The Aesthetics of Anarchism
In the wake of the first World War, art took a drastic turn towards rejection of existent political and social values. This shift in values is most apparent in the postmodern works of the time — whereas before the artist’s social and political role was limited to commentary and critique, in the postmodern many took it upon themselves to reject the dominant paradigm entirely, and to call for its total abolition. This subversion of all authority gave many art scenes a uniquely anarchistic tone which is exhibited in their artwork. In this paper I will demonstrate a working definition of “postmodern”; a relevant connection between postmodernism and dadaism, surrealism, and the Fluxus movement; and how anarchist political thought is apparent throughout these movements.
Part I: Demonstration of Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a nom de guerre for those parts of the modern which, according to Lyotard, “[put] forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms… that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” In a less-than-complete sense, the postmodern in regards to aesthetics could be seen as a sort of anti-formalism; the postmodern artwork “[is] not in principle governed by pre-established rules”, so a rejection of a formal or dogmatic authority can also be seen as a defining quality. Lyotard saw the role of the postmodernist as “to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented… [to] wage war on totality; [to] witness… the unpresentable.” Thus, a working definition of postmodernism in the terms of Lyotard would be: A progressive form of modernism which denies the value of formalism, which rejects dogmatic rules or authority, and which attempts to present that which can be conceived, but not presented.
Dadaism is most concisely connected to postmodernism in the Dada Manifesto, written by Tristan Tzara. In Tzara’s mind, the function of Dada was utter rejection of all society’s givens — even the most basic, such as morality and logic. He summarized the Dada philosophy in one question: “from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena[?] Everything one looks at is false.” There “is no ultimate Truth”, and thus to base their ideology on anything already known would be disastrous and ultimately self-defeating. Here, the postmodern idea of rejecting dogmatic authority is most clear, as well as a desire to present that which has never been and never can be presented. In Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919), Hannah Hoch — a prominent Dada artist and pioneer of photomontage — both literally and figuratively slices up the German zeitgeist into a disjointed, mechanical portrait of her contemporary society as a form of criticism against a perceived lack of humanity. This lack is a perfect example of an unpresentable idea, undergoing an attempt at presentation.
Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, wrote in 1952: “All the institutions upon which the modern world rested — and which had just shown their worth in the First World War — were considered aberrant and scandalous to us.” Surrealism was a development of, and heavily influenced by, the Dadaists. This influence is clear in their rejection of the established status quo, their emphasis on experimental use of language and found objects. However, the way the surrealists went about presenting the unpresentable was far more focused around the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, especially the unconscious mind and the relevance of dreams. In the First Surrealist Manifesto, Breton clarifies their exploration of the human mind as the unpresentable: “The mind hardly dares express itself and, when it does, is limited to stating that this idea or that woman has an effect on it. What effect it cannot say; thus it gives the measure of its subjectivism and nothing more.” The connection to postmodernism is clear in the surrealist attempt at presenting the unpresentable, in Breton’s opinion the unconscious or dreaming mind. The surrealist rejection of formalism is also quite overt; In Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, contorted forms of clocks and a distorted section of a face are strewn across an empty, dreary landscape, possibly an attempt at representing the mutable nature of memory and time itself within the barren desert of a dying mind. Such ideas cannot truly be presented due to their nature as immaterial thought, further reconciling the surrealist aesthetic with postmodernism.
The Fluxus movement was founded by George Maciunas, and can be seen as a reaction to the second World War, a la Dada; Maciunas himself was a Lithuanian who fled Europe after the war. Fluxus was heavily influenced by Duchamp, the composer John Cage, and the Dadaists, and has even been referred to as a neo-Dadaist movement. From these predecessors Fluxus borrowed the concepts of found art, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and a reliance on chance to be a determining factor in the finished work. The Fluxus connection to postmodernism is apparent in their complete rejection of all dogmatism and station. Notable Fluxus works are almost intensely non-representative, and perhaps are the best examples of anti-art; Vautier’s Total Art Matchbox was simply a matchbox with instructions which implored the reader to destroy as much art as they could find, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film was an 8-minute film of nothing but a white screen with the occasional distortion or artifact. Zen for Film is notable in that it eschews all imagery, all form, in a call for the audience to engage in contemplative, meditative interiority. In this sense, these works can be seen as an attempt to present the unpresentable; in Paik’s work, a presentation of solitude and contemplation, in the case of the ready-mades, a presentation of their process of construction. Perhaps the clearest connection to the postmodern are the performance works of the Fluxus movement, in which are demonstrated an utter disregard for formalist performance theory — Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece was simply her sitting in a chair as she invited audience members to snip her clothes off with a provided pair of scissors, possibly a statement on the hyper-sexuality of the contemporary culture, or even deeper, an exploration of the predispositions towards the artworld held by those who witness it. This rejection of form and attempt at presenting the unpresentable serve to harmonize the Fluxus movement with postmodernism.
