no mention of the surrealist collages of Max Ernst, which
Collins considered to be an important influence on his artistic
development? Once again, queer anarchist issues seem to be subsumed into
Antliff’s vendetta against surrealism. While it is indeed refreshing to
see Abstract Expressionism associated in the book with the queer
sensibilities of Jess Collins rather than the macho posturing of an art
stud like Jackson Pollack, Antliff’s desire to erase all positive traces
of surrealism from the Abstract Expressionist ledger cheapens not only
the otherwise commendable inclusivity of this chapter, but demeans the
entire book yet again.
Moreover, nowhere in the volume is there any discussion of the influence
of surrealist experiments in “pure psychic automatism” on the origins of
Abstract Expressionism. No mention is made of the desire of surrealists
to connect with the primal. Nowhere to be found is their great
admiration for the creative work of indigenous peoples, which often
quite fluidly travels back and forth between the real and the mythic
realms. Such an approach to art, as to life, is in league with
surrealism’s quest to break the artificial dichotomy between the dream
and the social construct known as reality. Though this poetic concept is
not anchored to an art world context, artists have, time and again,
found it to be an impetus for their own creativity.
The most prominent Abstract Expressionist painter, Jackson Pollack, had,
before his days of glory, once interacted with Chilean surrealist
painter, Roberto Matta, in New York, immersing himself in regular games
of exquisite corpse as a way of unleashing the Marvelous. In fact, it
was, in part, as a result of his first-hand exposure to the European
surrealists temporarily forced into New York exile by the Nazis that
Pollack arrived at the “action painting” style which was to make his
reputation in the art world shortly after they had returned home. Though
his liquid drip/splatter/pouring techniques were clearly rooted in “pure
psychic automatism,” their surrealist antecedents were publicly erased.
Their European lineage went unnoted by both Pollack and art critics,
like Charles Henri Ford’s old paramour, Parker Tyler, writing in View
magazine, so as to market Abstract Expressionism as a distinctively
American school of avant-garde art. Their ultimate aim was to shift the
capital of the art world from Paris to New York.
Once this Americanization process was completed, Abstract Expressionism
soon began to be used as an ideological weapon in the Cold War, and, by
the Sixties, its clichéd tropes had become the staple fare of collegiate
art departments all across the country. In Antliff’s chapter, “Breakout
From The Prison House of Modernism,” we get a first hand account of the
frustrating and disempowering results of this development on one New
York art student. As a refreshing change from Antliff’s authoritative
voice as art historian, we are treated here to a lively email interview
which he conducted with anarchist graphic artist Susan Simensky Bietila.
In it, she tells her personal story of the way in which her art teachers
at Brooklyn College sought to discourage her desire to create
politically-engaged art during the early days of the Vietnam War, when
McCarthyism still hung heavily in the air. This was a time when
academia’s emphasis was on the apolitical formalist concerns of
abstractionism as exemplified by her assigned “mentor,” Ad Reinhardt,
who, though he was politically opposed to the war, did not believe in
mixing politics with art.
One wonders what would have transpired if Bietila’s mentor had been more
like Jess Collins’s teacher, the anarchist Clyfford Still? Would she
have seen Abstract Expressionism in a different light as a result of his
example? Might she have explored its connections with surrealism or been
exposed to surrealism’s affinities with anarchy or the art work of
surrealist women? Most importantly, would she have been encouraged by
Stills, precisely because of his anarchism, to devise her own unique
approach to developing the linkages between art and anarchy in her work.
Unfortunately, Reinhardt was not that kind of teacher. Instead, he was
not averse to publicly dismissing an historic anti-war mural like
Picasso’s Guernica as “just a cubist/surrealist painting of some kind.”
At this point we might question why Antliff fails to follow-up Bietila’s
mention of Reinhardt’s callous dismissal of Guernica with some questions
for her about whether the knowledge of Picasso’s association with
surrealism and Spanish anarchism might have offered her some additional
insight into both the painting and her own art. Might not the
conversation have turned quite naturally to surrealist poet, Benjamin
PĂ©ret, and his lover, the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, both of whom
fought in the anarchist Nestor Makhno battalion of the Durruti Column
during the Spanish Revolution (Civil War)?
Yet, once again, Antliff’s antipathy towards surrealism prevents what
might have been a fruitful discussion from occurring. In fact, his
obvious disdain for surrealism goes so deep that in his 2007 pamphlet,
Unleashing The Imagination: An Anarchist Tour of the National Gallery of
Canada, he happily contextualizes the Québec Autonomatists of Refus
Global (Total Refusal) as anarchists while decontextualizing their
strong ties to surrealism. By withholding such information on the
creative interplay of anarchism and surrealism from his readers, Antliff
seems to be doing to surrealism just what he accuses the National
Gallery of doing in relation to anarchism and just what Reinhardt did in
his day at Brooklyn College. As to Bietila, is it any wonder that
modernism without surrealism would seem like a prison house to her?
