In debates about racism and multiculturaliosm questions of civilization and the development of “culture” are never slow to surface.
Underpinning much racist ideology is the notion that the development of civilization was basically a European or western phenomenon. In reality, civilization – living in cities, literacy, law etc. – developed first in three main areas, none of them in Europe: the middle eastern fertile crescent (Iraq to Egypt), northwestern India and southeast China. Moreover Europe in the middle ages remained pitifully backward compared to China or the Islamic civilization in the middle east and north Africa.
But even those who accept these basic historical facts often still cling to the idea that “modern culture” and “modernism” are a uniquely European (and thus “white”) creation.
Then again in the anti-racist camp there are those who see different cultures as equal or “equally valid” but still think of them as separate and inherently linked to distinct ethnic or racial groups. Therefore they talk of preserving different cultures and maintaining their authenticity, resisting their contamination by external influences (for example by opposing mixed race adoptions).
A striking challenge to all these views of how culture develops is provided by the work and career of the greatest of all modern artists, Pablo Picasso.
At the beginning of the 20th century Picasso was already a rising star of the art world on the basis of the works of his so-called “Blue” and “Rose” periods, mainly powerful, if sentimental, depictions of the poor and the marginalized. Then in 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicting five prostitutes in a Spanish brothel displaying themselves to their prospective clients and staring implacably out of the canvass at the viewer. This painting opened the door to the development of cubism and the whole of modernist art. At the time it was deeply shocking not only to the establishment but also to all Picasso’s avant garde artist friends like Braque and Matisse. Among its many shocking features was the fact that two of the women’s heads were painted to resemble African masks while the other three were based on images from ancient Iberian culture.
The art critic John Berger describes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as “a raging frontal attack against life as Picasso found it” (The Success and Failure of Picasso, p72) and the African mask images are part of this. But if we look at how Picasso’s work develops we find that his use of African art also has a deeper significance.
What Picasso found in African art was the key, or one of the keys, to a new way of seeing and representing the world and a profoundly new conception of art, which broke more decisively than ever before – the break had been building for decades - with the dominant European art tradition.
Since the 15th century, that is in the era of the rise of capitalism, European painting and sculpture had focused on achieving a naturalistic representation of the physical world. In other words it tried to make more or less accurate copies of things, people and scenes, especially the possessions, land and appearance of the rich and powerful.
The African sculptures that influenced Picasso were products of pre-capitalist society where the role of art was quite different. It was not made to hang in palaces or museums but for use in daily life, particularly rituals, and its aim was not naturalistic imitation of status or property but the expression of “spiritual” (emotional-psychological) power. This is what made it such a useful source for the bohemian artists like Picasso who were rebelling against all the traditions of the bourgeois and aristocratic art academy.
If it were just the case of influencing one major modernist painting this could be dismissed as accidental, but it was not. The African influence on Picasso and Braque’s cubism as a whole and on Picasso’s later work is manifest. Paintings like the famous Three Dancers and even Guernica would have been impossible without the breakthrough achieved in Les Desmoiselles. And there were many other artists also directly influenced by African art: Brancusi, the pioneer of modernist sculpture; Matisse and Modigliani; the German expressionists, and the sculptor Giacometti ..
This was part of an even wider turn toward non-european sources of inspiration which ranged from the enthusiasm for Japanese prints of the Impressionists and Van Gogh, Gauguin’s physical migration first to Brittany and then to Tahiti, Henri Rousseau’s “primitivist” evocations of jungle scenes, Henry Moore’s inspiration by Mayan sculpture to Jackson Pollock’s influence by Native American (Navajo) sand pouring in his “drip” paintings.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Marxism and Terrorism
The forces of reaction have always tried to associate revolution, and by extension revolutionaries and Marxists, with terrorist acts of the kind that took place, in Madrid on the 11th or March. The fact is, however, that all genuine Marxists and socialists have always opposed the use of such methods.
Marxists do no reject all violence. The bourgeois politicians who make such claims – while supporting wars, nuclear weapons, armies, prisons etc – are simply hypocrites and Marxists recognise that in certain circumstances such as wars of national liberation and mass revolutionary struggle, violence may be unavoidable and necessary. But terrorism, as in the planting of bombs on government of civilian targets, or hijacking planes, or assassinations by small groups acting independently of class struggle has always been deemed unacceptable.
This is because terrorism runs counter to the most basic principles of Marxism. Marx showed that the root cause of exploitation, oppression, tyranny and war was not bad individual rulers or bad governments but the division of society into classes and the ownership and control of production by a minority class that lived off the labour of the majority. The overthrow of a ruling class and the economic system on which it rests cannot be achieved by killing or frightening even large numbers of individuals, but only by the struggle of a new class which is the bearer of a new economic system. It is class struggle, the collective action of people in their millions, which is the motor of history.
Applied to modern capitalist society this means that the only force capable of defeating and replacing the capitalist class and the capitalist system is the organised struggle of the mass of the working class. In the words of Marx, “The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.” This emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class is crucial not only for the overthrow of capitalism but also for the achievement of the aim, the establishment of socialism. Only revolution from below by the mass of working people themselves can lead to a socialist society run by working people in the interests of working people. Revolutions from above, even by forces claiming to act on behalf of the working class, result only in the replacement of one set of exploiters and oppressors by another (however good the intentions of the revolutionaries). This had been proved time and again in history but above all by the Communist, or more accurately Stalinist, military seizures of power in Eastern Europe, china etc which simply replaced private capitalism by state capitalism.
The methods of struggle used by Marxists and socialists from the most basic issuing of leaflets, collecting of petitions, organising trade unions and parties through to mass demonstrations, election campaigns and mass strikes are all steps towards raising the consciousness, confidence and organisation of working people to act on their own behalf.
Terrorist methods contradict this whole perspective. Frequently, as in Madrid, they are aimed at completely the wrong targets, striking not at rulers or oppressors but at ordinary working people. This repeats the “mistake” or should it be crime, so often perpetrated by the right, or collective national or racial guilt i.e. holding everyone of a particular group responsible for the actions or the rulers of that group. Often this has the effect of intensifying racial, national or sectarian divisions which weaken the struggle of the working class and which it should be the project of the left to overcome.
Even where that targets are more judiciously selected e.g. individual tyrants, direct and senior agents of the oppressor state, there is still a very high risk of error resulting in unintended innocent victims, with all the same political consequences.
Another common result of terrorism is that it strengthens and legitimises the repressive apparatus of the very state it is supposed to undermine. The regime on the receiving end responds the attacks on civil liberties, arbitrary round-ups of “suspects” etc. It cannot be said that this always happens. Recent events in Spain – due to the splendid response of the Spanish people – are a wonderful exception. But it is the most likely outcome. Similarly, terrorist acts can have the perverse effect of turning a roundly despised politician or businessman into some kind of martyr or national hero, as happened with the kidnapping and killing of former Italian PM, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978.
But even in the best possible case – where the target is an undoubted and generally acknowledged tyrant and the deed is meticulously executed with no innocent casualties – the terrorist operation remains at odds with the Marxist perspective because it is an attempt to substitute the deeds of a small minority for the collective struggle of the masses and its effects is to encourage the idea of liberation from on high rather than self emancipation from below. As Leon Trotsky put it:
“If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle?…If it makes sense to terrify highly places personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for a party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections?
…In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.” [Emphasis in original]
Sometimes the advocates of terrorism have claimed that terror tactics need not be counterposed to the class struggle but can be combined with it. Trotsky rejects this “compromise formula” insisting that in practice any movement adopting terrorist methods would come to be dominated by them to the exclusion of mass action.
“By its very essence terrorist work demands such concentrated energy for ‘the great moment’, such an overestimation of the significance of individual heroism and such a ‘hermetic’ conspiracy that – if not logically – then psychologically it totally excludes agitation and organisational work among the masses…terrorism is too ‘absolute’ a form of struggle to be content with a limited and subordinate role in the party.”
Quoting Trotsky here is appropriate for two reasons. First because Trotsky wrote, at different times in his political career a series of articles on terrorism which eloquently summarise the Marxist case and these have been collected in an accessible pamphlet, Leon Trotsky ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ (Pathfinder 1980). Second, because the articles grow out of, and make repeated reference to, the experience of terrorism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conducted by the Narodniks or Populists, and particularly by the organisation Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), this was one of the great terrorists campaigns in history and perhaps the first time terrorism was intellectually formulated as a systematic political strategy. The Narodniks were intellectuals who looked to Russia’s vast and deeply oppressed peasantry and who’s aim was to overthrow tsarism by systematic attacks on the tsar and his ministers. The Russian Marxist movement under the leadership of it’s founder, George Plekhanov, emerged precisely in opposition to Populism and therefore conducted an intense debate on the question of terrorism in the course of which the Marxist position was definitively established.
One further aspect of that position which was shared by all the Russian revolutionary socialists in particularly brought out in Trotsky’s writings. This is the distinction the Russian Marxists made between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, the latter had all their sympathy and their personal courage was always acknowledged. By all accounts the Narodnik militants were of a particularly noble cast but the point is clearly of contemporary relevance.
Ruling class politicians and their media habitually denounce terrorists as “cowards”, “evil” and “sub-human”. The Russian Marxists had no truck with such notions and never contemplated moderating their own opposition to tsarism on account of “the terrorist threat”, still less joining forces with the regime against the terrorists. Their criticism of terrorism was always in terms of its ineffective and counterproductive nature in relation to the real revolutionary struggle. And of course they were vindicated by history. It was no terrorist bomb but the mass action of the working class that eventually toppled both tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie.
The Marxist response to terrorism formulated around the turn of the century has stood the test of time and has served as a guide to action in recent decades. These decades however, have offered a rich and varied crop or terrorist campaigns on which certain observations can be made.
In the first place it is clear that there is a substantial strand of right wing and fascist terrorism. Examples include the Orange paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Bologna bombing in Italy, Oklahoma in the U.S, David Copeland of the Soho nail bomb, and Combat 18. But, obviously these present no theoretical problems for the left since we are opposed to everything about them. Other forms of terrorism divide broadly into two camps. On the one hand, mainly in the 1970s, there were various offshoots from the far left and the student revolt – the Weathermen in the U.S, the Angry Brigade in Britain, the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and so on. Typically these groups represented a frustrated, impatient reaction to the faltering of the mass movements from which they sprung. With the partial exception of the Red Brigades, they had no mass base and little capacity to inflict serious damage on the ruling class. Their main effect was to disorganise and disorient the left. It is clear that the job of revolutionary socialists is to do everything possible to discourage the development of such moods, but by argument and by ensuring the positive momentum of the mass struggle.
On the other hand, and much more important, have been various kinds of nationalist terrorist formations attempting to represent oppressed nationalities – the IRA, ETA, the different Palestinian organisations etc. These organisations usually do have a significant, if largely passive, social base, though it’s size can vary from being a small minority to a substantial majority of their respecting communities and, crucially, they usually have a base in a section of the national bourgeoisie. Essentially they are political formations who would like to be able to wage conventional war (or at least guerrilla war) but who are prevented from doing so by the overwhelming superiority of the oppressor’s military forces. Their class basis and their political outlook prevent them from looking to the working class as an alternative. Consequently they resort to terrorism.
Despite all the talk about Islamic fundamentalism Al Queda (like Hezbollah and Hamas) are basically spin-offs from Arab nationalism who have adopted Islamism in response to the past failures of secular nationalism and Stalinism. Their real aim, despite the rhetoric on both sides, is not to destroy the western way of life or overthrow capitalism but to drive out or limit imperialism in their part of the world.
Sometimes, and the Palestinian Intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, “condemn” Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance. Nevertheless the general force of the Marxist critique continues to apply. Therefore, Marxists within the context of uncompromising opposition to our “own” imperialist bourgeoisies must continue to make the case that ultimately the defeat of imperialism and the overthrow of capitalism are tasks that are bound together and that the only force that can complete these tasks is the international working class.
Marxists do no reject all violence. The bourgeois politicians who make such claims – while supporting wars, nuclear weapons, armies, prisons etc – are simply hypocrites and Marxists recognise that in certain circumstances such as wars of national liberation and mass revolutionary struggle, violence may be unavoidable and necessary. But terrorism, as in the planting of bombs on government of civilian targets, or hijacking planes, or assassinations by small groups acting independently of class struggle has always been deemed unacceptable.
This is because terrorism runs counter to the most basic principles of Marxism. Marx showed that the root cause of exploitation, oppression, tyranny and war was not bad individual rulers or bad governments but the division of society into classes and the ownership and control of production by a minority class that lived off the labour of the majority. The overthrow of a ruling class and the economic system on which it rests cannot be achieved by killing or frightening even large numbers of individuals, but only by the struggle of a new class which is the bearer of a new economic system. It is class struggle, the collective action of people in their millions, which is the motor of history.
Applied to modern capitalist society this means that the only force capable of defeating and replacing the capitalist class and the capitalist system is the organised struggle of the mass of the working class. In the words of Marx, “The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself.” This emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class is crucial not only for the overthrow of capitalism but also for the achievement of the aim, the establishment of socialism. Only revolution from below by the mass of working people themselves can lead to a socialist society run by working people in the interests of working people. Revolutions from above, even by forces claiming to act on behalf of the working class, result only in the replacement of one set of exploiters and oppressors by another (however good the intentions of the revolutionaries). This had been proved time and again in history but above all by the Communist, or more accurately Stalinist, military seizures of power in Eastern Europe, china etc which simply replaced private capitalism by state capitalism.
The methods of struggle used by Marxists and socialists from the most basic issuing of leaflets, collecting of petitions, organising trade unions and parties through to mass demonstrations, election campaigns and mass strikes are all steps towards raising the consciousness, confidence and organisation of working people to act on their own behalf.
Terrorist methods contradict this whole perspective. Frequently, as in Madrid, they are aimed at completely the wrong targets, striking not at rulers or oppressors but at ordinary working people. This repeats the “mistake” or should it be crime, so often perpetrated by the right, or collective national or racial guilt i.e. holding everyone of a particular group responsible for the actions or the rulers of that group. Often this has the effect of intensifying racial, national or sectarian divisions which weaken the struggle of the working class and which it should be the project of the left to overcome.
Even where that targets are more judiciously selected e.g. individual tyrants, direct and senior agents of the oppressor state, there is still a very high risk of error resulting in unintended innocent victims, with all the same political consequences.
Another common result of terrorism is that it strengthens and legitimises the repressive apparatus of the very state it is supposed to undermine. The regime on the receiving end responds the attacks on civil liberties, arbitrary round-ups of “suspects” etc. It cannot be said that this always happens. Recent events in Spain – due to the splendid response of the Spanish people – are a wonderful exception. But it is the most likely outcome. Similarly, terrorist acts can have the perverse effect of turning a roundly despised politician or businessman into some kind of martyr or national hero, as happened with the kidnapping and killing of former Italian PM, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades in 1978.
But even in the best possible case – where the target is an undoubted and generally acknowledged tyrant and the deed is meticulously executed with no innocent casualties – the terrorist operation remains at odds with the Marxist perspective because it is an attempt to substitute the deeds of a small minority for the collective struggle of the masses and its effects is to encourage the idea of liberation from on high rather than self emancipation from below. As Leon Trotsky put it:
“If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle?…If it makes sense to terrify highly places personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for a party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections?
…In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.” [Emphasis in original]
Sometimes the advocates of terrorism have claimed that terror tactics need not be counterposed to the class struggle but can be combined with it. Trotsky rejects this “compromise formula” insisting that in practice any movement adopting terrorist methods would come to be dominated by them to the exclusion of mass action.
“By its very essence terrorist work demands such concentrated energy for ‘the great moment’, such an overestimation of the significance of individual heroism and such a ‘hermetic’ conspiracy that – if not logically – then psychologically it totally excludes agitation and organisational work among the masses…terrorism is too ‘absolute’ a form of struggle to be content with a limited and subordinate role in the party.”
Quoting Trotsky here is appropriate for two reasons. First because Trotsky wrote, at different times in his political career a series of articles on terrorism which eloquently summarise the Marxist case and these have been collected in an accessible pamphlet, Leon Trotsky ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ (Pathfinder 1980). Second, because the articles grow out of, and make repeated reference to, the experience of terrorism in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conducted by the Narodniks or Populists, and particularly by the organisation Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), this was one of the great terrorists campaigns in history and perhaps the first time terrorism was intellectually formulated as a systematic political strategy. The Narodniks were intellectuals who looked to Russia’s vast and deeply oppressed peasantry and who’s aim was to overthrow tsarism by systematic attacks on the tsar and his ministers. The Russian Marxist movement under the leadership of it’s founder, George Plekhanov, emerged precisely in opposition to Populism and therefore conducted an intense debate on the question of terrorism in the course of which the Marxist position was definitively established.
One further aspect of that position which was shared by all the Russian revolutionary socialists in particularly brought out in Trotsky’s writings. This is the distinction the Russian Marxists made between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, the latter had all their sympathy and their personal courage was always acknowledged. By all accounts the Narodnik militants were of a particularly noble cast but the point is clearly of contemporary relevance.
Ruling class politicians and their media habitually denounce terrorists as “cowards”, “evil” and “sub-human”. The Russian Marxists had no truck with such notions and never contemplated moderating their own opposition to tsarism on account of “the terrorist threat”, still less joining forces with the regime against the terrorists. Their criticism of terrorism was always in terms of its ineffective and counterproductive nature in relation to the real revolutionary struggle. And of course they were vindicated by history. It was no terrorist bomb but the mass action of the working class that eventually toppled both tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie.
