The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution
By the English Section of the Situationist International
Tim Clark, Christopher Gray, Charles Radcliffe and Donald Nicholson-Smith



The Crisis of Modern Art: Dada and Surrealism

"Never before," wrote Artaud [in Theatre and Its Double], "has there been so much talk about civilisation and culture as today, when it is life itself that is disappearing. And there is a strange parallel between the general collapse of life, which underlies every specific symptom of demoralisation, and this obsession with a culture which is designed to domineer over life." Modern Art is at a dead end. To be blind to this fact implies a complete ignorance of the most radical theses of the European avant-garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925: that art must cease to be a specialised and imaginary transformation of the world and become the real transformation of lived experience itself. Ignorance of this attempt to recreate the nature of creativity itself, and above all its vicissitudes in Dada and Surrealism, has made the whole development of modern art incoherent, chaotic and incomprehensible.

With the Industrial Revolution, there began a change in the whole definition of art -- slowly, often unconscioulsy, it changed from a celebration of society and its ideologies to a project of total subversion. From being the focus and guarantee of myth, "great" art became an explosion at the centre of the mythic constellation. Out of mythic time and space it produced a radical historical consciousness which released and reassembled the real contradictions of bourgeois "civilisation."

Even the antique became subversive -- in 50 years, art escaped from the certainties of Augustan values and created its own revolutionary myth of a primitive society. For David and Ledoux, the imperative was to capture the forms of life and self-consciousness which had produced the culture of the ancient world; to recreate rather than to imitate. The 19th century was only to give that proposal a more demoniac and Dionysian gloss.

The project of art -- for Blake, for Nietzsche -- became the transvaluation of all values and the destruction of all that prevents it. Art became negation: in Goya, in Beethoven, or in Gericault, one can see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a lifetime. But a change in the definition of art demanded a change in its forms and the 19th century was marked by an accelerating and desperate attempt at improvising new forms of artistic attack. Courbet began by touting his pictures round the countryside in a marquee and ended in the Commune by superintending the destruction of the Vendome column (the century's most radical artistic art, which its author immediately disowned).

After the Commune, artists suffered a collective loss of nerve. Mythic time was reborn out of the womb of historical continuity, but it was the mythic time of an isolated and finally obliterated individuality. In the novel, Tolstoy or Conrad struggled to retain a sense of nothingness; irony teetered over into despair; time stopped and insanity took over.

For the Symbolists, the evasion of history became a principle; they gave up the struggle for new revolutionary forms in favor of a purely mythic cult of the isolated artistic gesture. If it was impossible to paint the proletariat, it was equally impossible to paint anything else. So art had to be about nothing; life must exist for art's sake; the ugly and intolerable truth, said Mallarme with complete disdain, is the "popular form of beauty." The Symbolists lived on in a realm of an infinitely elegant but stifling tautology. In Mallarme himself, the inescapable subject of poetry is the death of being and the birth of abstract consciousness: a consciousness at once multiform, perfect, magnificently anti-dialectical and radically impotent.

In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1890s) revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality. Marx's original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too "is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].

The separation and hostility between the "world" of art and the "world" of everyday life finally exploded in Dada. "Life and art are One," proclaimed Tzara; "the modern artist does not paint, he creates directly." But this upsurge of real, direct creativity had its own contradictions. All the real creative possibilities of the time were dependent on the free use of its real productive forces, on the free use of its technology, from which the Dadaists, like everyone else, were excluded. Only the possibility of total revolution could have liberated Dada. Without it, Dada was condemned to vandalism and, ultimately, to nihilism -- unable to get past the stage of denouncing an alienated culture and the self-sacrificial forms of expression which it imposed on its artists and their audience alike. It painted pictures on the Mona Lisa, instead of raising the Louvre. Dada flared up and burnt out as an art sabotaging art in the name of reality and reality in the name of art. A tour de force of nihilistic gaiety. The variety, exuberance and audacity of the ludic creativity it liberated, vital enough to transmute the most banal object or event into something vivid and unforeseen, only discovered its real orientation in the revolutionary turmoil of Germany at the end of the First World War. In Berlin, where its expression was most coherent, Dada offered a brief glimpse of a new praxis beyond both art and politics: the revolution of everyday life.