Part II: Demonstration of Anarchism
Anarchism is, at it’s core, a rejection of all unjust hierarchy and authority; primarily in its manifestations as the state, colonialism, capitalism, and more contemporarily, patriarchy. In the previous sections I’ve outlined the relevant connection between Dadaist, surrealist, and Fluxus philosophy and postmodernism — in this section, I will outline relevant connections between these same movements and anarchist political thought.
Dadaism was a direction reaction to the first World War, made immediately apparent in its creation in Zurich, the capital of neutral Switzerland. In the words of Hans Arp, “In Zurich, not involved in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we dedicated ourselves to the fine arts. While in the distance gunfire rumbled, we glued paper, read our works, wrote poetry, and sang at the top of our voices.” It was there, in the Cabaret Voltaire, that the Dada manifesto was drafted as a massive critique of whatever artistic, social, or political values resulted in the war. This critique is made ad absurdum in the artwork of George Grosz, a prominent member of the Berlin Dada movement, in his famous series of drawings which caricaturized the sociopolitical environment of Germany. In his work Civilisation Marching On, jackbooted and pock-marked soldiers march in line, stirred forward by a fervent, almost animalistic crowd. In Post Apocalyptic Hunger, two figures — presumably those with authority, derided as gluttonous — eat a meal, contrasted to a bloody and violent scene of soldiers killing civilians. Many Berlin Dadaists were explicitly political in their works; during the 1918 Spartacist uprising, the Dada would march through working class neighborhoods and sing anti-militarist songs. Outside of their artwork, the Dadaists were more overtly political. The artist Hugo Ball translated Mikhail Bakunin, Hans Richter was well connected with Zurich anarchists, and Tristan Tzara himself claimed “the anarchistic nature of Dada [was] obvious”. One line in the manifesto perfectly summarized the extent to which Dadaist philosophy was in line with anarchist thought: a call for the “[abolition] of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets… abolition of prophets”.
Breton once said, in the same article from 1952, that “it was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself.” Many surrealists regularly contributed to the anarchist journal La Libertaire, including the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, who later said in a letter to Georges Fontenis that “If the disappearance of the State can not be envisaged in the immediate, it is no less true that the proletarian insurrection must mark the the first day of the death agony of the State”. Anarchist thought is prevalent in Peret’s poems, from his despair at the hyper-commercialization of society and subsequent commercialization of human emotion in Le Verbe Etre to his references to a caged bird, analogous to the growing restraint and policing of the French and Spanish working class in The Spectral Attitudes. A surprising amount of Peret’s work remains untranslated, and the majority of the surrealist movement’s political involvement was engaging in direct action and local political participation rather than immediate demonstration in their artwork.
The Fluxus movement was the most overt in their sociopolitical message. The manifesto begins with a call to “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness… professional and commercialized culture… PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART”. The intense focus on ready-mades demonstrated a pseudo-centralized attack on highly commercialized high art, which they saw as an abandonment of creative virtue. They would often mass replicate their artworks with the express purpose of reducing their commercial value, and their radical anti-institutionalism made them almost as much of a political movement as an artistic one. Fluxus art would go on to critique hierarchical relationships through much of their anthology: Licking Piece, a performance piece by Benjamin Patterson, had no other direction than “cover shapely female with whipped cream, lick, topping of chopped nuts and cherries is optional.” This piece served to address sexual objectification and a misogyny in contemporary society, similar in tone to Ono’s Cut Piece. Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys, in which he enclosed himself in a gallery for several days with a wild coyote, was a commentary on colonialism and an attempt to recapture an untamed, pre-colonial America while simultaneously rejecting the sovereignty of the existent power structure by providing the coyote with copies of The Wall Street Journal to use as a toilet. Beuys was shuttled between the gallery and the airport so he wouldn’t have to touch American soil with his feet — he was protesting the Vietnam war at the time, and had previously announced that he refused to enter the United States. This anti-war, anti-colonial message was common in other Fluxus works. While Fluxus members weren’t as active politically as the surrealists — perhaps due to the anti-communist, anti-anarchist political environment of the time — the virtues they extolled were perfectly in line with anarchist philosophy.
It’s obvious that no entire movement could share an ideology, and postmodernism has a bevy of examples of non-anarchistic thought; futurism, though influenced by the avant-garde and Dada and influential in some measure to the surrealists, openly embraced hierarchy when it was seen as more efficient than otherwise, and served as a later justification for the rise of fascism in Italy and their subsequent involvement in World War II. However, as I’ve demonstrated in this paper, anarchism was perhaps the political philosophy that postmodern art was most inundated with (possibly eclipsed by communism for the surrealists).
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