The Marxist response to terrorism formulated around the turn of the century has stood the test of time and has served as a guide to action in recent decades. These decades however, have offered a rich and varied crop or terrorist campaigns on which certain observations can be made.
In the first place it is clear that there is a substantial strand of right wing and fascist terrorism. Examples include the Orange paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Bologna bombing in Italy, Oklahoma in the U.S, David Copeland of the Soho nail bomb, and Combat 18. But, obviously these present no theoretical problems for the left since we are opposed to everything about them. Other forms of terrorism divide broadly into two camps. On the one hand, mainly in the 1970s, there were various offshoots from the far left and the student revolt – the Weathermen in the U.S, the Angry Brigade in Britain, the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and so on. Typically these groups represented a frustrated, impatient reaction to the faltering of the mass movements from which they sprung. With the partial exception of the Red Brigades, they had no mass base and little capacity to inflict serious damage on the ruling class. Their main effect was to disorganise and disorient the left. It is clear that the job of revolutionary socialists is to do everything possible to discourage the development of such moods, but by argument and by ensuring the positive momentum of the mass struggle.
On the other hand, and much more important, have been various kinds of nationalist terrorist formations attempting to represent oppressed nationalities – the IRA, ETA, the different Palestinian organisations etc. These organisations usually do have a significant, if largely passive, social base, though it’s size can vary from being a small minority to a substantial majority of their respecting communities and, crucially, they usually have a base in a section of the national bourgeoisie. Essentially they are political formations who would like to be able to wage conventional war (or at least guerrilla war) but who are prevented from doing so by the overwhelming superiority of the oppressor’s military forces. Their class basis and their political outlook prevent them from looking to the working class as an alternative. Consequently they resort to terrorism.
Despite all the talk about Islamic fundamentalism Al Queda (like Hezbollah and Hamas) are basically spin-offs from Arab nationalism who have adopted Islamism in response to the past failures of secular nationalism and Stalinism. Their real aim, despite the rhetoric on both sides, is not to destroy the western way of life or overthrow capitalism but to drive out or limit imperialism in their part of the world.
Sometimes, and the Palestinian Intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, “condemn” Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance. Nevertheless the general force of the Marxist critique continues to apply. Therefore, Marxists within the context of uncompromising opposition to our “own” imperialist bourgeoisies must continue to make the case that ultimately the defeat of imperialism and the overthrow of capitalism are tasks that are bound together and that the only force that can complete these tasks is the international working class.
Preface to ‘What is the Real Marxost Tradition?’
What is the Real Marxist Tradition? was initially written in 1983, for a specific occasion – the 100th aniversary of Marx’s death – and with a specic purpose: to disentangle what I believe to be genuine Marxism from the numerous regimes and parties round the world which laid claim to the name and ideology of Marxism while totally distorting and/or it’s content.
It’s central argument was that the fundamental distinguishing characteristic or authentic Marxism was no faithful adherance to Marx’s texts as a whole, nor to particular selected doctrines but it’s role as the theoretical articulation of the interests, struggle and liberation of a particular class, the modern proletariat or working class.
Similarly the common characteristic of the various “false” or pseudo-marxisms discussed was their abandonment of the project of working class self-emancipation and their transformation of Marxist doctrine into an ideology of another social force or class.
22 years later two obvious questions arise. First, to what extent have the ideas presented here stood the test of events? Second, to what extent do they remain relevant and useful to today’s socialists and revolutionaries in the very different world situation we now confront? A full answer to these questions is beyond the scope of a short preface but the immidiately striking fact is that the historically most important perversion of Marxism, namely, Stalinism, has all but departed the scene. A few Stalinist regimes remain, notably that in North Korea, but the ability of Stalinism to act as a pole of attraction and misleadership to millions of workers, socialists and would-be revolutionaries worldwide, has gone.
Indeed the whole process of the so-called “collapse of Communism” was a substantial confirmation of one of the key theoretical premises of this book, namely that the “Communist” regimes were neither socialist nor worker’s states, but State Capitalist (a premise taken from what I believe to be the most important Marxist theoretical text of the whole Cold War period, Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia.) Had Russia or Poland or Rumania been worker’s states of some kind the working class of these countries would have defended them in some way. Just the opposite was the case. Had they been socialist in any sense their relatively smooth adoption of “western” capitalism, with the bulk of the ruling apparatus and the industrial management simply stepping sideways, would have been impossible.
Most spectacular of all, of course, is the almost seamless transformation of China, without even formal “political revolution” or regime change from apparent Maoist communist fervour into the massive engine of capitalist growth that it has become in the last two decades. Again only the theory of state capitalism provides a basis for the theoretical understanding and analysis of the Chinese phenomenon.
Social Democracy, Stalinism’s predecessor in the anti-revolutionary transformation of Marxism and it’s principal rival for the political allegiance of the international working class (especially in the industrialised west) is still with us, of course. Nevertheless it too has changed dramatically. In this process my country or rather Tony Blair and the British Labour Party – New Labour – as he aptly calls it has led the way. Assuming leadership of the Labour Party after it’s fourth successive electoral defeat in 1992, Blair set about it’s wholesale “modernisation” i.e. transformation in a neo-liberal direction. In this he was remarkably successful at least at the upper echelons, while the rank and file have been silenced and marginalized. The result has been a Labour government since 1997 purged of every vestige of socialist principle of conscience which has turned Britian into George Bush’s most unquestioning ally, helped initiate three major imperialist wars, attacked civil liberties across the board, persued privatisation relentlessly including in health care and education, turned it’s back on the trade unions (except for taking their money) and, like neo-liberal giverbnments everywhere, presised over a huge grown in social inequality.
And where Blair has led others, from Schroeder in Germany to Lula in Brazil have been keep to follow. The social democracy not just of Bernstein and Kautsky, with it’s explicit Marxist roots, but also of Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt has become a thing of the past. This does not mean that reformism in general is dead. Reformism has deep roots in the structure of capitalist society and the consciousness of the working class – like the hydra of greek myth, cut off one of it’s heads and another will grow. So long as the majority of workers lack the confidence to take power into their own hands, they will look for reformist solutions to their problems. However it does mean that internationally the social democratic parties have seriously declined as a force that can command the loyalty of working people and that a political space has opened up to their left.
Third world nationalism, the third tendency discussed in this book, is also still around and will remain so until imperialism is defeated. But it too has changed. Precisely because of the demise of Stalinism and the failure of Communism/State Capitalism as a model of economic development, third world nationalism today is far less likely to don Marxist clothes. Even Hugo Chavez of Venesuala, the current principal third worldist hero, speaks only of a “Bolivarian”, not a Marxist revolution.
Not surprisingly our rulers and their ideologists have greeted these developments triumphantly, claiming they represent the death of Socialism. In their euphoria and arrogance some of these bourgois ideologues anticipated a new world order free of serious conflict ot challenge. They seem to believe that every act of resistance in the world stemmed ultimately from Moscow and that without Moscow resistance would disappear. And, it has to be said, that some on the left, particularly those with faith or illusions in one or another varient of Stalinism, at least partially accepted these arguments and either changed sides or slumped into depression.
Clearly if this inperpretation has proved correct, the perspective of What is the Real Marxist Tradition? would now be irrlevant. But equally clearly, this interpretation has proved false. On the contrary the last decade has seen resistance spring up and grow on a truly worldwide basis, because, of course, resistance is not rooted in any ideology, “evil” or otherwise, “Communist” or “Islamic”, but stems from the real experience of exploitation, oppression and injustice.
The global situation today contrasts not only with the expectation of the Pentagon intellectuals but also with the conditions when What is the Real Marxist Tradition? first appeared. Broadly speaking the 1980s, the Regan-Thatcher years, were a period of defeat for the working class and isolation for revolutionary socialists in which the emphasis has to be put on the small scale defence and propagation of our ideas. The 1990s were years of partial recovery. But the new century has seen a widespread radicalisation and resurgence of resistance.
This resistance has taken many forms: The international anticapitalist movement with it’s great demonstrations and conferences – Seattle, Geonoa, Porto Allegre, Florence, Mumbai etc; the international antiwar movement, with it’s extraordinary global demonstration against the Iraq war on February 15th 2003; the French worker’s strikes of 1995 and the “No” vote to the European Union’s neo-liberal constitution in 2005; the mass struggles of the Latin American working class, peaking in near-revolutions in Argentina and Bolivia; the emergence of new electoral challenges to the left of social democracy in Europe (RESPECT in Britain, the Portugese Left Block, Die Wahl in Germany etc).
This wave of struggles has drawn a whole new generation into the movement and it is to be hopped that this book can play a small part in helping to attract the most serious among them to the authentic Marxism of working class and human liberation.
Two further points need to be made. The proponants of globalisation see it as an all-conquering force but, as Marx explained long ago, Capitalism creates it’s own gravedigger, and the latest phase of capitalist development is no exception. It has brought into being, on a hitherto unprecidented scale, a new international working class with immese potential power, concentrated above all in the great cities of what used to be called the third world: Sao Paulo, Cairo, Shanghai and, of course, Seoul.
Finally, the socialist transformation of society by the working class has never been so urgent. In the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote that the class struggle could result “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” For Marx this was a brilliant theoretical speculation; he could not then have forseen the concrete forms of this “common ruin”. The 20th century showed us one possible form, nuclear war; The 21st century shows us another in the shape of climate change and global warming. In 1983 this was a faint blip on the horizon. Today it is a pressing reality and it threatens humanity as a whole but especially the world’s poor with almost unimaginable catastrophe. The solutions to global warming are both known and practical – the replacement of fossil fuels with sources of renewable energy such as wind, solar and tidal power and the use of planned public transport to end dependancy on the private car – but the world’s rulers, it’s giant corporations and imperialist governments, driven by vested interest and the logic of capitalist competition, refuse to implement them. In this end I suspect that it will fall to the international working class on whom, as this book shows, Marx based his entire philosophy on politics to save humanity from disaster by taking power into it’s own hands. Our struggle is to make sure this happens in time.
This was written in July 2005 for the Koran translation of the long article "What is the Real Marxist Tradition".
It’s central argument was that the fundamental distinguishing characteristic or authentic Marxism was no faithful adherance to Marx’s texts as a whole, nor to particular selected doctrines but it’s role as the theoretical articulation of the interests, struggle and liberation of a particular class, the modern proletariat or working class.
Similarly the common characteristic of the various “false” or pseudo-marxisms discussed was their abandonment of the project of working class self-emancipation and their transformation of Marxist doctrine into an ideology of another social force or class.
22 years later two obvious questions arise. First, to what extent have the ideas presented here stood the test of events? Second, to what extent do they remain relevant and useful to today’s socialists and revolutionaries in the very different world situation we now confront? A full answer to these questions is beyond the scope of a short preface but the immidiately striking fact is that the historically most important perversion of Marxism, namely, Stalinism, has all but departed the scene. A few Stalinist regimes remain, notably that in North Korea, but the ability of Stalinism to act as a pole of attraction and misleadership to millions of workers, socialists and would-be revolutionaries worldwide, has gone.
Indeed the whole process of the so-called “collapse of Communism” was a substantial confirmation of one of the key theoretical premises of this book, namely that the “Communist” regimes were neither socialist nor worker’s states, but State Capitalist (a premise taken from what I believe to be the most important Marxist theoretical text of the whole Cold War period, Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia.) Had Russia or Poland or Rumania been worker’s states of some kind the working class of these countries would have defended them in some way. Just the opposite was the case. Had they been socialist in any sense their relatively smooth adoption of “western” capitalism, with the bulk of the ruling apparatus and the industrial management simply stepping sideways, would have been impossible.
Most spectacular of all, of course, is the almost seamless transformation of China, without even formal “political revolution” or regime change from apparent Maoist communist fervour into the massive engine of capitalist growth that it has become in the last two decades. Again only the theory of state capitalism provides a basis for the theoretical understanding and analysis of the Chinese phenomenon.
Social Democracy, Stalinism’s predecessor in the anti-revolutionary transformation of Marxism and it’s principal rival for the political allegiance of the international working class (especially in the industrialised west) is still with us, of course. Nevertheless it too has changed dramatically. In this process my country or rather Tony Blair and the British Labour Party – New Labour – as he aptly calls it has led the way. Assuming leadership of the Labour Party after it’s fourth successive electoral defeat in 1992, Blair set about it’s wholesale “modernisation” i.e. transformation in a neo-liberal direction. In this he was remarkably successful at least at the upper echelons, while the rank and file have been silenced and marginalized. The result has been a Labour government since 1997 purged of every vestige of socialist principle of conscience which has turned Britian into George Bush’s most unquestioning ally, helped initiate three major imperialist wars, attacked civil liberties across the board, persued privatisation relentlessly including in health care and education, turned it’s back on the trade unions (except for taking their money) and, like neo-liberal giverbnments everywhere, presised over a huge grown in social inequality.
And where Blair has led others, from Schroeder in Germany to Lula in Brazil have been keep to follow. The social democracy not just of Bernstein and Kautsky, with it’s explicit Marxist roots, but also of Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt has become a thing of the past. This does not mean that reformism in general is dead. Reformism has deep roots in the structure of capitalist society and the consciousness of the working class – like the hydra of greek myth, cut off one of it’s heads and another will grow. So long as the majority of workers lack the confidence to take power into their own hands, they will look for reformist solutions to their problems. However it does mean that internationally the social democratic parties have seriously declined as a force that can command the loyalty of working people and that a political space has opened up to their left.
Third world nationalism, the third tendency discussed in this book, is also still around and will remain so until imperialism is defeated. But it too has changed. Precisely because of the demise of Stalinism and the failure of Communism/State Capitalism as a model of economic development, third world nationalism today is far less likely to don Marxist clothes. Even Hugo Chavez of Venesuala, the current principal third worldist hero, speaks only of a “Bolivarian”, not a Marxist revolution.
Not surprisingly our rulers and their ideologists have greeted these developments triumphantly, claiming they represent the death of Socialism. In their euphoria and arrogance some of these bourgois ideologues anticipated a new world order free of serious conflict ot challenge. They seem to believe that every act of resistance in the world stemmed ultimately from Moscow and that without Moscow resistance would disappear. And, it has to be said, that some on the left, particularly those with faith or illusions in one or another varient of Stalinism, at least partially accepted these arguments and either changed sides or slumped into depression.
Clearly if this inperpretation has proved correct, the perspective of What is the Real Marxist Tradition? would now be irrlevant. But equally clearly, this interpretation has proved false. On the contrary the last decade has seen resistance spring up and grow on a truly worldwide basis, because, of course, resistance is not rooted in any ideology, “evil” or otherwise, “Communist” or “Islamic”, but stems from the real experience of exploitation, oppression and injustice.
The global situation today contrasts not only with the expectation of the Pentagon intellectuals but also with the conditions when What is the Real Marxist Tradition? first appeared. Broadly speaking the 1980s, the Regan-Thatcher years, were a period of defeat for the working class and isolation for revolutionary socialists in which the emphasis has to be put on the small scale defence and propagation of our ideas. The 1990s were years of partial recovery. But the new century has seen a widespread radicalisation and resurgence of resistance.
This resistance has taken many forms: The international anticapitalist movement with it’s great demonstrations and conferences – Seattle, Geonoa, Porto Allegre, Florence, Mumbai etc; the international antiwar movement, with it’s extraordinary global demonstration against the Iraq war on February 15th 2003; the French worker’s strikes of 1995 and the “No” vote to the European Union’s neo-liberal constitution in 2005; the mass struggles of the Latin American working class, peaking in near-revolutions in Argentina and Bolivia; the emergence of new electoral challenges to the left of social democracy in Europe (RESPECT in Britain, the Portugese Left Block, Die Wahl in Germany etc).
This wave of struggles has drawn a whole new generation into the movement and it is to be hopped that this book can play a small part in helping to attract the most serious among them to the authentic Marxism of working class and human liberation.
Two further points need to be made. The proponants of globalisation see it as an all-conquering force but, as Marx explained long ago, Capitalism creates it’s own gravedigger, and the latest phase of capitalist development is no exception. It has brought into being, on a hitherto unprecidented scale, a new international working class with immese potential power, concentrated above all in the great cities of what used to be called the third world: Sao Paulo, Cairo, Shanghai and, of course, Seoul.
Finally, the socialist transformation of society by the working class has never been so urgent. In the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote that the class struggle could result “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” For Marx this was a brilliant theoretical speculation; he could not then have forseen the concrete forms of this “common ruin”. The 20th century showed us one possible form, nuclear war; The 21st century shows us another in the shape of climate change and global warming. In 1983 this was a faint blip on the horizon. Today it is a pressing reality and it threatens humanity as a whole but especially the world’s poor with almost unimaginable catastrophe. The solutions to global warming are both known and practical – the replacement of fossil fuels with sources of renewable energy such as wind, solar and tidal power and the use of planned public transport to end dependancy on the private car – but the world’s rulers, it’s giant corporations and imperialist governments, driven by vested interest and the logic of capitalist competition, refuse to implement them. In this end I suspect that it will fall to the international working class on whom, as this book shows, Marx based his entire philosophy on politics to save humanity from disaster by taking power into it’s own hands. Our struggle is to make sure this happens in time.
This was written in July 2005 for the Koran translation of the long article "What is the Real Marxist Tradition".
Expression of an age
The US artist Jackson Pollock has long been controversial. John Molyneux explains why this is so in his review of a new exhibition of his work.