Surrealism was initially an attempt to forge a positive movement out of the devastation left in the wake of Dada. The original Surrealist group understood clearly enough, at least during its heyday, that social repression is coherent and is repeated on every level of experience and that the essential meaning of revolution could only be the liberation and immediate gratification of everyone's repressed will to live -- the liberation of a subjectivity seething with revolt and spontaneous creativity, with sovereign re-inventions of the world in terms of subjective desire, whose existence Freud had revealed to them (but whose repression and sublimation Freud, as a specialist accepting the permanence of bourgeois society as a whole, could only believe to be irrevocable). They saw quite rightly that the most vital role a revolutionary avant-garde could play was to create a coherent group experimenting with a new lifestyle, drawing on new techniques, which were simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive, of extending the perimeters of lived experience. Art was a series of free experiments in the construction of a new libertarian order.

But their gradual lapse into traditional forms of expression -- the self-same forms whose pretensions to immortality the Dadaists had already sent up, mercilessly, once and for all -- proved to be their downfall: their acceptance of a fundamentally reformist position and their integration within the spectacle. They tried to introduce the subjective dimension of revolution into the communist movement at the very moment when its Stalinist hierarchy had been perfected. They tried to use conventional artistic forms at the very moment when the disintegration of the spectacle, for which they themselves were partly responsible, had turned the most scandalous gestures of spectacular revolt into eminently marketable commodities. As all the real revolutionary possibilities of the period were wiped out, suffocated by bureaucratic reformism or murdered by the firing squad, the Surrealist attempt to supersede art and politics in a completely new type of revolutionary self-expression steadily degenerated into a travesty of its original elements: the mostly celestial art and the most abject communism.


The Transformation of Poverty and the Transformation of the Revolutionary Project
From then till now . . . nothing. For nearly half a century, art has repeated itself, each repetition feebler, more inane than the last. Only today, with the first signs of a more highly evolved revolt within a more highly developed capitalism, can the radical project of modern art be taken up again and taken up more coherently. It is not enough for art to seek its realisation in practice; practice must also seek its art. The bourgeois artists, rebelling against the mediocrity of mere survival, which was all their class could guarantee, were always tragically at cross-purposes with the traditional revolutionary movement. While the artists -- from Keats to the Marx Brothers -- were trying to invent the richest possible experience of an absent life, the working class -- at least on the level of their official theory and organisation -- were struggling for the very survival the artists rejected. Only now, with the Welfare State, with the gradual accession of the whole proletariat to hitherto 'bourgeois' standards of comfort and leisure, can the two movements converge and lose their traditional animosity. As, in mechanical succession, the problems of material survival are solved and as life, in an equally mechanical succession, becomes more and more disgusting, all revolt becomes essentially a revolt against the quality of experience. One knows very few people dying of hunger. But everyone one knows is dying of boredom.

By now it has become painfully evident to everyone -- apart from a gag radical left -- that it is not one or another isolated aspect of contemporary civilisation that is horrifying, but our own lives as a whole, as they are lived on an everyday level. The utter debacle of the left today lies in its failure to notice, let alone understand, the transformation of poverty which is the basic characteristic of life in the highly industrialised countries. Poverty is still conceived in terms of the 19th century proletariat -- its brutal struggle to survive in the teeth of exposure, starvation and disease -- rather than in terms of the inability to live, the lethargy, the boredom, the isolation, the anguish and the sense of complete meaninglessness which are eating like a cancer through its 20th century counterpart. The left blithely accepts all the mystifications of spectacular consumption. They cannot see that consumption is no more than the corollary of modern production -- functioning as both its economic stabilisation and its ideological justification -- and that the one sector is just as alienated as the other. They cannot see that all the pseudo variety of leisure masks a single experience: the reduction of everyone to the role of passive and isolated spectators, forced to surrender their own individual desires and to accept a purely fictitious and mass-produced surrogate. Within this perspective, the left has become no more than the avant-garde of the permanent reformism to which neo-capitalism is condemned. Revolution, on the contrary, demands a total change, and today this can only mean to supersede the present system of work and leisure en bloc.