Even the Provos with whom she later hooked up in Amsterdam had
connections with the English surrealist, Charles Radcliffe. His Heatwave
magazine was modeled after The Rebel Worker, which had been produced by
a collective of young radicals of her own age in the States who would
soon go on to form the Chicago Surrealist Group. And one of them,
Penelope Rosemont, like Bietila, had been involved in Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) during those exciting days. In any case,
beginning with the Provos, this chapter of the book thankfully leaves
the twin elitist outposts of higher education and the art world in the
dust, and immerses us in the sprawling anti-authoritarian politics of
the New York City counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. With
Bietila as our trusted guide, we move freely from the Provos to the
Yippies to SDS and from the Rat to the Guardian. Later, in her story, we
touch down in the midst of Active Resistance, World War 3 Illustrated
and the Drawing Resistance Traveling Art Show. Bietila’s passionate,
candid and insightful comments here, and throughout the entire chapter,
are a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise an unnecessarily stifling
book.
The final chapter, “With Open Eyes: Anarchism and the Fall of the Berlin
Wall,” actually has very little directly to do with the crumbling of the
Wall, but for the first time the book enters into the realm of music.
For Antliff, this rather predictably, means the music of the seminal
anarchist punk band, Crass, and the powerful collages and posters which
Gee Vaucher did in conjunction with their records. Good-o, but where
might you ask is African diasporic music in the Antliff book? The
anti-authoritarian influences of hip hop, reggae, free jazz, and
Afrobeat on anarchist culture go unremarked. In fact, the only reference
to black people in the entire book is a disparaging comment about the
Black Panthers. Though the latter is an understandable anarchist
critique of their perceived authoritarianism, since it stands alone as
the only reference to black culture in the whole book, it is
disconcerting to say the least.
Where is the Nigerian originator of Afrobeat, the late Fela Anikulapo
Kuti in this book? An examination of Fela’s politically-charged music
and his legendary autonomous zone, the Kalakuta Republic, would have
been a nice touch. According to one of his biographers, Michael Veal,
Fela’s cultural resistance reveals an “anarchism ultimately opposed to
all forms of authority, hierarchy and official organization.” And, like
Vaucher’s role with Crass, the full color collages and posters of
Gharioki Lemi represent a staggering combination of devastating
political satire, gut-wrenching images, and provocative messages from
the Seventies and Eighties pan-Africanist milieu. In fact, Fela’s life
and music were scandalous, irreverent, and, as Trevor Schoonmaker has
put it, “inherently punk.” Sadly, Antliff fails to conceptualize the DIY
militancy of punk as a quality that exists beyond artificially
constructed racial and musical genre boundaries. This is a lost
opportunity to broaden the scope of what is thought of as “anarchist
music.” But, of course, even without the punk analogies, Fela’s music
and Lemi’s artwork stand together as one of the great anti-authoritarian
collaborations of all time.
Of Antliff’s other choices for the last chapter, the wondrous collages
of Freddie Baer are duly noted, but where are the visual feasts cooked
up by collagist James Koehnline and what of the hearty black humor of
his fellow collagist, Winston Smith, both of whose art work has been
widely disseminated in relation to the magazines, books, and recordings
of the anarchist milieu and both of whom have surrealist affinities as
well? Instead, the remainder of the chapter is spent on the late Richard
Mock, a political printmaker to whom Antliff has staked his claim as an
anarchist art historian. Here Mock is made to play Courbet to Antliff’s
Proudhon.
In the end, it is the last sentence of the book in which Antliff
explains Mock’s prints that is most revealing of the book as a whole:
“Critiquing oppression while calling attention to the anarchic
potentialities within society, they prefigure a world of possibilities
in which each and every one of us are the index of reality’s
radicalism.” As a counter vision, I would like to propose a geography of
autonomy which cannot be indexed by the confines of reality, where
impossibility is the demand, oppression and alienation are the starting
points of resistance, and where the discovery that our creative
potentialities are not limited to the art world is cause for joyous
outbursts of anarchic laughter as we cut loose the drunken boat of art
from its miserablist moorings and set it adrift in a sea of dreams,
propelled freely by the astonishing winds of unexpected adventure.
Denman Island, Winter 2008