Every reader of Socialist Review with an interest in art should try and visit the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London (11 March to 6 June). Here is a unique chance to see the work of one of the century's most influential and controversial artists. Pollock, for reasons of scale, texture and colour, demands to be seen in the original and most of the time there are only one or two works on view in Britain. In this show there is work from throughout Pollock's career and about a dozen of the great drip paintings on which his reputation and notoriety primarily rest.
None of us judges or even 'sees' without preconceptions, and in the case of Pollock there are at least five 'interpretations' in sufficient circulation to condition our initial responses. The first and predominant interpretation seized on the drip and flick method of applying paint to suggest Pollock's work was just a random mess, an absurd tangle of lines and splodges. 'This is not art--it's a joke in bad taste', as a Reynolds News headline put it in 1959. Doubtless this is a view that still plays well in the columns of the Sun but it is comprehensively refuted by any serious scrutiny of the paintings. A few minutes spent looking in turn at Summertime, Lavender Mist and Blue Poles demonstrates that Pollock achieved strikingly different aesthetic effects in different works and that this was a highly controlled process.
The second, more favourable, interpretation was a kind of inversion of the first. It too focused on the drip method, which it called 'action painting', and celebrated as a wild romantic outpouring of self expression. In this view much was made of Pollock's birth in Cody, Wyoming, and he was depicted as a sort of all-American lonesome cowboy hero. The most sophisticated presentation of this line was by the critic Harold Rosenberg, who spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in which 'what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event', and who wrote, 'The big moment came when it was decided to paint "just to paint". The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value--political, aesthetic, moral.'
The third account, associated with Clement Greenberg, who was the most influential art critic of the 1950s and 1960s, was in sharp opposition to the second. It proclaimed Abstract Expressionism and Pollock in particular as the epitome of aesthetic value. It supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet, in which painting became ever 'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface. It was this view which established Pollock's position in the modern art canon and became hegemonic in the art world until the late 1960s.
The 1960s radicalisation, however, gave rise to a fourth interpretation--a left critique--which located Pollock in his political context and attributed his success not to his formal merits but to his ideological usefulness to US imperialism. It was revealed that posthumous exhibitions of Pollock had been covertly sponsored by the CIA, and the argument was made that the US ruling class threw its weight behind this kind of art out of a nationalistic craving for an US avant garde to supplant Paris and a symbol of freedom to counterpose to Soviet insistence on Social Realism. Thus Pollock was promoted as, in the words of Eva Cockcroft, a 'weapon of the Cold War'.
Finally, there is a feminist revaluation of Pollock which looks askance at the machismo of the 'hero in the studio' and tends to see the whole drip and flick performance as the acting out of the phallocentric male fantasy on the symbolically supine canvas.
These political critiques were a salutary corrective to the romantic and nationalist myth making of the US bourgeoisie and the formalism of Greenberg that underwrote it. They disclosed the forces of ideology and material interest that lay behind the supposedly 'disinterested' judgements of the art world. That the Museum of Modern Art, the US's principal tastemaker in this area, was owned and controlled by the Rockefeller family, and that no Chinese wall separated their policy in art from their policy in Latin America and South East Asia, are facts to be reckoned with. Moreover they are precisely the kind of facts that the art establishment--the Tate as well as MOMA--is anxious to marginalise. In his lengthy presentation at the exhibition's press view, Jeremy Lewinson, the Tate's Director of Collections, made no mention of this left critique (though the feminist case was fully acknowledged), and in his book Interpreting Pollock it is dismissed in one line as some kind of paranoid conspiracy theory.
However, the limitation of this critique is that while it may help to explain Pollock's rapid rise to art superstardom, it tells us little of substance about the meaning and merit of his paintings. For if it is a fact that Pollock was used for Cold War purposes, it is no less a fact that he did not paint with that intention.
So what of the paintings themselves? This exhibition confirms that it is the drip paintings of 1947 to 1950 that are the real achievement. Some of the earlier works are surprisingly good, better than reproductions had led one to expect, especially in their colour. But The She-Wolf is the only really outstanding painting of this period, and in general the work does not get 'beyond' Picasso, with whose influence he was struggling.
The drip paintings are qualitatively different. This is where Pollock makes the breakthrough to a new way of painting and a distinct aesthetic vision. Even here there are failures, pictures like Galaxy and Reflection of the Big Dipper which don't work. But there are masterpieces like Full Fathom Five, Number 32, 1950 and Lavender Mist which are among the great paintings of the century. It is a criticism of this show that not enough of these great paintings (eg Autumn Rhythm) are on view compared with the show when it was in New York and relative to the lesser earlier work.
What makes these paintings 'great'? The major paintings possess two qualities which relate to both form and content. First, they create order out of chaos. Without obvious patterning they achieve a total symphonic composition and this speaks of the struggle against alienation, fragmentation and disintegration. Second these compositions 'signify' at many levels--they convey by suggestion a multiplicity of 'meanings', meanings that are social, historical and political in character.
Let us take Lavender Mist as an example. On first seeing a reproduction of this, my eight year old granddaughter said instantly, 'It's like EastEnders!' She is right. It is suggestive of an aerial photograph of a city, but it is a city that has somehow been blasted. Here we must remember that this painting was done from above. It is also suggestive of astronomical photographs of nebulae and galaxies (in Comet, Galaxy and other works this is explicit, and Pollock is known to have been an avid stargazer) while at the same time close up details of this and other paintings resemble microscopic photos of molecular structures.
Add to these visual associations that these works were painted in the aftermath of Hiroshima and at the onset of the Cold War, and note Pollock's own statement that 'modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.' Also recall again that this technique was to drip, flick and throw the paint onto the canvas from above. Put all this together and I think the connection between the work and the historical advent of the threat of nuclear annihilation is clear.
Of course the relation is not direct--neither Lavender Mist nor in fact any of Jackson's other works is a painting of a nuclear explosion, nor is it anti-war agitprop. Pollock was attempting to paint out of his subconscious, but there is surely reason to believe that the prospect of nuclear holocaust would have been on his mind at this time. Nor is this any more than a partial account of the factors at work--other associations are with the improvisation of bebop and free form jazz and with the young male rebels (Brando, Dean, Kerouac) of the time. Nevertheless, it is impossible to understand Pollock's art, without historically locating him in this way.
This raises the question as to how such art was readily appropriated by the US ruling class. Clearly there were elements in the work that lent themselves to this--the passionate individualism, the absence of overt politics--but there are elements in Blake's Jerusalem which allow that battle cry of freedom to be sung at the Last Night of the Proms. And we are forced to note how often it has been the fate of great radical art from Milton to Van Gogh to be taken up by our rulers. The solution is not to renounce the art but to expropriate our rulers.
This article was published in the April 1999 issue of Socialist Review.
Every reader of Socialist Review with an interest in art should try and visit the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London (11 March to 6 June). Here is a unique chance to see the work of one of the century's most influential and controversial artists. Pollock, for reasons of scale, texture and colour, demands to be seen in the original and most of the time there are only one or two works on view in Britain. In this show there is work from throughout Pollock's career and about a dozen of the great drip paintings on which his reputation and notoriety primarily rest.
None of us judges or even 'sees' without preconceptions, and in the case of Pollock there are at least five 'interpretations' in sufficient circulation to condition our initial responses. The first and predominant interpretation seized on the drip and flick method of applying paint to suggest Pollock's work was just a random mess, an absurd tangle of lines and splodges. 'This is not art--it's a joke in bad taste', as a Reynolds News headline put it in 1959. Doubtless this is a view that still plays well in the columns of the Sun but it is comprehensively refuted by any serious scrutiny of the paintings. A few minutes spent looking in turn at Summertime, Lavender Mist and Blue Poles demonstrates that Pollock achieved strikingly different aesthetic effects in different works and that this was a highly controlled process.
The second, more favourable, interpretation was a kind of inversion of the first. It too focused on the drip method, which it called 'action painting', and celebrated as a wild romantic outpouring of self expression. In this view much was made of Pollock's birth in Cody, Wyoming, and he was depicted as a sort of all-American lonesome cowboy hero. The most sophisticated presentation of this line was by the critic Harold Rosenberg, who spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in which 'what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event', and who wrote, 'The big moment came when it was decided to paint "just to paint". The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value--political, aesthetic, moral.'
The third account, associated with Clement Greenberg, who was the most influential art critic of the 1950s and 1960s, was in sharp opposition to the second. It proclaimed Abstract Expressionism and Pollock in particular as the epitome of aesthetic value. It supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet, in which painting became ever 'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface. It was this view which established Pollock's position in the modern art canon and became hegemonic in the art world until the late 1960s.
The 1960s radicalisation, however, gave rise to a fourth interpretation--a left critique--which located Pollock in his political context and attributed his success not to his formal merits but to his ideological usefulness to US imperialism. It was revealed that posthumous exhibitions of Pollock had been covertly sponsored by the CIA, and the argument was made that the US ruling class threw its weight behind this kind of art out of a nationalistic craving for an US avant garde to supplant Paris and a symbol of freedom to counterpose to Soviet insistence on Social Realism. Thus Pollock was promoted as, in the words of Eva Cockcroft, a 'weapon of the Cold War'.
Finally, there is a feminist revaluation of Pollock which looks askance at the machismo of the 'hero in the studio' and tends to see the whole drip and flick performance as the acting out of the phallocentric male fantasy on the symbolically supine canvas.
These political critiques were a salutary corrective to the romantic and nationalist myth making of the US bourgeoisie and the formalism of Greenberg that underwrote it. They disclosed the forces of ideology and material interest that lay behind the supposedly 'disinterested' judgements of the art world. That the Museum of Modern Art, the US's principal tastemaker in this area, was owned and controlled by the Rockefeller family, and that no Chinese wall separated their policy in art from their policy in Latin America and South East Asia, are facts to be reckoned with. Moreover they are precisely the kind of facts that the art establishment--the Tate as well as MOMA--is anxious to marginalise. In his lengthy presentation at the exhibition's press view, Jeremy Lewinson, the Tate's Director of Collections, made no mention of this left critique (though the feminist case was fully acknowledged), and in his book Interpreting Pollock it is dismissed in one line as some kind of paranoid conspiracy theory.
However, the limitation of this critique is that while it may help to explain Pollock's rapid rise to art superstardom, it tells us little of substance about the meaning and merit of his paintings. For if it is a fact that Pollock was used for Cold War purposes, it is no less a fact that he did not paint with that intention.
So what of the paintings themselves? This exhibition confirms that it is the drip paintings of 1947 to 1950 that are the real achievement. Some of the earlier works are surprisingly good, better than reproductions had led one to expect, especially in their colour. But The She-Wolf is the only really outstanding painting of this period, and in general the work does not get 'beyond' Picasso, with whose influence he was struggling.
The drip paintings are qualitatively different. This is where Pollock makes the breakthrough to a new way of painting and a distinct aesthetic vision. Even here there are failures, pictures like Galaxy and Reflection of the Big Dipper which don't work. But there are masterpieces like Full Fathom Five, Number 32, 1950 and Lavender Mist which are among the great paintings of the century. It is a criticism of this show that not enough of these great paintings (eg Autumn Rhythm) are on view compared with the show when it was in New York and relative to the lesser earlier work.
What makes these paintings 'great'? The major paintings possess two qualities which relate to both form and content. First, they create order out of chaos. Without obvious patterning they achieve a total symphonic composition and this speaks of the struggle against alienation, fragmentation and disintegration. Second these compositions 'signify' at many levels--they convey by suggestion a multiplicity of 'meanings', meanings that are social, historical and political in character.
Let us take Lavender Mist as an example. On first seeing a reproduction of this, my eight year old granddaughter said instantly, 'It's like EastEnders!' She is right. It is suggestive of an aerial photograph of a city, but it is a city that has somehow been blasted. Here we must remember that this painting was done from above. It is also suggestive of astronomical photographs of nebulae and galaxies (in Comet, Galaxy and other works this is explicit, and Pollock is known to have been an avid stargazer) while at the same time close up details of this and other paintings resemble microscopic photos of molecular structures.
Add to these visual associations that these works were painted in the aftermath of Hiroshima and at the onset of the Cold War, and note Pollock's own statement that 'modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.' Also recall again that this technique was to drip, flick and throw the paint onto the canvas from above. Put all this together and I think the connection between the work and the historical advent of the threat of nuclear annihilation is clear.
Of course the relation is not direct--neither Lavender Mist nor in fact any of Jackson's other works is a painting of a nuclear explosion, nor is it anti-war agitprop. Pollock was attempting to paint out of his subconscious, but there is surely reason to believe that the prospect of nuclear holocaust would have been on his mind at this time. Nor is this any more than a partial account of the factors at work--other associations are with the improvisation of bebop and free form jazz and with the young male rebels (Brando, Dean, Kerouac) of the time. Nevertheless, it is impossible to understand Pollock's art, without historically locating him in this way.
This raises the question as to how such art was readily appropriated by the US ruling class. Clearly there were elements in the work that lent themselves to this--the passionate individualism, the absence of overt politics--but there are elements in Blake's Jerusalem which allow that battle cry of freedom to be sung at the Last Night of the Proms. And we are forced to note how often it has been the fate of great radical art from Milton to Van Gogh to be taken up by our rulers. The solution is not to renounce the art but to expropriate our rulers.
This article was published in the April 1999 issue of Socialist Review.
Is there a Marxist aesthetic?
Sinead Kennedy’s introduction to the Marxist approach to art (Socialist Worker 15 July) was very good. She is right about the need to combine politics/ideology and aesthetics without simply reducing art to ideology.
Trotsky said that ‘Art must be judged first by the laws of art’, but he didn’t say what those ‘laws’ are, and the enormous differences in the art of different societies and times mean they cannot be a fixed set of rules.
So is there a Marxist aesthetic, ie a distinctive Marxist theory of what makes a work of art artistically good ? I think there is and that its starting point lies in Marx’s key proposition that art is part of the superstructure of society which arises on and is conditioned by the economic base, the forces and relations of production.
These core relations of production shape and condition a multitude of other social relations - political, personal, sexual and so on. They range from how a courtier looks at a king and vice versa, to how people have sex and the relations between parents and children; from how the individual relates to society to how people relate to nature; from the life of the village to the life of the metropolis.
These relations form the stuff of our lived experience and the raw material of art. Good or great art is art which achieves a precise ( the precision extends to the individual word, brushstroke or note), moving and critical representation of, and response to, such relations, especially when they are new or changing.
This can be done from a variety of political standpoints and in many different forms but it is the common core which links Shakespeare and Beckett, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Tracey Emin, Mozart, Coltrane and The Clash.
This was a letter to Socialist Worker.
Trotsky said that ‘Art must be judged first by the laws of art’, but he didn’t say what those ‘laws’ are, and the enormous differences in the art of different societies and times mean they cannot be a fixed set of rules.
So is there a Marxist aesthetic, ie a distinctive Marxist theory of what makes a work of art artistically good ? I think there is and that its starting point lies in Marx’s key proposition that art is part of the superstructure of society which arises on and is conditioned by the economic base, the forces and relations of production.
These core relations of production shape and condition a multitude of other social relations - political, personal, sexual and so on. They range from how a courtier looks at a king and vice versa, to how people have sex and the relations between parents and children; from how the individual relates to society to how people relate to nature; from the life of the village to the life of the metropolis.
These relations form the stuff of our lived experience and the raw material of art. Good or great art is art which achieves a precise ( the precision extends to the individual word, brushstroke or note), moving and critical representation of, and response to, such relations, especially when they are new or changing.
This can be done from a variety of political standpoints and in many different forms but it is the common core which links Shakespeare and Beckett, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Tracey Emin, Mozart, Coltrane and The Clash.
This was a letter to Socialist Worker.
The Emin Phenomenon or the Phenomenal Emin
Tracy Emin is a new phenomenon and consequently, like many new phenomena in the past, is met with widespread incomprehension, misunderstanding and vilification. When I read much of the press coverage she receives, including from some ‘respectable’ critics, I am reminded of the reaction, documented so tellingly by T.J.Clarke, to Manet’s Olympia when it first appeared in the Salon in 1865. Then the critics, faced with a painting that contested the prevailing conceptions of art, women, sex and class, were not even able to recognise or articulate the nature of the challenge offered, and therefore responded with misplaced sarcasm and invective. Something very similar occurs with Emin who as it happens – and I do not think this is coincidence –deals with just the same issues today. At the same time, there is very little serious or academic discussion of Emin’s work, Which is rather remarkable given the vast recent academic discourses on all things ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’. This article is an attempt to redress the balance and to argue, on the basis of her work, that Emin is a serious and important artist.
First, however, I want to discuss the nature of Emin’s fame which is one of the things about her which is new. Tracy Emin is currently the most famous contemporary artist in Britain and a woman. I don’t think this has ever happened before. Obviously there have been famous women artists in the past – Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo and so on – but they have not been the leading artists of the day. Hepworth was overshadowed by Moore and Bacon, Kahlo by Rivera, not to mention Picasso. Again this is not by chance. When the YBAs – Young British Artists – broke into the mainstream with the Sensations show in 1997, 18 out of the 42 artists exhibited were women – still a minority but a far larger minority than would have been the case in an impressionist, surrealist, abstract expressionist or pop art show, or any previous art movement that I can think of. Moreover, of that minority, not only Emin but also Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jenmy Saville, Fiona Rae, Gillian Wearing, and Sam Taylor-Wood have emerged as major figures in the art world. Clearly this reflects underlying changes in the social position of women. Equally clearly, however, there is an element of barely concealed misogynistic backlash in some of the responses to Emin.