The revolutionary project, as dreamed among the dark satanic mills of consumer society, can only be the creation of a new lease of life as a whole and the subordination of the productive forces to this end. Life must become the game desire plays with itself. But the rediscovery and the realisation of human desires is impossible without a critique of the phantastic form in which these desires have always found the illusory realisation which allowed their real repression to continue. Today this means that 'art' -- phantasy erected into a systematic culture -- has become Public Enemy Number One. It also means that the traditional philistinism of the left is no longer just an incidental embarrassment. It has become deadly. From now on, the possibility of a new revolutionary critique of society depends on the possibility of a sex revolutionary critique of culture and vice versa. There is no question of subordinating art to politics or politics to art. The question is of superseding both of them insofar as they are separated forms.

No project, however phantastic, can any longer be dismissed as 'Utopian.' The power of industrial productivity has grown immeasurably faster than any of the 19th century revolutionaries foresaw. The speed at which automation is being developed and applied heralds the possibility of the complete abolition of forced labor -- the absolute pre-condition of real human emancipation -- and, at the same time, the creation of a new, purely ludic type of free activity, whose achievement demands a critique of the alienation of 'free' creativity in the work of art. Art must be short-circuited. The whole accumulated power of the productive forces must be put directly at the service of man's imagination and will to live. At the service of the countless dreams, desires and half-formed projects which are our common obsession and our essence, and which we all mutely surrender in exchange for one or another worthless substitute. Our wildest fantasies are the richest elements of our reality. They must be given real, not abstract powers. Dynamite, feudal castles, jungles, liquor, helicopters, laboratories . . . everything and more must pass into their service. "The world has long haboured the dream of something. Today if it merely becomes conscious of it, it can possess it really." (Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843)


The Realisation of Art and the Permanent Revolution of Everyday Life

"The goal of the Situationists is immediate participation in a varied and passionate life, through moments which are both transient and consciously controlled. The value of these moments can only lie in their real effect. The Situationists see cultural activity, from the point of view of the totality, as a method of experimental construction of everyday life, which can be developed indefinitely with the extension of leisure and the disappearance of the division of labour (and, first and foremost, the artistic division of labour). Art can stop being an interpretation of sensations and become an immediate creation of more highly evolved sensations. The problem is how to produce ourselves, and not the things which enslave us." ("Theses on the Cultural Revolution," Internationale Situationniste No. 1, 1958)

It is not enough to burn the museums. They must also be sacked. Past creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life. Everything of value in art has always cried aloud to be made real and to be lived. This 'subversion' of traditional art is, obviously, merely part of the whole art of subversion we must master (cf. Ten Days That Shook the University). Creativity, since Dada, has not been a matter of producing anything more but of learning to use what has already been produced.

Contemporary research into the factors 'conditioning' human life poses implicitly the question of man's integral determination of his own nature. If the results of this research are brought together and synthesized under the aegis of the cyberneticians, then man will be condemned to a New Ice Age. A recent 'Commission on the Year 2000' is already gleefully discussing the possibilities of 'programmed dreams and human liberation for medical purposes.' (Newsweek, 16/10/67) If, on the contrary, these 'means of conditioning' are seized by the revolutionary masses, then creativity will have found its real tools: the possibilities of everyone freely shaping their own experience will become literally demiurgic. From now on, Utopia is not only an eminently practical project, it is a vitally necessary one.

The construction of situations is the creation of real time and space, and the widest integrated field before it lies in the form of the city. The city expresses, concretely, the prevailing organisation of everyday life. The nightmare of the contemporary megalopolis -- space and time engineered to isolate, exhaust and abstract us -- has driven the lesson home to everybody, and its very pitilessness has begun to engender a new utopian consciousness. "If man is formed by circumstances, then these circumstances must be formed by man." (Marx, The Holy Family) If all the factors conditioning us are co-ordinated and unified by the structure of the city, then the question of mastering our own experience becomes one of mastering the conditioning inherent in the city and revolutionising its use. This is the context within which man can begin, experimentally, to create the circumstances that create him: to create his own immediate experience. These "fields of lived experience" will supersede the antagonism between town and country which has dominated human life up to now. They will be environments which transform individual and group experience, and are themselves transformed as a result; they will be cities whose structure affords, concretely, the means of access to every possible experience, and, simultaneously, every possible experience of these means of access. Dynamically inter-related and evolving wholes. Game-cities. In this context, Fourier's dictum that "the equilibrium of the passions depends upon the constant confrontation of opposites" should be understood as an architectural principle. (The subversion of past culture as a whole finds its focus in the cities. So many neglected themes -- the labyrinth, for example -- remain to be explored.) What does Utopia mean today? To create the real time and space within which all our desires can be realised and all of our reality desired. To create the total work of art.