Also new and different is the precise nature of Emin’s fame: she is a ‘celebrity’. In a sense many artists have been celebrities before – Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and especially Picasso were all celebrities of a kind (far bigger celebrities than Emin) but in their case it meant being lionised, almost worshipped, in ‘cultural’ circles. Emin is a celebrity in today’s ‘celebrity culture’, which is a mass media popular culture; It means she appears on ‘Have I Got News For You?’,’ Desert Island Discs ‘and ‘Richard and Judy’. This is a world in which there is absolutely no guarantee of deference or even respect. On the contrary this kind of celebrity, although it pays very well, actually opens Emin up to exposure and derision. The contrast is well illustrated by an anecdote about Francis Bacon. After one of his rather hazardous sexual escapades in the sixties, Bacon found himself under arrest (this was before the legalisation of homosexuality). The consequence was not being plastered all over the tabloids but a phone call from Lord (Arnold) Goodman, No.10’s legal fixer, to the metropolitan police commissioner explaining that it would not be a good idea for ‘Britain’s greatest living painter’ to appear in humiliating circumstances at Bow Street Magistrates Court. He was swiftly released. Obviously Emin enjoys no such protection.
But why, out of all the young British artists available, has Emin in particular been selected by the media for celebrity status? One reason, of course, is that she is sexually candid and the media is obsessed with all things sexual. Another reason, however, is that the media has picked up the fact that with a layer of people Emin is genuinely popular i.e. she has a fan base, and therefore her presence on a quiz or chat show is likely to boost its audience.
The very use of the term ‘fan base’, while appropriate, immediately distinguishes Emin’s fame from the fame of Henry Moore or Jackson Pollock or even Damien Hirst, but it is not intended pejoratively. It indicates that Emin’s art has reached people not normally touched by ‘fine art’ and that they have responded intensely. Who are these people and what is the nature of their response? Evidence on this can only be anecdotal and impressionistic. My evidence, for what it’s worth, is based on observing the public at the 1999 Turner Prize Show at the Tate Britain and talking to people, mainly, but not only, students at the school of Art, Design and Media where I teach, quite extensively for the last five or so years. The Turner Prize Show was significant because there were four artists represented, but something like 70-80% of the public were concentrated in Emin’s space; many of them were young women, students on school or college trips, and they were pouring intently over Emin’s work, examining it avidly and in detail. It was quite different from the way either tourists or art aficionados relate to old masters in the National Gallery. In fact I don’t think I have seen any group of gallery visitors so engaged with works of art. Subsequent conversations have broadly confirmed this picture. Emin’s fans are predominantly, though certainly not exclusively, younger women,part of the recently found audience for contemporary art but not art world insiders, and they hold their position on the basis of Emin’s work, not because of media hype, which has largely been hostile.
There is nothing mysterious or accidental here. Such people relate to Emin because Emin’s work relates, like that of no other artist I can think of, to their experience.
As virtually every other commentator on Emin begins by observing, most of her work is autobiographical. Its main subject matter is her traumas and triumphs, sufferings and joys of growing up in Margate, maturing in London and elsewhere, and so becoming the person she is today. As a result, Emin’s work is often criticised for being ‘self-centered’, ‘narcissistic’. In my opinion this criticism completely misses the point, the point so eagerly seized on by her ‘fans’, namely that the experiences re-presented in Emin’s art are not just personal experiences, but are common to a wide layer of young women growing up in this time, in this society. Normally these experiences remain private, confided perhaps to ‘best friends’ but otherwise hidden from public view and therefore in a sense shameful. By making these experiences into art (which is different from just exposing or ‘confessing’ them ). Emin actually engages in a process of ‘democratic sharing’ with her audience. It is particularly democratic because the work is not didactic and does not preach. It does not seek to impose or determine a specific response. It simply says “This is what happened to me; this is how I felt about it.” And perhaps “This is how I dealt with it.” If it strikes a chord, as it evidently often does, then so be it.
Emin’s first work to make a public impact, her tent, or Everyone I Ever Slept With, 1963-95, shown in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1997, is a good example of this. The smallish tent sits on the gallery floor . On the inside Emin has sewn the names of her bedmates of the previous thirty years. To see or experience the work the viewer has to crawl into the tent. Thus Emin has created a ‘private’ space, a den with private information about her life which the public is invited to share. The fact, which she has made a point of calling attention to, that the names included not just lovers but also others she had shared “the intimacy of sleep” with (such as her twin brothers and aborted foetuses) is important. It does not negate the sexual interpretation of the title, which in our culture is the obvious first reading, but it modifies it, ensuring that the sexual is not separated from the emotional. What we are offered to share is not gossip or titillation but feelings, including painful feelings.
Emin’s most famous work, My Bed, is actually a complex piece which has appeared in different forms in different places, for example with and without a noose hanging over the bed, and which I cannot explore fully here, but essentially it works on the same principle. According to the sexist stereotype, women are the homemakers and responsible for clearing up. A messed up house shames a woman, makes her a ‘slut’, much more than it does a man. The bedroom and above all the bed itself represents a place of privacy, intimacy and sex, pain and illness. The stained sheets are a visible trace of all this and thus taboo. ‘You don’t wash your dirty linen in public.’ My Bed takes all this as its starting point and confronts it, knowing that for some of us all the time and many of us some of the time it is a lie. It is a spectacular coming out. And out there thousands, perhaps millions of people say, openly or privately, “Yes! I’ve been there, I know what that’s about!” That is the mechanism and that is why My Bed is one of those few works of contemporary art that captures people’s imagination and stays in the public memory.
In this context it is well worth dealing with the prevalent notion that Emin is lacking in technical artistic skills. For example much of the media coverage of My Bed seemed based on the assumption that she had simply transplanted her actual bed or bedroom into the Tate. This, as a moment’s thought would have made clear, was nonsense. My Bed, which had already appeared in Tokyo, was a consciously constructed work, as much a made work of art as Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom. In so far as it was a sufficiently convincing representation of a disordered bedroom to persuade journalists that it was the real thing this is testimony to Emin’s skill, and actually it was visually very powerful.
In fact Emin is a skilled practitioner in a range of media, but it is her drawing as manifested in her many monoprints that I particularly want to focus on. In my opinion Emin’s drawing is superb. This, of course, is a value judgement which is difficult to justify or even convey in words. I would make two points: first, that Emin is able, with great economy, to achieve very accurate and telling representations. Foe example, we know from a number of photographs what Emin’s legs look like; they have a peculiar athletic rangy quality. Her drawings capture this quality exactly. Compare the photograph I’ve Got It All with the monoprints I See It Thoe and Walking Drunk In High Shoes. Second, that her line combines strength and vulnerability, confidence and pain in exactly the right proportions for her subject matter, and matching visual form to intellectual/emotional content is precisely the key skill of the visual artist.
To bring out further the significance of Emin’s art I shall examine in turn three of its themes – class, sex and art – which are more or less omnipresent and which taken together make for its distinctiveness and power.
CLASS:
Perhaps the most immediately striking and unusual thing about both Emin’s persona and her work is the way in which she positions herself as a working class artist. The whole question of class and art is so highly charged that I must straight away take care to explain precisely what I mean, and I don’t mean, by this statement.
Clearly Emin is not currently working class in any shape or form. She is probably a millionaire, certainly rich, and she functions , as all successful visual artists do, as boss of her own small business. Nor am I referring to her class background which was complex. Up to thje age of seven her mother had a largeish hotel in Margate but then, when she broke up with Emin’s father, bankruptcy and poverty ensued and Emin’s youth, whether or not strictly proletarian, was plebeian. As we know this had a major influence on her art, but that is still not what I mean here. Nor is she an artist who sees or presents herself as associated with or representative of, the working class movement (like John Heartfield or Diego Rivera, to give classic examples). What she does do, however, is present herself as culturally working class. This is evident in the whole way in which she conducts herself: in her accent, of course, but more importantly in what she says and how she says it. She makes no attempt to engage in ‘intellectual art speak’ but sticks to unaffected everyday language. (Unlike, for example, Jake Chapman of the Chapman Brothers, who is highly accomplished at theoretical discourse.) This was an element of her drunken walk out from the Channel 4 art discussion programme with David Sylvester, Waldemar Januscek et al – “I’d rather be with my mum and my friends” – and plays a part in her willingness to participate in popular cultural shows. This is highly unusual in the art world, the ethos of which is very upper class. There has always, of course, been a smattering of working class artists rising through the art schools but normally they adopt the dominant cultural style.
The most obvious parallel to Emin in this is Damien Hirst, especially the young Hirst, but there is a difference: in Hirst the working class attitude does not carry over into the work itself, with Emin it does. The language used in her many appliquéd quilts/blankets, her films and her monoprint drawings is the language of the street, including the swear words, the grammatical errors and the misspellings. The question of the spelling mistakes is interesting here. Emin denies either that she has dyslexia or that they are deliberate; she insists that she simply makes mistakes but doesn’t care . But I am convinced that Emin is being a little disingenuous here. First, the spelling mistakes and letters wrong-way-round reference the work of Jean Michel Basquiat, originally a New York graffiti artist, and (as they do in Basquiat) carry connotations of writing on street and toilet walls. Secondly, they occur in the appliquéd (sewn) works where mistakes seem unlikely, especially in the blanket called Pysco Slut where ‘Pysco’ is much wittier and more to the point than ‘Psycho’. But, above all, the experiences her art deals with are, by and large, the experiences of working class girls.
This is the case with the short film Why I Never Became A Dancer, in my opinion one of her most important and powerful works. The film tells of Emin’s aspiration to be a dancer and her participation in a dance competition in Margate, the prize for which meant going to London. Just as she felt things are going well she finds herself surrounded by a circle of local lads (many of whom she has had sex with). At first she thinks they are clapping her, and then she realises that in fact they are chanting in unison ‘Slag, Slag, Slag’, and she runs from the ballroom in dismay. The film ends with her dancing, alone and just for herself, and saying to the camera, “Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard…this one’s for you.” It also applies to her recent film Top Spot on teenage suicide, about which Amy Lane, in Socialist Review wrote “There is nothing contained in Top Spot that does not reflect the reality of Britain’s working class estates…[It] is a painfully accurate portrayal of modern adolescent experience. ”
Just as there is an element of misogyny in the media and critical hostility to Emin so also there is an element of class prejudice. In particular I think middle class critics often miss the point of her work because the kind of experiences she deals with are not their experiences and not part of the world they inhabit. The recognition factor which is key for Emin’s ‘fans’ and for what I have called the process of ‘democratic sharing’ is missing.
Emin’s consciousness of , and concern for, this relationship with her audience was evident in her fury at Top Spot being given only an 18-plus certificate by the censors, and her consequent withdrawal of the film that would thus be prevented from reaching the very people it was intended for.
The discussion of class obviously raises the question of Emin’s politics. It is often said of her that she is not political. If this were true I would not find it a problem for, as Leon Trotsky always insisted, art cannot simply be judged on its politics. As it happens it is not true. I have already noted that Emin does not see herself or function as an artistic representative of a working class political movement – given that her formative years were the eighties this is not surprising – but she does have a political consciousness and outlook, and this is clear from many of her public statements and appearances. Broadly speaking she is on the left. She did work for Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign. She is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-war. My colleague Milly Thompson, formerly of BANK, who knows the London art scene, says that in that world Emin is known as ‘a committed socialist’. Moreover some of her recent work from 2004, exhibited in New Zealand, does deal explicitly with questions of war and peace.
Of course against this can be set the fact that Emin has now made a lot of money, doubtless has a very comfortable lifestyle, wears Vivian Westwood clothes, mixes from time to time with various unsavoury rich bastards like Charles Saachi and is evidently very pleased with this state of affairs. All of which provides good grounds for complaint from young, angry, impoverished artists.
I set this down for the record, but I do not believe that either her leftish views or her affluent lifestyle constitute major grounds for the evaluation of her art.
SEX
That sex should be a major theme in Emin’s work is hardly surprising. Sex has been a central theme in European art from the Renaissance to Picasso and beyond (not to speak of Ancient Greece and Rome, Japan and so on). But it should be said at the outset, there is no element of eroticism or titillation here, unlike in Botticelli, Titian, Bronzino, Buncher, Ingres, Renoir, Rodin, Klimt etc etc. Nor is it sexual fantasy or dreams, as we might find in surrealism. Nor is it the sex of the brothel featured so heavily in late 19th and early 20th century French art. It is real, everyday sex – as experienced by her, of course, but also by millions of other people. This, in itself, is remarkable. It seems strange to say it but I do not think there is a precedent for it in the whole of European visual art .
The history of art develops dialectically with each new generation or movement or individual artist usually defining themselves in opposition to the immediately preceding dominant trend. Part of this process is the discovery of new material, both physically and in terms of subject matter, to make art out of material which was often previously thought of as ‘unartistic’ (or vulgar, prosaic, mundane, ugly etc). This is one of the reasons why new art so often meets with the reaction that it is ‘not art’. Thus, following the call of Baudelaire, mid 18th century French art painted ‘The heroism of modern life’ as opposed to the heroes of classical mythology; thus the Post-impressionists restored form where the Impressionists has neglected it, and the Futurists and Constructivists aestheticised the machine and technology previously anathema to classicists and romantics alike. Thus Pop Art turned to the imagery of mass popular culture dismissed as kitsch by Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists. Picasso spoke once of the difficulty of finding new subject matter and cited Van Gogh’s A Pair Of Boots as an outstanding example. But find a new subject is what Tracy Emin has done.
A key feature of Emin’s treatment of sex is her disclosure, in Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-95, Why I Never Became A Dancer and her written piece Masculinity , of an early teenage phase of promiscuity in Margate. In the voiceover on Dancer she describes it as follows:
And then there was sex. It was something you could just do, and it was for free. Sex was something simple. You could got to a pub, you’d walk home, have fish and chips, then sex…on a beach, down an alley, a green, a park, even a hotel. It didn’t matter that I was young, thirteen or fourteen. It didn’t matter that they were men…19, 20, 25, 26. It never crossed my mind to ask them what the attraction was. I knew…sex was what it was…by the time I was fifteen I had stopped shagging.
I suspect that even if it is not a majority experience, such a phase among working class girls is quite common, driven by a complex mixture of low self esteem, the search for love, affection, intimacy, pleasure, excitement, desire to grow up, ambivalent yearnings for a baby a so on. Usually the experience remains hidden; hidden at the time for obvious reasons, from parents, or school and the authorities – though shared perhaps with a best friend; hidden or at least not talked about later when adult respectability has been achieved. It therefore remains largely unrecorded and unrepresented. Films and novels have occasionally visited the territory, but not, until now, the elevateded world of fine art.
Emin’s treatment of this experience appears simple – a plain rendering of the facts – but it is in fact quite complex and nuanced. In Dancer she defends herself against the charge of being a ‘slag’ and records her conviction at the time that she was “better than all those boys.” But in Masculinity she writes that she “developed the ridiculous habit of sleeping with men much older than me.” In her interview with Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show,she says she must accept some responsibility because she “egged the men on, followed them, flirted” but also that in their twenties these men should have known better than to sleep with a 14 year old. However, in the same interview, she also claims for her promiscuous phase that it was very “educational”.
This ‘ambivalence’ towards her sexual experiences runs throughout her work.
Jennifer Doyle in her essay ‘The Effect of Intimacy’ calls this “Tracey Emin’s bad-sex aesthetics” I think this term is wrong. Emin records many bad sexual experiences in her art but she does not ‘aestheticize’ them. They are not presented as anything other than bad experiences with all their negative emotional effects. She deals with childhood abuse, humiliation, abandonment, rape, and abortion in the way these things actually happen to women (never as her own or other’s fantasy material) and with the severe emotional trauma and pain they caused. There is no romanticisation of abjection (though perhaps the appliquéd ‘Love Poem’ is a partial exception to this .)
However, this central theme is held in tension with two others. The first is that her experiences , though often bad, have not proved insuperable. Yes, they were deeply painful but they were not, including the rape, ‘unspeakable’ or the worst thing imaginable. She does not, I think, revel in her suffering, only in her ability to have overcome it. Why I Never Became A Dancer ends with a seagull soaring up and away from the shores of Margate. The second is the retention, despite the traumas of the past, of an open affirmative attitude to sex and sexuality i.e. to good sex
Holding each of these three elements, each of them a humane and progressive response, in tension with each other but without allowing any of them to be compromised, is a very considerable artistic and emotional achievement.
Emin does not present herself as a feminist artist and is not generally thought of as one. The previous generation of feminist artists and critics tended to view Emin and other so-called ‘bad girls’ with distain as frivolous betrayers of the feminist/art/theory cause. But, in fact, in dealing with sex Emin deals also with sexism. Why I Never Became A Dancer confronts the – very crude – sexism rampant among certain kinds of teenage boys and young men. My Bed challenges the sexist attitude that makes a disordered bedroom much more shameful for a woman than a man. Indeed there is a sense in which the totality of her art practice and persona challenge the double standards about sex. The question of class interacts with the question of sexism here. Emin is not seen as a ‘feminist’ artist because feminism and, especially, feminism in the art world has been a largely middle class phenomenon, focusing mainly on the issues that concern middle class and professional women; how women are represented in the media, how gender affects promotion chances etc. The issues Emin deals with – how teenage girls get ‘slagged off’ and ‘broken into’ – are not recognised as feminist because they come from a different world. But the fact is that Emin tackles feminism at the sharp end. Although, as we shall see, she has also produced work about sexism in the art world.)
ART
“I need art like I need God”, is the title and content of one of Emin’s pieces in neon lighting, and ‘art’, in particular Emin’s relationship to art,is a central theme in her work. In interviews she strongly defends her own artistic integrity and the general integrity of contemporary art and consistently proclaims her faith in ‘art’. When some of her work, along with much other contemporary art, was destroyed in a warehouse fire her first public response was measured, putting the event in perspective of the real disasters that occur in the world, but she was hurt and angered by the mockery of sections of the press and public. This should not be surprising for it is through art that Emin dealt with many of her personal problems and completely transformed her life. She celebrates this - she thought of calling her last solo show at White Cube ‘Upgrade’.
One of the ways ‘art’ features in Emin’s work is through her references to other artists. Of course many artists do this – Picasso reworks themes from Velasquez and Delacroiz, Manet’s Olympia echoes the pose of Titian’s Venus D’Urbino, Warhol takes his image of Christ from Da Vinci’s Last Supper and so on – but Emin’s range of reference is broad and impressive (which gives the lie to another of the myths and misconceptions about her, prevalent in the media, that she is some kind of ‘primitive’ or ‘naif’). Most obviously she is indebted to her hero Edvard Munch, and to Egon Schiele; the use of language in both the monoprints and the blankets nods to Basquiat; the neon lighting pieces are influenced by Don Flavin and Bruce Naumann; My Bed recalls Rauschenberg’s Bed and, more subtly, the bed of Manet’s Olympia; The Helter Skelter construction references the Tatlin tower; the blanketr work in general builds on the use of sewing and textiles by feminist artists of the 70s and 80s.
Of course if quoting other artists was the main point of these works it would make them banal, but with Emin’s pieces this is not the case. Her principal tribute to Munch is Homage to Edvard Munch and All my Dead Children and is accompanied by her verbal scream (for her aborted children) which is truly disturbing and terrible. Her drawings may owe something to Schiele but are in no way imitations or similar in content. In the case of the blanket work Emin has transformed the genre, freeing it of its craft and genteel associations, and making it into vibrant dramatic new form in its own right.
One of Emin’s most important works, while remaining partly autobiographical , is also a powerful comment on the role own women in art. This was a performance piece originally entitled Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, enacted in the Gallery Andreas Brändström in Stockholm in 1996. Emin spent three weeks living naked in an enclosed studio space, visible to the public during gallery opening hours, through fish-eye lenses in the walls. At first she is just there being observed, then gradually she starts to paint. The performance was recorded, and we can see it in a photo series called The Life Model Goes Mad.
The piece has many meanings but among them is the fact that traditionally, say one hundred years ago at the birth of modernism with Picasso and Matisse in Paris, or even fifty or thirty years ago, the principle role of women in art was as models (and the line between model, lover, and prostitute was often blurred). As the Guerilla Girls put it in their famous poster Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum?, ‘less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are female, but 88% of the nudes are female.’ If Emin had been around in 1900 or 1950 the combination of her class and gender would almost certainly have made her a model and not an artist. Indeed Emin actually was a life model for a while at the start of her career. Recently things have begun to change and Emin is part of that change. The Life Model Goes Mad (the ‘goes mad’ is a reference to her earlier blanket piece – and self adopted slogan – Mad Tracey From Margate) enacts the process; the object becomes subject, the passive becomes active, the life model turns into an artist. As usual in Emin the piece is both autobiographical and socially representative at the same time.
CONCLUSION
“Remember the golden rule…Those who have the gold make the rules.”
As we know from Marx, in class divided societies the ruling class invariably dominates the culture (though seldom completely). However the domination in the field of visual art, especially painting and sculpture has been more complete, more extreme that in other art forms. This is because whereas the poet or novelist needs only pen and paper, the visual art must be embodied in materials (which are very expensive), stored, and exhibited, either in museums and galleries or in public places (which of course are never controlled by the public). And because in the capitalist epoch the art market has focused on the buying and selling of ‘unique’ and ‘original’ works, in contrast to music and literature which centre on either the large scale selling of mechanical reproductions – books, records, CDs etc – or live performances to collective audiences. As a result, from Tutankhamun to Lorenzo de Medici and Henry VIII to Rockefeller and Saatchi, visual art has been dominated by the very rich and very powerful. This in turn has meant that the exclusion and marginalisation of working class people, women and black people has been even more marked in visual art than in other art forms. There is no female painter whose standing in the canon compares with Jane Austin or George Elliot. There is, to my knowledge, not a single painting by a black artist in the National Gallery, and until very recently, there were none in the Tate either. In this context the existence and work of Tracey Emin is both an example of limited change that has occurred and a challenge to the present and the future .
Marx also tells us that art, like religion, philosophy and politics, is part of the superstructure of society which arises from and is conditioned by the economic base. I would add that the economic base i.e the forces and relations of productions give rise to and shape a developing ensemble of social relations which range from how people dress with all its connotations, to family and sexual relations, to how people look at a king or a beggar and how a king or a beggar looks at the people, to how we experience the sea, the countryside and the city. What major art does is express and comment upon these changing social relations in a visually powerful way. Giotto and Michelangelo, Holbein and Breughal, Hals and Rembrandt, Hogarth, Constable and Joseph Wright of Derby, David and Goya, Courbet and Manet, Picasso, Leger, Malevich, Rodchenko, Ernst, Bacon, and Warhol all do this in their different ways. And so does Emin.
The changing social relations that Emin addresses are those shaping the relative positions in society of women and men, especially young working class women and men. The changes in this sphere in the course of my lifetime i.e the last half century or so, have been spectacular: the huge rise in the number of women (especially married women) in paid labour; the Equal Pay Act; the Sex Discrimination Act; the pill; legalised abortion, freer divorce and lip service to equality all over the place. In other ways they remain strictly limited: no fundamental change in the division of labour in the home, no equal pay in reality, women still hugely underrepresented in top jobs, sexist images all over the media. Of course the change is not evenly spread across society. In my judgement the least has been at the very top amongst those who own the wealth, run industry and finance, and control the state. There bourgeois male power remains firmly entrenched. The biggest change has been among the professional middle classes – academics, intellectuals, media people etc. where the success of girls in education and higher education has had it’s effect and equal opportunities policies abound. Many working class women have also benefited from the changes, from the shift in general attitudes and the increased educational and job opportunities. But for the majority, especially in the manual as opposed to white collar working class, where money for child care is scarce or non-existent, and the struggle for survival dominates, the change has been minimal. Some working class men, in the main the politically more progressive, have changed their attitudes, but many have not and the old sexism remains rampant. The problems are particularly acute among teenagers and young men anxious to establish their virility, and this is what working class girls and young women have to cope with.
These are the contradictions which Emin has lived and which her art expresses and responds to with clarity and passion. Politically there is an obvious problem in that while Emin’s work, for all its dealing with trauma, ultimately carries a message of hope, it is hope for an individual not a collective or social solution, and this can only be possible for a small minority. Unfortunately we don’t get our art to political order and given the historical period of Emin’s artistic formation, the eighties and early nineties, it is hardly surprising that collective working class emancipation through political action was not high on her agenda. What matters more than the correct politics is whether the problems addressed are real, whether the art has integrity and whether it is visually imaginative and powerful. Emin’s work succeeds on all the counts with the extra factor that it really speaks to people, and people beyond the normal range of ‘art lovers’, in a way that is achieved by no other contemporary artist.
A cut version of this article appeared in the Journal of International Socialism
First, however, I want to discuss the nature of Emin’s fame which is one of the things about her which is new. Tracy Emin is currently the most famous contemporary artist in Britain and a woman. I don’t think this has ever happened before. Obviously there have been famous women artists in the past – Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo and so on – but they have not been the leading artists of the day. Hepworth was overshadowed by Moore and Bacon, Kahlo by Rivera, not to mention Picasso. Again this is not by chance. When the YBAs – Young British Artists – broke into the mainstream with the Sensations show in 1997, 18 out of the 42 artists exhibited were women – still a minority but a far larger minority than would have been the case in an impressionist, surrealist, abstract expressionist or pop art show, or any previous art movement that I can think of. Moreover, of that minority, not only Emin but also Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jenmy Saville, Fiona Rae, Gillian Wearing, and Sam Taylor-Wood have emerged as major figures in the art world. Clearly this reflects underlying changes in the social position of women. Equally clearly, however, there is an element of barely concealed misogynistic backlash in some of the responses to Emin.
Also new and different is the precise nature of Emin’s fame: she is a ‘celebrity’. In a sense many artists have been celebrities before – Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and especially Picasso were all celebrities of a kind (far bigger celebrities than Emin) but in their case it meant being lionised, almost worshipped, in ‘cultural’ circles. Emin is a celebrity in today’s ‘celebrity culture’, which is a mass media popular culture; It means she appears on ‘Have I Got News For You?’,’ Desert Island Discs ‘and ‘Richard and Judy’. This is a world in which there is absolutely no guarantee of deference or even respect. On the contrary this kind of celebrity, although it pays very well, actually opens Emin up to exposure and derision. The contrast is well illustrated by an anecdote about Francis Bacon. After one of his rather hazardous sexual escapades in the sixties, Bacon found himself under arrest (this was before the legalisation of homosexuality). The consequence was not being plastered all over the tabloids but a phone call from Lord (Arnold) Goodman, No.10’s legal fixer, to the metropolitan police commissioner explaining that it would not be a good idea for ‘Britain’s greatest living painter’ to appear in humiliating circumstances at Bow Street Magistrates Court. He was swiftly released. Obviously Emin enjoys no such protection.
But why, out of all the young British artists available, has Emin in particular been selected by the media for celebrity status? One reason, of course, is that she is sexually candid and the media is obsessed with all things sexual. Another reason, however, is that the media has picked up the fact that with a layer of people Emin is genuinely popular i.e. she has a fan base, and therefore her presence on a quiz or chat show is likely to boost its audience.
The very use of the term ‘fan base’, while appropriate, immediately distinguishes Emin’s fame from the fame of Henry Moore or Jackson Pollock or even Damien Hirst, but it is not intended pejoratively. It indicates that Emin’s art has reached people not normally touched by ‘fine art’ and that they have responded intensely. Who are these people and what is the nature of their response? Evidence on this can only be anecdotal and impressionistic. My evidence, for what it’s worth, is based on observing the public at the 1999 Turner Prize Show at the Tate Britain and talking to people, mainly, but not only, students at the school of Art, Design and Media where I teach, quite extensively for the last five or so years. The Turner Prize Show was significant because there were four artists represented, but something like 70-80% of the public were concentrated in Emin’s space; many of them were young women, students on school or college trips, and they were pouring intently over Emin’s work, examining it avidly and in detail. It was quite different from the way either tourists or art aficionados relate to old masters in the National Gallery. In fact I don’t think I have seen any group of gallery visitors so engaged with works of art. Subsequent conversations have broadly confirmed this picture. Emin’s fans are predominantly, though certainly not exclusively, younger women,part of the recently found audience for contemporary art but not art world insiders, and they hold their position on the basis of Emin’s work, not because of media hype, which has largely been hostile.
There is nothing mysterious or accidental here. Such people relate to Emin because Emin’s work relates, like that of no other artist I can think of, to their experience.
As virtually every other commentator on Emin begins by observing, most of her work is autobiographical. Its main subject matter is her traumas and triumphs, sufferings and joys of growing up in Margate, maturing in London and elsewhere, and so becoming the person she is today. As a result, Emin’s work is often criticised for being ‘self-centered’, ‘narcissistic’. In my opinion this criticism completely misses the point, the point so eagerly seized on by her ‘fans’, namely that the experiences re-presented in Emin’s art are not just personal experiences, but are common to a wide layer of young women growing up in this time, in this society. Normally these experiences remain private, confided perhaps to ‘best friends’ but otherwise hidden from public view and therefore in a sense shameful. By making these experiences into art (which is different from just exposing or ‘confessing’ them ). Emin actually engages in a process of ‘democratic sharing’ with her audience. It is particularly democratic because the work is not didactic and does not preach. It does not seek to impose or determine a specific response. It simply says “This is what happened to me; this is how I felt about it.” And perhaps “This is how I dealt with it.” If it strikes a chord, as it evidently often does, then so be it.
Emin’s first work to make a public impact, her tent, or Everyone I Ever Slept With, 1963-95, shown in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1997, is a good example of this. The smallish tent sits on the gallery floor . On the inside Emin has sewn the names of her bedmates of the previous thirty years. To see or experience the work the viewer has to crawl into the tent. Thus Emin has created a ‘private’ space, a den with private information about her life which the public is invited to share. The fact, which she has made a point of calling attention to, that the names included not just lovers but also others she had shared “the intimacy of sleep” with (such as her twin brothers and aborted foetuses) is important. It does not negate the sexual interpretation of the title, which in our culture is the obvious first reading, but it modifies it, ensuring that the sexual is not separated from the emotional. What we are offered to share is not gossip or titillation but feelings, including painful feelings.
Emin’s most famous work, My Bed, is actually a complex piece which has appeared in different forms in different places, for example with and without a noose hanging over the bed, and which I cannot explore fully here, but essentially it works on the same principle. According to the sexist stereotype, women are the homemakers and responsible for clearing up. A messed up house shames a woman, makes her a ‘slut’, much more than it does a man. The bedroom and above all the bed itself represents a place of privacy, intimacy and sex, pain and illness. The stained sheets are a visible trace of all this and thus taboo. ‘You don’t wash your dirty linen in public.’ My Bed takes all this as its starting point and confronts it, knowing that for some of us all the time and many of us some of the time it is a lie. It is a spectacular coming out. And out there thousands, perhaps millions of people say, openly or privately, “Yes! I’ve been there, I know what that’s about!” That is the mechanism and that is why My Bed is one of those few works of contemporary art that captures people’s imagination and stays in the public memory.
In this context it is well worth dealing with the prevalent notion that Emin is lacking in technical artistic skills. For example much of the media coverage of My Bed seemed based on the assumption that she had simply transplanted her actual bed or bedroom into the Tate. This, as a moment’s thought would have made clear, was nonsense. My Bed, which had already appeared in Tokyo, was a consciously constructed work, as much a made work of art as Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom. In so far as it was a sufficiently convincing representation of a disordered bedroom to persuade journalists that it was the real thing this is testimony to Emin’s skill, and actually it was visually very powerful.
In fact Emin is a skilled practitioner in a range of media, but it is her drawing as manifested in her many monoprints that I particularly want to focus on. In my opinion Emin’s drawing is superb. This, of course, is a value judgement which is difficult to justify or even convey in words. I would make two points: first, that Emin is able, with great economy, to achieve very accurate and telling representations. Foe example, we know from a number of photographs what Emin’s legs look like; they have a peculiar athletic rangy quality. Her drawings capture this quality exactly. Compare the photograph I’ve Got It All with the monoprints I See It Thoe and Walking Drunk In High Shoes. Second, that her line combines strength and vulnerability, confidence and pain in exactly the right proportions for her subject matter, and matching visual form to intellectual/emotional content is precisely the key skill of the visual artist.
To bring out further the significance of Emin’s art I shall examine in turn three of its themes – class, sex and art – which are more or less omnipresent and which taken together make for its distinctiveness and power.
CLASS:
Perhaps the most immediately striking and unusual thing about both Emin’s persona and her work is the way in which she positions herself as a working class artist. The whole question of class and art is so highly charged that I must straight away take care to explain precisely what I mean, and I don’t mean, by this statement.
Clearly Emin is not currently working class in any shape or form. She is probably a millionaire, certainly rich, and she functions , as all successful visual artists do, as boss of her own small business. Nor am I referring to her class background which was complex. Up to thje age of seven her mother had a largeish hotel in Margate but then, when she broke up with Emin’s father, bankruptcy and poverty ensued and Emin’s youth, whether or not strictly proletarian, was plebeian. As we know this had a major influence on her art, but that is still not what I mean here. Nor is she an artist who sees or presents herself as associated with or representative of, the working class movement (like John Heartfield or Diego Rivera, to give classic examples). What she does do, however, is present herself as culturally working class. This is evident in the whole way in which she conducts herself: in her accent, of course, but more importantly in what she says and how she says it. She makes no attempt to engage in ‘intellectual art speak’ but sticks to unaffected everyday language. (Unlike, for example, Jake Chapman of the Chapman Brothers, who is highly accomplished at theoretical discourse.) This was an element of her drunken walk out from the Channel 4 art discussion programme with David Sylvester, Waldemar Januscek et al – “I’d rather be with my mum and my friends” – and plays a part in her willingness to participate in popular cultural shows. This is highly unusual in the art world, the ethos of which is very upper class. There has always, of course, been a smattering of working class artists rising through the art schools but normally they adopt the dominant cultural style.
The most obvious parallel to Emin in this is Damien Hirst, especially the young Hirst, but there is a difference: in Hirst the working class attitude does not carry over into the work itself, with Emin it does. The language used in her many appliquéd quilts/blankets, her films and her monoprint drawings is the language of the street, including the swear words, the grammatical errors and the misspellings. The question of the spelling mistakes is interesting here. Emin denies either that she has dyslexia or that they are deliberate; she insists that she simply makes mistakes but doesn’t care . But I am convinced that Emin is being a little disingenuous here. First, the spelling mistakes and letters wrong-way-round reference the work of Jean Michel Basquiat, originally a New York graffiti artist, and (as they do in Basquiat) carry connotations of writing on street and toilet walls. Secondly, they occur in the appliquéd (sewn) works where mistakes seem unlikely, especially in the blanket called Pysco Slut where ‘Pysco’ is much wittier and more to the point than ‘Psycho’. But, above all, the experiences her art deals with are, by and large, the experiences of working class girls.