Unitary urbanism is a critique, not a doctrine, of cities. It is the living critique of cities by their inhabitants: the permanent qualitative transformation, made by everyone, of social space and time. Thus, rather than say that Utopia is the total work of art, it would be more accurate to say that Utopia is the richest and most complex domain serving total creativity. This also means that any specific propositions we can make today are of purely critical value. On an immediate practical level, experimentation with a new positive distribution of space and time cannot be dissociated from the general problems of organisation and tactics confronting us. Clearly a whole urban guerilla will have to be invented. We must learn to subvert existing cities, to grasp all the possible and the least expected uses of time and space they contain. Conditioning must be thrown in reverse. It can only be out of these experiments, out of the whole development of the revolutionary movement, that a real revolutionary urbanism can grow. On a rudimentary level, the blazing ghettoes of the USA already convey something of the primitive splendor, hazardousness and poetry of the environments demanded by the new proletariat. Detroit in flames was a purely Utopian affirmation. A city burnt to make a negro holiday . . . shadows of most terrible, yet great and glorious things to come. . . .


The Work of Art: A Spectacular Commodity
Unfortunately, it is not only the avant-garde of revolutionary art and politics which has a different conception of the role to be played by artistic creativity. "The problem is to get the artist onto the workshop floor among other research workers, rather than outside industry producing sculptures," remarks the Committee of the Art Placement Group, which is sponsored by, amongst others, the Tate Gallery, the Institute of Directors, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Evening Standard, 1/2/67). In fact, industrialisation of 'art' is already a fait accompli. The irreversible expansion of the modern economy has been forcing it to accord an increasingly important position for a long time now. Already the substance of the tertiary sector of the economy -- the one expanding the most rapidly -- is almost exclusively 'cultural.' Alienated society, by revealing its perfect compatibility with the work of art and its growing dependence upon it, has betrayed the alienation of art in the harshest and least flattering light possible. Art, like the rest of the spectacle, is no more than the organisation of everyday life in a form where its true nature can at most be dismissed and turned into the appearance of its opposite: where exclusion can be made to seem participation, where one-way transmission can be made to seem communication, where loss of reality can be made to seem realisation.

Most of the crap passed off as culture today is no more than dismembered fragments -- reproduced mechanically without the slightest concern for their original significance -- of the debris left by the collapse of every world culture. This rubbish can be marketed simply as historico-aesthetic bric-a-brac or, alternatively, various past styles and attitudes can be amalgamated, up-dated and plastered indiscriminately over an increasingly wide range of products as haphazard and auto-destructive fashions. But the importance of art in the spectacle today cannot be reduced to the mere fact that it offers a relatively unexploited accumulation of commodities. Marshall McLuhan remarks: "Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the ability to recognise it for what it is. To prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society. Just as higher education is no longer a frill or a luxury, but a stark need for production in the shaping and structure created by electric technology." And Galbraith, even more clearly, speaks about the great need "to subordinate economic to aesthetic goals." (Guardian, 22/2/67)

Art has a specific role to play in the spectacle. Production, once it is no longer answering any real needs at all, can only justify itself in purely aesthetic terms. The work of art -- the completely gratuitous product with a purely formal coherence -- provides the strongest ideology of pure contemplation possible today. As such it is the model commodity. A life which has no sense apart from contemplation of its own suspension in a void finds its expression in the gadget: a permanently superannuated product whose only interest lies in its abstract technico-aesthetic ingenuity and whose only use lies in the status it confers on those consuming its latest remake. Production as a whole will become increasingly 'artistic' insofar as it loses any other raison d'etre.