This is the case with the short film Why I Never Became A Dancer, in my opinion one of her most important and powerful works. The film tells of Emin’s aspiration to be a dancer and her participation in a dance competition in Margate, the prize for which meant going to London. Just as she felt things are going well she finds herself surrounded by a circle of local lads (many of whom she has had sex with). At first she thinks they are clapping her, and then she realises that in fact they are chanting in unison ‘Slag, Slag, Slag’, and she runs from the ballroom in dismay. The film ends with her dancing, alone and just for herself, and saying to the camera, “Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard…this one’s for you.” It also applies to her recent film Top Spot on teenage suicide, about which Amy Lane, in Socialist Review wrote “There is nothing contained in Top Spot that does not reflect the reality of Britain’s working class estates…[It] is a painfully accurate portrayal of modern adolescent experience. ”
Just as there is an element of misogyny in the media and critical hostility to Emin so also there is an element of class prejudice. In particular I think middle class critics often miss the point of her work because the kind of experiences she deals with are not their experiences and not part of the world they inhabit. The recognition factor which is key for Emin’s ‘fans’ and for what I have called the process of ‘democratic sharing’ is missing.
Emin’s consciousness of , and concern for, this relationship with her audience was evident in her fury at Top Spot being given only an 18-plus certificate by the censors, and her consequent withdrawal of the film that would thus be prevented from reaching the very people it was intended for.
The discussion of class obviously raises the question of Emin’s politics. It is often said of her that she is not political. If this were true I would not find it a problem for, as Leon Trotsky always insisted, art cannot simply be judged on its politics. As it happens it is not true. I have already noted that Emin does not see herself or function as an artistic representative of a working class political movement – given that her formative years were the eighties this is not surprising – but she does have a political consciousness and outlook, and this is clear from many of her public statements and appearances. Broadly speaking she is on the left. She did work for Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign. She is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-war. My colleague Milly Thompson, formerly of BANK, who knows the London art scene, says that in that world Emin is known as ‘a committed socialist’. Moreover some of her recent work from 2004, exhibited in New Zealand, does deal explicitly with questions of war and peace.
Of course against this can be set the fact that Emin has now made a lot of money, doubtless has a very comfortable lifestyle, wears Vivian Westwood clothes, mixes from time to time with various unsavoury rich bastards like Charles Saachi and is evidently very pleased with this state of affairs. All of which provides good grounds for complaint from young, angry, impoverished artists.
I set this down for the record, but I do not believe that either her leftish views or her affluent lifestyle constitute major grounds for the evaluation of her art.
SEX
That sex should be a major theme in Emin’s work is hardly surprising. Sex has been a central theme in European art from the Renaissance to Picasso and beyond (not to speak of Ancient Greece and Rome, Japan and so on). But it should be said at the outset, there is no element of eroticism or titillation here, unlike in Botticelli, Titian, Bronzino, Buncher, Ingres, Renoir, Rodin, Klimt etc etc. Nor is it sexual fantasy or dreams, as we might find in surrealism. Nor is it the sex of the brothel featured so heavily in late 19th and early 20th century French art. It is real, everyday sex – as experienced by her, of course, but also by millions of other people. This, in itself, is remarkable. It seems strange to say it but I do not think there is a precedent for it in the whole of European visual art .
The history of art develops dialectically with each new generation or movement or individual artist usually defining themselves in opposition to the immediately preceding dominant trend. Part of this process is the discovery of new material, both physically and in terms of subject matter, to make art out of material which was often previously thought of as ‘unartistic’ (or vulgar, prosaic, mundane, ugly etc). This is one of the reasons why new art so often meets with the reaction that it is ‘not art’. Thus, following the call of Baudelaire, mid 18th century French art painted ‘The heroism of modern life’ as opposed to the heroes of classical mythology; thus the Post-impressionists restored form where the Impressionists has neglected it, and the Futurists and Constructivists aestheticised the machine and technology previously anathema to classicists and romantics alike. Thus Pop Art turned to the imagery of mass popular culture dismissed as kitsch by Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists. Picasso spoke once of the difficulty of finding new subject matter and cited Van Gogh’s A Pair Of Boots as an outstanding example. But find a new subject is what Tracy Emin has done.
A key feature of Emin’s treatment of sex is her disclosure, in Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-95, Why I Never Became A Dancer and her written piece Masculinity , of an early teenage phase of promiscuity in Margate. In the voiceover on Dancer she describes it as follows:
And then there was sex. It was something you could just do, and it was for free. Sex was something simple. You could got to a pub, you’d walk home, have fish and chips, then sex…on a beach, down an alley, a green, a park, even a hotel. It didn’t matter that I was young, thirteen or fourteen. It didn’t matter that they were men…19, 20, 25, 26. It never crossed my mind to ask them what the attraction was. I knew…sex was what it was…by the time I was fifteen I had stopped shagging.
I suspect that even if it is not a majority experience, such a phase among working class girls is quite common, driven by a complex mixture of low self esteem, the search for love, affection, intimacy, pleasure, excitement, desire to grow up, ambivalent yearnings for a baby a so on. Usually the experience remains hidden; hidden at the time for obvious reasons, from parents, or school and the authorities – though shared perhaps with a best friend; hidden or at least not talked about later when adult respectability has been achieved. It therefore remains largely unrecorded and unrepresented. Films and novels have occasionally visited the territory, but not, until now, the elevateded world of fine art.
Emin’s treatment of this experience appears simple – a plain rendering of the facts – but it is in fact quite complex and nuanced. In Dancer she defends herself against the charge of being a ‘slag’ and records her conviction at the time that she was “better than all those boys.” But in Masculinity she writes that she “developed the ridiculous habit of sleeping with men much older than me.” In her interview with Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show,she says she must accept some responsibility because she “egged the men on, followed them, flirted” but also that in their twenties these men should have known better than to sleep with a 14 year old. However, in the same interview, she also claims for her promiscuous phase that it was very “educational”.
This ‘ambivalence’ towards her sexual experiences runs throughout her work.
Jennifer Doyle in her essay ‘The Effect of Intimacy’ calls this “Tracey Emin’s bad-sex aesthetics” I think this term is wrong. Emin records many bad sexual experiences in her art but she does not ‘aestheticize’ them. They are not presented as anything other than bad experiences with all their negative emotional effects. She deals with childhood abuse, humiliation, abandonment, rape, and abortion in the way these things actually happen to women (never as her own or other’s fantasy material) and with the severe emotional trauma and pain they caused. There is no romanticisation of abjection (though perhaps the appliquéd ‘Love Poem’ is a partial exception to this .)
However, this central theme is held in tension with two others. The first is that her experiences , though often bad, have not proved insuperable. Yes, they were deeply painful but they were not, including the rape, ‘unspeakable’ or the worst thing imaginable. She does not, I think, revel in her suffering, only in her ability to have overcome it. Why I Never Became A Dancer ends with a seagull soaring up and away from the shores of Margate. The second is the retention, despite the traumas of the past, of an open affirmative attitude to sex and sexuality i.e. to good sex
You don’t fuck me over
You gently lift me out of bed
Lay me on the floor
And make love to me
Holding each of these three elements, each of them a humane and progressive response, in tension with each other but without allowing any of them to be compromised, is a very considerable artistic and emotional achievement.
Emin does not present herself as a feminist artist and is not generally thought of as one. The previous generation of feminist artists and critics tended to view Emin and other so-called ‘bad girls’ with distain as frivolous betrayers of the feminist/art/theory cause. But, in fact, in dealing with sex Emin deals also with sexism. Why I Never Became A Dancer confronts the – very crude – sexism rampant among certain kinds of teenage boys and young men. My Bed challenges the sexist attitude that makes a disordered bedroom much more shameful for a woman than a man. Indeed there is a sense in which the totality of her art practice and persona challenge the double standards about sex. The question of class interacts with the question of sexism here. Emin is not seen as a ‘feminist’ artist because feminism and, especially, feminism in the art world has been a largely middle class phenomenon, focusing mainly on the issues that concern middle class and professional women; how women are represented in the media, how gender affects promotion chances etc. The issues Emin deals with – how teenage girls get ‘slagged off’ and ‘broken into’ – are not recognised as feminist because they come from a different world. But the fact is that Emin tackles feminism at the sharp end. Although, as we shall see, she has also produced work about sexism in the art world.)
ART
“I need art like I need God”, is the title and content of one of Emin’s pieces in neon lighting, and ‘art’, in particular Emin’s relationship to art,is a central theme in her work. In interviews she strongly defends her own artistic integrity and the general integrity of contemporary art and consistently proclaims her faith in ‘art’. When some of her work, along with much other contemporary art, was destroyed in a warehouse fire her first public response was measured, putting the event in perspective of the real disasters that occur in the world, but she was hurt and angered by the mockery of sections of the press and public. This should not be surprising for it is through art that Emin dealt with many of her personal problems and completely transformed her life. She celebrates this - she thought of calling her last solo show at White Cube ‘Upgrade’.
One of the ways ‘art’ features in Emin’s work is through her references to other artists. Of course many artists do this – Picasso reworks themes from Velasquez and Delacroiz, Manet’s Olympia echoes the pose of Titian’s Venus D’Urbino, Warhol takes his image of Christ from Da Vinci’s Last Supper and so on – but Emin’s range of reference is broad and impressive (which gives the lie to another of the myths and misconceptions about her, prevalent in the media, that she is some kind of ‘primitive’ or ‘naif’). Most obviously she is indebted to her hero Edvard Munch, and to Egon Schiele; the use of language in both the monoprints and the blankets nods to Basquiat; the neon lighting pieces are influenced by Don Flavin and Bruce Naumann; My Bed recalls Rauschenberg’s Bed and, more subtly, the bed of Manet’s Olympia; The Helter Skelter construction references the Tatlin tower; the blanketr work in general builds on the use of sewing and textiles by feminist artists of the 70s and 80s.
Of course if quoting other artists was the main point of these works it would make them banal, but with Emin’s pieces this is not the case. Her principal tribute to Munch is Homage to Edvard Munch and All my Dead Children and is accompanied by her verbal scream (for her aborted children) which is truly disturbing and terrible. Her drawings may owe something to Schiele but are in no way imitations or similar in content. In the case of the blanket work Emin has transformed the genre, freeing it of its craft and genteel associations, and making it into vibrant dramatic new form in its own right.
One of Emin’s most important works, while remaining partly autobiographical , is also a powerful comment on the role own women in art. This was a performance piece originally entitled Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, enacted in the Gallery Andreas Brändström in Stockholm in 1996. Emin spent three weeks living naked in an enclosed studio space, visible to the public during gallery opening hours, through fish-eye lenses in the walls. At first she is just there being observed, then gradually she starts to paint. The performance was recorded, and we can see it in a photo series called The Life Model Goes Mad.
The piece has many meanings but among them is the fact that traditionally, say one hundred years ago at the birth of modernism with Picasso and Matisse in Paris, or even fifty or thirty years ago, the principle role of women in art was as models (and the line between model, lover, and prostitute was often blurred). As the Guerilla Girls put it in their famous poster Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum?, ‘less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are female, but 88% of the nudes are female.’ If Emin had been around in 1900 or 1950 the combination of her class and gender would almost certainly have made her a model and not an artist. Indeed Emin actually was a life model for a while at the start of her career. Recently things have begun to change and Emin is part of that change. The Life Model Goes Mad (the ‘goes mad’ is a reference to her earlier blanket piece – and self adopted slogan – Mad Tracey From Margate) enacts the process; the object becomes subject, the passive becomes active, the life model turns into an artist. As usual in Emin the piece is both autobiographical and socially representative at the same time.
CONCLUSION
“Remember the golden rule…Those who have the gold make the rules.”
As we know from Marx, in class divided societies the ruling class invariably dominates the culture (though seldom completely). However the domination in the field of visual art, especially painting and sculpture has been more complete, more extreme that in other art forms. This is because whereas the poet or novelist needs only pen and paper, the visual art must be embodied in materials (which are very expensive), stored, and exhibited, either in museums and galleries or in public places (which of course are never controlled by the public). And because in the capitalist epoch the art market has focused on the buying and selling of ‘unique’ and ‘original’ works, in contrast to music and literature which centre on either the large scale selling of mechanical reproductions – books, records, CDs etc – or live performances to collective audiences. As a result, from Tutankhamun to Lorenzo de Medici and Henry VIII to Rockefeller and Saatchi, visual art has been dominated by the very rich and very powerful. This in turn has meant that the exclusion and marginalisation of working class people, women and black people has been even more marked in visual art than in other art forms. There is no female painter whose standing in the canon compares with Jane Austin or George Elliot. There is, to my knowledge, not a single painting by a black artist in the National Gallery, and until very recently, there were none in the Tate either. In this context the existence and work of Tracey Emin is both an example of limited change that has occurred and a challenge to the present and the future .
Marx also tells us that art, like religion, philosophy and politics, is part of the superstructure of society which arises from and is conditioned by the economic base. I would add that the economic base i.e the forces and relations of productions give rise to and shape a developing ensemble of social relations which range from how people dress with all its connotations, to family and sexual relations, to how people look at a king or a beggar and how a king or a beggar looks at the people, to how we experience the sea, the countryside and the city. What major art does is express and comment upon these changing social relations in a visually powerful way. Giotto and Michelangelo, Holbein and Breughal, Hals and Rembrandt, Hogarth, Constable and Joseph Wright of Derby, David and Goya, Courbet and Manet, Picasso, Leger, Malevich, Rodchenko, Ernst, Bacon, and Warhol all do this in their different ways. And so does Emin.
The changing social relations that Emin addresses are those shaping the relative positions in society of women and men, especially young working class women and men. The changes in this sphere in the course of my lifetime i.e the last half century or so, have been spectacular: the huge rise in the number of women (especially married women) in paid labour; the Equal Pay Act; the Sex Discrimination Act; the pill; legalised abortion, freer divorce and lip service to equality all over the place. In other ways they remain strictly limited: no fundamental change in the division of labour in the home, no equal pay in reality, women still hugely underrepresented in top jobs, sexist images all over the media. Of course the change is not evenly spread across society. In my judgement the least has been at the very top amongst those who own the wealth, run industry and finance, and control the state. There bourgeois male power remains firmly entrenched. The biggest change has been among the professional middle classes – academics, intellectuals, media people etc. where the success of girls in education and higher education has had it’s effect and equal opportunities policies abound. Many working class women have also benefited from the changes, from the shift in general attitudes and the increased educational and job opportunities. But for the majority, especially in the manual as opposed to white collar working class, where money for child care is scarce or non-existent, and the struggle for survival dominates, the change has been minimal. Some working class men, in the main the politically more progressive, have changed their attitudes, but many have not and the old sexism remains rampant. The problems are particularly acute among teenagers and young men anxious to establish their virility, and this is what working class girls and young women have to cope with.
These are the contradictions which Emin has lived and which her art expresses and responds to with clarity and passion. Politically there is an obvious problem in that while Emin’s work, for all its dealing with trauma, ultimately carries a message of hope, it is hope for an individual not a collective or social solution, and this can only be possible for a small minority. Unfortunately we don’t get our art to political order and given the historical period of Emin’s artistic formation, the eighties and early nineties, it is hardly surprising that collective working class emancipation through political action was not high on her agenda. What matters more than the correct politics is whether the problems addressed are real, whether the art has integrity and whether it is visually imaginative and powerful. Emin’s work succeeds on all the counts with the extra factor that it really speaks to people, and people beyond the normal range of ‘art lovers’, in a way that is achieved by no other contemporary artist.
A cut version of this article appeared in the Journal of International Socialism
Art versus War
Art and war represent opposite poles of history and society: the creative versus the destructive, the human versus the inhuman, yet throughout the history of so-called ‘civilisation’ art ahas been dominated by society’s rulers (“The class that controls the means of material production control also the means of mental production” – Karl Marx) and consequently has been used since the pharohs and the ancient greeks to glorify war and it’s victors. Occasionally this tradition has produced a masterpiece such as Paulo Ucelo’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1450), which celebrates Florance’s triumph over it’s nearby rival Sienna. But what distinguishes this painting is it’s superb combination of form and colour and it’s pioneering development of perspective, not it’s depiction of war.
In the main, however the glorification of war has resulted in an abundance of mediocre hackwork: countless kings on horseback pretending to be about to fight; innumerable ‘heroic’ commanders dying nobly. Victorian Britain specialised in imperialist art – spectacular cavalry charges mowing down the natives and such like – most of it painted badly.
In the 20th century the pattern changes and art, serious art at least, develops much more as a critic and opponant of war. But before discussing this we must go back to the early 19th century to the first, and perhaops still the greatest, of all anti-war artists, Francisco Goya.
Goya’s great painting The Third of May 1808, shows the execution of Spanish peasant insurgents by the occupying French army. The firing squad, whose shoulders are hunched and faces obscured, appear anonymous and ruthless. The central peasant figure, is bathed in light and flings out his arms in a christ-like gesture. All the sympathy of the painting is with the peasant victims.
Even more powerful are his series of private etchings The Disasters of War, which depict scenes of hand to hand fighting and atrocities from the ensuing peasant guerilla war, some of which Goya probably witnessed personally. With almost unbearable honesty Goya shows us the hanged and garroted, the castrated, mutilated and impaled – the true horror of war, observed close-up – as never before or since.
Goya’s anti-war art remained an isolated case for a hundred years. War was not a central theme in the major art of the 19th century, but a relavent and important development did take place. From about 1848 onwards the best artists (Corbet, Manet, Cezanne etc) detached themselves from state and aristocratic patronage and turned to what might be called radical avantgardism – Impressionism, Symbolism, Experssionism, Cubism, Futurism and so on.
This prepared the ground for the real turning point in art’s relationship to war, namely World War One. Several factors combined to produce a wave of anti-war art across Europe. First there was the sheer scale of the slaughter. Mass conscription and the appaling death toll of up to 16 million meant that the war touched the lives of everyone in society in a way that was historically unoprecedented. One consequence of this was that numerous artists and poets were called up and so experienced the war at first hand with a number of them being killed in the conflict e.g the French poet Apollinaire, the Italian painter Boccione, and the English poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.
The perculiarly dreadful nature of trench warfare with thousands of lives sacrificed for a few yards of wasteland meant that any halfway realistic depiction of the war looked like anti-war propaganda. A good example of this is Henry Tonks’ Studies in Facial Wounds. (1916). Tonks, an art school professor, made a series of pastel drawings of soldiers with facial wounds for medical purposes. The portraits are so horrific as to by themselves constitute an indictment of the war. Finally there was the fact that there existed a determined opposition to the war armed with a fierce and cohearant politcal critique of the whole enterprise. This opposition – Lenin, Luxomburg, Liebknicht, Maclean etc – was tiny and isolated at first but rapidly gained support as the war dragged on and this could not fail to influence the artists.
The result was such a rich legacy of anti-war art that no justice can be done to it in a short article. The sorrow of war widows, the grimness of the trenches, the terror of bombardment and the suffering of the gassed and maimed were all dramatically depicted by artists as varied as Kathe Kolwitz, Willy Jaekel, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christopher Nevinson, John and Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent and many others. Some of the most powerful work appeared in the aftermath of the war. I will mention just three examples. Without showing a single corpse or casualty Paul Nash encapsulates all the horror of the war in the multilated trees and tortured earth of his ironically entitled landscape We Are Making a New World (1918). Otto Dix’s Scat Players (1920) shows in close up three ex-serviceman playing cards – a soldier, sailor and airman – each hideously maimed and scarred. George Grosz invokes not only pity but also rage and directs it at the capitalist class responsible for the war in his savage satire These War Invalids are Getting to Be a Posivive Pest.
Of course it was the revolt of ordinary soldiers and workers, above all in Russia, that led the struggle against the war but there is no doubt that these artworks together with the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and others, played a significant role in imprinting a negative view of the war in the public imagination.
World War One also produced a revolt by anti-war artists which took a completely different form. In neutral Zurich, near where Lenin was at the time, were a small group of extreme avant-gardists – Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck and others. Disgusted an enraged by the disaster engulfing Europe they turned against the “culture” and “civilisation” which they believed had produced the catastrophe. They endevoured to produce an art that was “anti-art” and “anti-culture”, that would provoke, mock and undermine the bourgois cultural establishment. They gave it the nonsense name “Dada”. Dadaism was a glorious failure. It could not have been otherwise. The bougoisie was shocked but not shaken and the war machine continued remorselessly, no more deflected from it’s path than a charging elephant by the bite of a gnat. Nevertheless dada did have an important long term influence on the development of art, paving the way for Surrealism and feeding into the work of Marcel Duchamp. It is also interesting to note that this period saw the production of the one great painting of the 20th century that could be described as enthusiastically pro-war – but of course it was a very different war. El Lissitsky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge was in support of the red army’s defence of the Russian revolution. This is one of the outstanding works of the great flowering of revolutionary culture in Russia before it was strangled by the death hand of the stalinist dictatorship. In the inter-war period, European culture, like European society, tended to polarise between far right and far left. The majority of visual artists tended to support the left and anti-war art merged with anti-fascist art. There are two outstanding figures: John Heartfield and Pablo Picasso. Heartfield was german artist who adopted an english name during the first world war as a protest against anti-english propaganda. He was a communist who did much of his work for AIZ (Worker’s Illustrated Gazette). His major contribution was the development of the technique of photo-montage, the combining of several photographic images to produce a new art image. This technique is clearly particularly useful for art with a direct political message and has often been used subsequently (see below). Heartfield’s principal target was Hitler and he produced devastating posters such as Hither Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk and Million Stand Behind Me.
However he also created two especially powerful works which though certainly anti-fascist have a much more universal anti-war resonance. The first is the famous image of a dove of peace impaled on a bayonet. The second depicts five war planes high in the sky; from their tails flow five smoke trails which form five boned fingers and then merge into the palm of a skeletal hand. On the ground below lie the bodies of the dead and beneath them the caption Das Is Das Heil, Das Sie Bringen.
Picasso, of course, made Guernica, the most celebrated anti-war painting in history and probably the most famous painting of any kind in the 20th century. Provoked by the distruction of the basque town of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in the spanish civil war (the first instance of arial bombing of civillians) it is a symbolic response rather than a naturalistic representation of the event. This led to some debate at the time as to whether a social-realist rendering would have been more accessible to the masses, but this question seems to have been settled by history: no realist painting has reached half the people that Guernica has. The symbols deployed by Picasso – the bull, the mother with the dead child in her arms, the screaming horse, the fallen soldier with his broken sword – have a universal character. They make the painting not only an immensely powerful protest about a specific war crime but a protest against the horror of war and man’s inhumanity to man in general. Considerable use was made of Guernica in the recent campain against the Iraq war: “No To War” badges were made of the mother and dead child image and a british socialist newspaper reproduced Guernica across it’s front page in response to the destruction of Fallujah.
In contrast to World War One, World War Two produced little war or anti-war art of quality. One reason for this was simply that there was no artistic freedom either in stalinist Russia or in Nazi occupied Europe. Many of Europe’s leading artists fled to America but in Britan and the USA most artists supported the war, because of the nature of the Nazi enemy, and this inhibited them from depicting it’s awful reality. After 1945 the tradition of anti-war art was at least partially revived. Picasso’s association with the communist led peace movement led him to produce many variations on his theme of the dove as symbol of peace, images which are still used by today’s peace campaigners, and a major painting Massacre in Korea which echoed the hunched firing squad of Goya’s Third of May.
WHAMM! (1963) By the american pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, was a huge blow-up of a comicbook image of a US fighter blasting an enemy plane. It was politically ambigious but was at least open to the interpretation that it was an ironic expose of debased gung-ho american attitudes to war, and was adapted to make this point by campaigners against the first gulf war. Also Andy Warhol made a frightening image of an A-bomb mushroom cloud with devil’s horns. In Britain in the 70s and 80s Peter Kennard revived Heartfield’s photo-montage technique to produce powerful images in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament, most memorably through the incorporation of cruise missiles into John Constable’s famous landscape The Haywain. Both the painters appointed as Britain’s official war artists for the Gulf and Balkan wars, John Keane and Peter Hausen respectively adopted a critical stance (though personally, I dislike Hausen’s work). The current war in Iraq has generated an upsurge in grass roots anti-war art in Britain (the only country I have detailed information about) in forms ranging from the conceptual (a tank of mixed blood and oil) to sculptural charicatures of Bush and Blair. Even Tracy Emin, whose normal themes are autobiographical and sexual, has made some anti-war pieces. And, again in the tradition of John Heartfield, Leon Kuhn working closely with the anti-war movement has used photomontage to pillory Bush and Blair. His most telling image depicts Bush as a dog flying through the air like a B52, with Blair dragged behind clasping his leash and the caption “Mad Dogs and Englishmen…” (from the famous english song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun”).
For the best part of a hundred years the struggle against imperialist war has been absolutely central to the international struggle for a better world. What this brief, and massively incomplete, survey shows is that visual art along with all other art forms has a small but significan role to play in this struggle. Art has the power to move, to inspire, to educate, to win hearts and minds, to express pain and focus anger. Of course, by itself, the greatest art is far from enough, or Heartfield and Picasso would have defeated Hitler and Franco. But every political movement needs it’s artistic wing with politics and art feeding into each other to their mutual benefit.
[IMAGES:
Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1813)
Francisco Goya This is Worse from Disasters of War (1812-13)
Paul Nash We are Building a New World (1918)
Otto Dix The Skatplayers (1920)
George Grosz These War Invalids are Becoming a Positive Pest (1920)
El Lissitsky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920)
John Heartfield This is the Salvation, Which They Bring (1934)
Pablo Picasso Guernica (1937)
Pablo Picasso Massacre in Korea (1952)
Roy Lichtenstein WHAAM! (1963)
Peter Kennard “The Haywain”
Leon Kuhn Mad Dogs and Englishmen (2003)]
This article was written April 2005, for publication by the Centre for Socialist Studies in Egypt.
In the main, however the glorification of war has resulted in an abundance of mediocre hackwork: countless kings on horseback pretending to be about to fight; innumerable ‘heroic’ commanders dying nobly. Victorian Britain specialised in imperialist art – spectacular cavalry charges mowing down the natives and such like – most of it painted badly.
In the 20th century the pattern changes and art, serious art at least, develops much more as a critic and opponant of war. But before discussing this we must go back to the early 19th century to the first, and perhaops still the greatest, of all anti-war artists, Francisco Goya.
Goya’s great painting The Third of May 1808, shows the execution of Spanish peasant insurgents by the occupying French army. The firing squad, whose shoulders are hunched and faces obscured, appear anonymous and ruthless. The central peasant figure, is bathed in light and flings out his arms in a christ-like gesture. All the sympathy of the painting is with the peasant victims.
Even more powerful are his series of private etchings The Disasters of War, which depict scenes of hand to hand fighting and atrocities from the ensuing peasant guerilla war, some of which Goya probably witnessed personally. With almost unbearable honesty Goya shows us the hanged and garroted, the castrated, mutilated and impaled – the true horror of war, observed close-up – as never before or since.
Goya’s anti-war art remained an isolated case for a hundred years. War was not a central theme in the major art of the 19th century, but a relavent and important development did take place. From about 1848 onwards the best artists (Corbet, Manet, Cezanne etc) detached themselves from state and aristocratic patronage and turned to what might be called radical avantgardism – Impressionism, Symbolism, Experssionism, Cubism, Futurism and so on.
This prepared the ground for the real turning point in art’s relationship to war, namely World War One. Several factors combined to produce a wave of anti-war art across Europe. First there was the sheer scale of the slaughter. Mass conscription and the appaling death toll of up to 16 million meant that the war touched the lives of everyone in society in a way that was historically unoprecedented. One consequence of this was that numerous artists and poets were called up and so experienced the war at first hand with a number of them being killed in the conflict e.g the French poet Apollinaire, the Italian painter Boccione, and the English poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.
The perculiarly dreadful nature of trench warfare with thousands of lives sacrificed for a few yards of wasteland meant that any halfway realistic depiction of the war looked like anti-war propaganda. A good example of this is Henry Tonks’ Studies in Facial Wounds. (1916). Tonks, an art school professor, made a series of pastel drawings of soldiers with facial wounds for medical purposes. The portraits are so horrific as to by themselves constitute an indictment of the war. Finally there was the fact that there existed a determined opposition to the war armed with a fierce and cohearant politcal critique of the whole enterprise. This opposition – Lenin, Luxomburg, Liebknicht, Maclean etc – was tiny and isolated at first but rapidly gained support as the war dragged on and this could not fail to influence the artists.
The result was such a rich legacy of anti-war art that no justice can be done to it in a short article. The sorrow of war widows, the grimness of the trenches, the terror of bombardment and the suffering of the gassed and maimed were all dramatically depicted by artists as varied as Kathe Kolwitz, Willy Jaekel, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christopher Nevinson, John and Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent and many others. Some of the most powerful work appeared in the aftermath of the war. I will mention just three examples. Without showing a single corpse or casualty Paul Nash encapsulates all the horror of the war in the multilated trees and tortured earth of his ironically entitled landscape We Are Making a New World (1918). Otto Dix’s Scat Players (1920) shows in close up three ex-serviceman playing cards – a soldier, sailor and airman – each hideously maimed and scarred. George Grosz invokes not only pity but also rage and directs it at the capitalist class responsible for the war in his savage satire These War Invalids are Getting to Be a Posivive Pest.
Of course it was the revolt of ordinary soldiers and workers, above all in Russia, that led the struggle against the war but there is no doubt that these artworks together with the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and others, played a significant role in imprinting a negative view of the war in the public imagination.
World War One also produced a revolt by anti-war artists which took a completely different form. In neutral Zurich, near where Lenin was at the time, were a small group of extreme avant-gardists – Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck and others. Disgusted an enraged by the disaster engulfing Europe they turned against the “culture” and “civilisation” which they believed had produced the catastrophe. They endevoured to produce an art that was “anti-art” and “anti-culture”, that would provoke, mock and undermine the bourgois cultural establishment. They gave it the nonsense name “Dada”. Dadaism was a glorious failure. It could not have been otherwise. The bougoisie was shocked but not shaken and the war machine continued remorselessly, no more deflected from it’s path than a charging elephant by the bite of a gnat. Nevertheless dada did have an important long term influence on the development of art, paving the way for Surrealism and feeding into the work of Marcel Duchamp. It is also interesting to note that this period saw the production of the one great painting of the 20th century that could be described as enthusiastically pro-war – but of course it was a very different war. El Lissitsky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge was in support of the red army’s defence of the Russian revolution. This is one of the outstanding works of the great flowering of revolutionary culture in Russia before it was strangled by the death hand of the stalinist dictatorship. In the inter-war period, European culture, like European society, tended to polarise between far right and far left. The majority of visual artists tended to support the left and anti-war art merged with anti-fascist art. There are two outstanding figures: John Heartfield and Pablo Picasso. Heartfield was german artist who adopted an english name during the first world war as a protest against anti-english propaganda. He was a communist who did much of his work for AIZ (Worker’s Illustrated Gazette). His major contribution was the development of the technique of photo-montage, the combining of several photographic images to produce a new art image. This technique is clearly particularly useful for art with a direct political message and has often been used subsequently (see below). Heartfield’s principal target was Hitler and he produced devastating posters such as Hither Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk and Million Stand Behind Me.
However he also created two especially powerful works which though certainly anti-fascist have a much more universal anti-war resonance. The first is the famous image of a dove of peace impaled on a bayonet. The second depicts five war planes high in the sky; from their tails flow five smoke trails which form five boned fingers and then merge into the palm of a skeletal hand. On the ground below lie the bodies of the dead and beneath them the caption Das Is Das Heil, Das Sie Bringen.
Picasso, of course, made Guernica, the most celebrated anti-war painting in history and probably the most famous painting of any kind in the 20th century. Provoked by the distruction of the basque town of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in the spanish civil war (the first instance of arial bombing of civillians) it is a symbolic response rather than a naturalistic representation of the event. This led to some debate at the time as to whether a social-realist rendering would have been more accessible to the masses, but this question seems to have been settled by history: no realist painting has reached half the people that Guernica has. The symbols deployed by Picasso – the bull, the mother with the dead child in her arms, the screaming horse, the fallen soldier with his broken sword – have a universal character. They make the painting not only an immensely powerful protest about a specific war crime but a protest against the horror of war and man’s inhumanity to man in general. Considerable use was made of Guernica in the recent campain against the Iraq war: “No To War” badges were made of the mother and dead child image and a british socialist newspaper reproduced Guernica across it’s front page in response to the destruction of Fallujah.
In contrast to World War One, World War Two produced little war or anti-war art of quality. One reason for this was simply that there was no artistic freedom either in stalinist Russia or in Nazi occupied Europe. Many of Europe’s leading artists fled to America but in Britan and the USA most artists supported the war, because of the nature of the Nazi enemy, and this inhibited them from depicting it’s awful reality. After 1945 the tradition of anti-war art was at least partially revived. Picasso’s association with the communist led peace movement led him to produce many variations on his theme of the dove as symbol of peace, images which are still used by today’s peace campaigners, and a major painting Massacre in Korea which echoed the hunched firing squad of Goya’s Third of May.
WHAMM! (1963) By the american pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, was a huge blow-up of a comicbook image of a US fighter blasting an enemy plane. It was politically ambigious but was at least open to the interpretation that it was an ironic expose of debased gung-ho american attitudes to war, and was adapted to make this point by campaigners against the first gulf war. Also Andy Warhol made a frightening image of an A-bomb mushroom cloud with devil’s horns. In Britain in the 70s and 80s Peter Kennard revived Heartfield’s photo-montage technique to produce powerful images in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament, most memorably through the incorporation of cruise missiles into John Constable’s famous landscape The Haywain. Both the painters appointed as Britain’s official war artists for the Gulf and Balkan wars, John Keane and Peter Hausen respectively adopted a critical stance (though personally, I dislike Hausen’s work). The current war in Iraq has generated an upsurge in grass roots anti-war art in Britain (the only country I have detailed information about) in forms ranging from the conceptual (a tank of mixed blood and oil) to sculptural charicatures of Bush and Blair. Even Tracy Emin, whose normal themes are autobiographical and sexual, has made some anti-war pieces. And, again in the tradition of John Heartfield, Leon Kuhn working closely with the anti-war movement has used photomontage to pillory Bush and Blair. His most telling image depicts Bush as a dog flying through the air like a B52, with Blair dragged behind clasping his leash and the caption “Mad Dogs and Englishmen…” (from the famous english song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun”).
For the best part of a hundred years the struggle against imperialist war has been absolutely central to the international struggle for a better world. What this brief, and massively incomplete, survey shows is that visual art along with all other art forms has a small but significan role to play in this struggle. Art has the power to move, to inspire, to educate, to win hearts and minds, to express pain and focus anger. Of course, by itself, the greatest art is far from enough, or Heartfield and Picasso would have defeated Hitler and Franco. But every political movement needs it’s artistic wing with politics and art feeding into each other to their mutual benefit.
[IMAGES:
Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1813)
Francisco Goya This is Worse from Disasters of War (1812-13)
Paul Nash We are Building a New World (1918)
Otto Dix The Skatplayers (1920)
George Grosz These War Invalids are Becoming a Positive Pest (1920)
El Lissitsky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920)
John Heartfield This is the Salvation, Which They Bring (1934)
Pablo Picasso Guernica (1937)
Pablo Picasso Massacre in Korea (1952)
Roy Lichtenstein WHAAM! (1963)
Peter Kennard “The Haywain”
Leon Kuhn Mad Dogs and Englishmen (2003)]
This article was written April 2005, for publication by the Centre for Socialist Studies in Egypt.
On Politics and Art
There has always been a broad affinity between progressive politics and the arts. On the one hand most, though by no means all, artists tend to be leftwing in their sympathies. On the other hand many people on the political left are interested in the arts and are often keen to enlist their support. This affinity is as it should be since both art and progressive politics are concerned with the development and enlargement of the human personality – in the final analysis, with human freedom.
However the precise relationship between art and politics has been the subject of much debate and controversy over the years, some of it bitter and some of it even with a gun or jailor’s key in hand. This article cannot review this whole debate but what it will do is argue against two common conceptions about politics and art – conceptions with are opposites but both of which hinder fruitful cooperation between artists and the left.
The first of these is the idea that “true” art must keep itself free from association with overt politics for fear of compromising its artistic integrity. The second is the idea that art is obliged to be explicitly political and directly support political causes on pain of being dismissed as reactionary or decadent.
The first view developed originally in the 19th century and is often associated in people’s minds with the slogan “art for art’s sake”. It is rooted in a highly individualist conception of art as the more-or-less “pure” self expression of the artist’s unique inner vision. It tends to trade on popular distrust of politics as a rather dirty business mostly about power and manipulation and is also partly a reaction to the – very real – historical experience of left organizations and governments, primarily those associated with the Communist/Stalinist tradition which attempted to impose a political straitjacket on artistic production.
The Stalinist experience I will comment on later but this extreme individualist view of art is flawed. Art is never pure self expression. Artistic production is always affected by a multitude of economic, social and political conditions which range from the crudely practical (“can I afford the canvass and paints?”, “will any theatre stage my play?”) to the question of state or religions censorship and to the pressures of all the ideological currents of the time. Even more fundamentally it is flawed because the very “self” which the artists seeks to express is itself a social product, the result of the sum total of that person’s experience i.e. their interactions with other people, with society. And if all art is unavoidably social and ideological why should it not tackle directly political themes alongside other social themes such as love, relationships, ambition, relations with nature and so on?
However the decisive argument for the possibility of authentic overtly political art is not given by theory but by experience. The simple fact is that across all the different art forms, over many centuries, in many countries and cultures, large numbers of indisputably powerful works of art have been inspired by political events and tackle directly political issues. Standard art history, literary and cultural criticism etc. does its best to obscure this by separating “great works” from their historical context, but even so, obvious examples abound.
In visual art there is Michelangelo’s David, commissioned by the city of Florence with the explicitly political purpose of celebrating the expulsion of their tyrannical Medici rulers. There is Jacques-Louis David’s painting of The Death of Marat (left wing radical in the French revolution, murdered by a counter-revolutionary). There is Goya’s Third of May 1808 which depicts the execution of Spanish peasant insurgents by the occupying Napoleonic army, with unconcealed sympathy for the insurgents. There is Delacroix’s famous Liberty Leading the People based on the French revolution of 1830. In the 20th century we have the openly political work of the Russian avant garde – Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin etc.- inspired by the Russian revolution; the antiwar art of Paul Nash, Otto Dix and others, the anti-nazi photomontages of John Heartfield and, of course, Picasso’s Guernica protesting the bombing of the Basque town by fascist warplanes in the Spanish civil war.
In literature the examples of overtly political writing range from the English romantic poet Shelley whose greatest poem The Mask of Anarchy is perhaps the most savage denunciation of a government ever written to the great German poet and dramatist Bertold Brecht whose output was almost entirely political. The French novelist Emile Zola wrote Germinal about a miners’ strike; the American novelist John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath about the struggles of the rural poor in the Depression, and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg devoted a long poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra to the Vietnam war. WB Yeats, Ireland’s foremost poet, wrote Easter 1916 to commemorate the Easter rising against British rule and Chile’s Pablo Neruda repeatedly used his poetry to attack the role of US imperialism and its puppet dictators in Latin America.
In music we have Mozart’s The Magic Flute dealing with freemasonry (then a serious revolutionary force in Europe) and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Egmont Overture, both about the struggle for freedom in the Napoleonic era. In song there is the extraordinary voice of Paul Robeson, drawing on political songs from around the world, the immortal Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday attacking lynching in the US south, the political work of Bob Dylan (Hard Rain, Masters of War, Only a Pawn in Their Game,etc.) and Bob Marley’s great anthem of liberation Redemption Song.
In film we have Eisenstein’s masterpieces Battleship Potemkin, Strike and October, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Quiemada (about a slave revolt in the Carribean) and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom about the Spanish civil war.
What these examples, which could easily be multiplied many times over, demonstrate beyond doubt is that there is no incompatibility between explicit political commitment and art work of the highest order.
Since it is clear that such work aids the radical or progressive cause both by winning hearts and minds on particular issues and by raising consciousness and morale in general it is obvious that the left should support, encourage and make use of it wherever possible. But there is another side to this argument which is equally important. If directly political art should be encouraged it does not at all follow that nonpolitical art should be disparaged or condemned.
Art cannot and should not be reduced to political critique or propaganda. Art reflects and responds to the whole range of human needs and experience: birth, death, love, sex, the quality of light or rain, feelings of personal despair or hope, the look of hills and trees, the lines and colour of buildings, the play and pain of children, the drama of the sky and of the streets – everything. Of course it is true that in the final analysis all these things are profoundly conditioned by politics but that does not mean that every artistic expression of these themes needs to be outwardly political. And insofar as that expression is powerful, moving, beautiful or original, and develops or refines our means of communication (visual, linguistic or musical) it is a benefit to humanity.
Many of the artists cited above as producing directly political work also produced much work without overt political content. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for the pope; WB Yeats wrote not only Easter 1916 but the nature poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree; alongside Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday sang the love song Fine and Mellow; before Guernica Picasso developed cubism by painting men with pipes and guitars. It would be gross stupidity to praise Strange Fruit and reject Fine and Mellow, to applaud Guernica but deplore cubism – especially as Guernica could not have been painted without the prior cubism.
Political art is to be encouraged but it must be the artist’s free choice. Any attempt by political parties or governments to impose particular subject matter or style on art - as was the case with so-called “socialist realism” in the Soviet Union under Stalin (though not, it should be noted, under Lenin),in Mao’s China and in other Stalinist states and, to some extent in the international Communist movement as a whole - results only in depriving artistic production of all its vitality.
A further point requiring consideration is the fact that artistic work is often implicitly rather than explicitly political. When Rembrandt produced his deeply sympathetic etchings of beggars there was an implicit defiance and critique of the hostile attitude to beggars and the poor characteristic of 17th century Dutch capitalism. When in the 19th century French artists turned from painting grand mythological scenes and portraits of the nobility to the portrayal of the daily life of the people there was an implicit rejection of the whole aristocratic/bourgeois established order. When Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis play modern jazz and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday sing the blues, every note, every phrase, speaks of the sufferings of their people and denounces racism. This is of particular importance, because mainstream cultural commentary tends wherever possible to ignore or downplay such implicit politics preferring to present art as “universal” or “timeless”. Radical cultural commentators therefore have a responsibility to bring out this element by insisting that works of art can only be fully understood in their social, historical and political context.
Finally it is necessary to stress that even artists with conservative and reactionary worldviews can sometimes produce work of real value. An example is the English Victorian writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was an out-and-out imperialist. Kipling was the author of the phrase “the white man’s burden” and of a dreadful poem of the same name and yet he also produced a number of poems and stories of genuine power and insight such as The Barrack Room Ballads. Then there is T S Eliot who was a rightwing, anglo-catholic (a very conservative version of Christianity) royalist who flirted with fascism and yet he wrote The Waste Land which both used language in a new way that has influenced the whole of modern poetry and was a profound critique of the spiritual emptiness of western capitalist society after the first world war.
There are two main explanations for this apparent paradox. The first is that a deeply held conservative position does offer a certain vantage point from which to mount a strong artistic critique of the shallowness, grubby commercialism and alienation of capitalist social relations, even if politically it offers no way forward. The second is that the making of art is a complex contradictory process not always completely under the artist’s conscious control, so that sometimes the art transcends the limitations of the artist’s ideology. Of course in such cases progressive commentators need to point out, not conceal, that nature of the artist’s ideology but their hostility to that ideology should not lead to blanket rejection of good work when it is done.Thus, for example, Karl Marx praised highly the depiction of French society by the novelist Balzac, who was a conservative monarchist, despite his total opposition to Balzac’s political position.
In conclusion the lively interaction and collaboration of radical politics and art in all its forms is mutually beneficial and much to be desired. For it to be achieved artists must escape from the bourgeois myth of art as asocial and nonpolitical and this must be complemented on the part of the left by a non-sectarian, non-dogmatic approach to art based on a real understanding and sensitivity to the complex ways in which art develops.
This article was written in April 2006 for publication by the Centre for Socialist Studies in Egypt.
However the precise relationship between art and politics has been the subject of much debate and controversy over the years, some of it bitter and some of it even with a gun or jailor’s key in hand. This article cannot review this whole debate but what it will do is argue against two common conceptions about politics and art – conceptions with are opposites but both of which hinder fruitful cooperation between artists and the left.
The first of these is the idea that “true” art must keep itself free from association with overt politics for fear of compromising its artistic integrity. The second is the idea that art is obliged to be explicitly political and directly support political causes on pain of being dismissed as reactionary or decadent.
The first view developed originally in the 19th century and is often associated in people’s minds with the slogan “art for art’s sake”. It is rooted in a highly individualist conception of art as the more-or-less “pure” self expression of the artist’s unique inner vision. It tends to trade on popular distrust of politics as a rather dirty business mostly about power and manipulation and is also partly a reaction to the – very real – historical experience of left organizations and governments, primarily those associated with the Communist/Stalinist tradition which attempted to impose a political straitjacket on artistic production.
The Stalinist experience I will comment on later but this extreme individualist view of art is flawed. Art is never pure self expression. Artistic production is always affected by a multitude of economic, social and political conditions which range from the crudely practical (“can I afford the canvass and paints?”, “will any theatre stage my play?”) to the question of state or religions censorship and to the pressures of all the ideological currents of the time. Even more fundamentally it is flawed because the very “self” which the artists seeks to express is itself a social product, the result of the sum total of that person’s experience i.e. their interactions with other people, with society. And if all art is unavoidably social and ideological why should it not tackle directly political themes alongside other social themes such as love, relationships, ambition, relations with nature and so on?
However the decisive argument for the possibility of authentic overtly political art is not given by theory but by experience. The simple fact is that across all the different art forms, over many centuries, in many countries and cultures, large numbers of indisputably powerful works of art have been inspired by political events and tackle directly political issues. Standard art history, literary and cultural criticism etc. does its best to obscure this by separating “great works” from their historical context, but even so, obvious examples abound.
In visual art there is Michelangelo’s David, commissioned by the city of Florence with the explicitly political purpose of celebrating the expulsion of their tyrannical Medici rulers. There is Jacques-Louis David’s painting of The Death of Marat (left wing radical in the French revolution, murdered by a counter-revolutionary). There is Goya’s Third of May 1808 which depicts the execution of Spanish peasant insurgents by the occupying Napoleonic army, with unconcealed sympathy for the insurgents. There is Delacroix’s famous Liberty Leading the People based on the French revolution of 1830. In the 20th century we have the openly political work of the Russian avant garde – Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin etc.- inspired by the Russian revolution; the antiwar art of Paul Nash, Otto Dix and others, the anti-nazi photomontages of John Heartfield and, of course, Picasso’s Guernica protesting the bombing of the Basque town by fascist warplanes in the Spanish civil war.
In literature the examples of overtly political writing range from the English romantic poet Shelley whose greatest poem The Mask of Anarchy is perhaps the most savage denunciation of a government ever written to the great German poet and dramatist Bertold Brecht whose output was almost entirely political. The French novelist Emile Zola wrote Germinal about a miners’ strike; the American novelist John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath about the struggles of the rural poor in the Depression, and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg devoted a long poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra to the Vietnam war. WB Yeats, Ireland’s foremost poet, wrote Easter 1916 to commemorate the Easter rising against British rule and Chile’s Pablo Neruda repeatedly used his poetry to attack the role of US imperialism and its puppet dictators in Latin America.
In music we have Mozart’s The Magic Flute dealing with freemasonry (then a serious revolutionary force in Europe) and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Egmont Overture, both about the struggle for freedom in the Napoleonic era. In song there is the extraordinary voice of Paul Robeson, drawing on political songs from around the world, the immortal Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday attacking lynching in the US south, the political work of Bob Dylan (Hard Rain, Masters of War, Only a Pawn in Their Game,etc.) and Bob Marley’s great anthem of liberation Redemption Song.
In film we have Eisenstein’s masterpieces Battleship Potemkin, Strike and October, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Quiemada (about a slave revolt in the Carribean) and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom about the Spanish civil war.
What these examples, which could easily be multiplied many times over, demonstrate beyond doubt is that there is no incompatibility between explicit political commitment and art work of the highest order.
Since it is clear that such work aids the radical or progressive cause both by winning hearts and minds on particular issues and by raising consciousness and morale in general it is obvious that the left should support, encourage and make use of it wherever possible. But there is another side to this argument which is equally important. If directly political art should be encouraged it does not at all follow that nonpolitical art should be disparaged or condemned.
Art cannot and should not be reduced to political critique or propaganda. Art reflects and responds to the whole range of human needs and experience: birth, death, love, sex, the quality of light or rain, feelings of personal despair or hope, the look of hills and trees, the lines and colour of buildings, the play and pain of children, the drama of the sky and of the streets – everything. Of course it is true that in the final analysis all these things are profoundly conditioned by politics but that does not mean that every artistic expression of these themes needs to be outwardly political. And insofar as that expression is powerful, moving, beautiful or original, and develops or refines our means of communication (visual, linguistic or musical) it is a benefit to humanity.
Many of the artists cited above as producing directly political work also produced much work without overt political content. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for the pope; WB Yeats wrote not only Easter 1916 but the nature poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree; alongside Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday sang the love song Fine and Mellow; before Guernica Picasso developed cubism by painting men with pipes and guitars. It would be gross stupidity to praise Strange Fruit and reject Fine and Mellow, to applaud Guernica but deplore cubism – especially as Guernica could not have been painted without the prior cubism.
Political art is to be encouraged but it must be the artist’s free choice. Any attempt by political parties or governments to impose particular subject matter or style on art - as was the case with so-called “socialist realism” in the Soviet Union under Stalin (though not, it should be noted, under Lenin),in Mao’s China and in other Stalinist states and, to some extent in the international Communist movement as a whole - results only in depriving artistic production of all its vitality.
A further point requiring consideration is the fact that artistic work is often implicitly rather than explicitly political. When Rembrandt produced his deeply sympathetic etchings of beggars there was an implicit defiance and critique of the hostile attitude to beggars and the poor characteristic of 17th century Dutch capitalism. When in the 19th century French artists turned from painting grand mythological scenes and portraits of the nobility to the portrayal of the daily life of the people there was an implicit rejection of the whole aristocratic/bourgeois established order. When Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis play modern jazz and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday sing the blues, every note, every phrase, speaks of the sufferings of their people and denounces racism. This is of particular importance, because mainstream cultural commentary tends wherever possible to ignore or downplay such implicit politics preferring to present art as “universal” or “timeless”. Radical cultural commentators therefore have a responsibility to bring out this element by insisting that works of art can only be fully understood in their social, historical and political context.
Finally it is necessary to stress that even artists with conservative and reactionary worldviews can sometimes produce work of real value. An example is the English Victorian writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was an out-and-out imperialist. Kipling was the author of the phrase “the white man’s burden” and of a dreadful poem of the same name and yet he also produced a number of poems and stories of genuine power and insight such as The Barrack Room Ballads. Then there is T S Eliot who was a rightwing, anglo-catholic (a very conservative version of Christianity) royalist who flirted with fascism and yet he wrote The Waste Land which both used language in a new way that has influenced the whole of modern poetry and was a profound critique of the spiritual emptiness of western capitalist society after the first world war.
There are two main explanations for this apparent paradox. The first is that a deeply held conservative position does offer a certain vantage point from which to mount a strong artistic critique of the shallowness, grubby commercialism and alienation of capitalist social relations, even if politically it offers no way forward. The second is that the making of art is a complex contradictory process not always completely under the artist’s conscious control, so that sometimes the art transcends the limitations of the artist’s ideology. Of course in such cases progressive commentators need to point out, not conceal, that nature of the artist’s ideology but their hostility to that ideology should not lead to blanket rejection of good work when it is done.Thus, for example, Karl Marx praised highly the depiction of French society by the novelist Balzac, who was a conservative monarchist, despite his total opposition to Balzac’s political position.
In conclusion the lively interaction and collaboration of radical politics and art in all its forms is mutually beneficial and much to be desired. For it to be achieved artists must escape from the bourgeois myth of art as asocial and nonpolitical and this must be complemented on the part of the left by a non-sectarian, non-dogmatic approach to art based on a real understanding and sensitivity to the complex ways in which art develops.
This article was written in April 2006 for publication by the Centre for Socialist Studies in Egypt.
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