Rated slightly above the run-of-the-mill consumers of traditional culture is a sort of mass avant-garde of consumers who wouldn't miss a single episode of the latest 'revolt' churned out by the spectacle: the latest solemn 80 minute flick of 360 variegated bare arses, the latest manual of how to freak out without tears, the latest napalm-twisted monsters air-expressed to the local Theatre of Fact. One builds up resistance to the spectacle, and, like any other drug, its continued effectiveness demands increasingly suicidal doses. Today, with everyone all but dead from boredom, the spectacle is essentially a spectacle of revolt. Its function is quite simply to distract attention from the only real revolt: revolt against the spectacle. And, apart from this one point, the more extreme the scandal the better. Any revolt within the spectacular forms, however sincere subjectively -- from The Who to Marat/Sade -- is absorbed and made to function in exactly the opposite perspective to the one that was intended. A baffled 'protest vote' becomes more and more overtly nihilistic. Censorship. Hash. Vietnam. The same old careerism in the same old rackets. Today the standard way of maintaining conformity is by means of illusory revolts against it. The final form taken by the Provos -- Saturday night riots protected by the police, put in quarantine, functioning as Europe's premier avant-garde tourist attraction -- illustrates very clearly how resilient the spectacle can be.

Beyond this, there are a number of recent cultural movements which are billed as a coherent development from the bases of modern art -- as a contemporary avant-garde -- and which are in fact no more than the falsification of the high points of modern art and their integration. Two forms seem to be particularly representative: reformism and nihilism.


The Phoney Avant-Garde
Attempts to reform the artistic spectacle, to make it more coherent and, inseparably, to resurrect the illusion of participation in it, are ten a penny. For a time, separated forms -- sound, light, jazz, dance, painting, film, poetry, politics, theatre sculpture, architecture, etc -- have been brought together, in various juxtapositions, in the mixed and multi-media shows. In kinetic art we are promised the apotheosis of the process. A current Russian group declares: "We propose to exploit all possibilities, all aesthetic and technical means, all physical and chemical phenomena, even all kinds of art as our methods of artistic expression." (Form, No. 4) The specialist always dreams of 'broadening his field.' Likewise the obsessive attempts to make the 'audience' 'participate.' No one cares to point out that these two concepts are blatantly contradictory, that every artistic form, like every other prevailing social form, is explicitly designed to prohibit even the intervention, let alone the control, of the vast majority of people. Endless examples could be cited. Last winter saw "Vietnamese Free Elections" billed as an experiment in creating "total involvement" in the Vietnamese situation through a fusion of political and dramatic form, etc. "Actors are not wanted," it was stated. "This is a new exercise in audience participation" that came with the ticket. "If you want to speak, hold up your hand. When you are recognised by the chairman, you must give your real name and the fictional occupation entered on your background sheet. . . . During the course of the meeting, you are operating as a fictional character and not as a spokesman for your personally held beliefs" (emphasis in original). The Happening is the general matrix of participation art -- and the Happening is where it becomes obvious that nothing ever happens. Everyone has lost themselves as totally as they have lost everyone else. Without the drugs, it could be explosive.

Cop art, cop artists. The whole lot moves towards a fusion of forms in a total environmental spectacle complete with various forms of prefabricated and controlled participation. It is just an integral part of the all-encompassing reforming of modern capitalism. Behind it looms the whole weight of a society trying to obscure the increasingly transparent exclusion and repression it imposes on everyone, to restore some semblance of colour, variety and meaning to leisure and work, to "organise participation in something in which it is impossible to participate." As such, these artists should be treated the same way as police-state psychiatrists, cyberneticians, and contemporary architects. Small wonder their avant-garde cultural 'events' are so heavily policed.

Anything art can do, life can do better. A journalist describes the sense of complete reality of driving a static racing car in an ambiance consisting solely of a colour film, which responded to every touch of the steering and acceleration as though he were really speeding round a race track. Even the sensations of a 120 mph smash could be simulated (Daily Express, 18/1/66) Expo '67, the Holy City of science fiction, boasts a three-million-buck 'Gyrotron' designed "to lift its passengers into a facsimile of outer space and then dunk them in a fiery volcano. . . . We orbit up an invisible track. Glowing around us are spinning planets, comets, galaxies . . . man-made satellites, Telstars, moon rockets . . . vooming in our cars are electronic undulations, deep beeps and astral snores." Finally, the 'participants' are plunged down a "red incinerator, surrounded by simulated lava, steam and demonic shrieks" (Life, 15/5/67) Reinforced by the sort of conditioning made possible by the discoveries of the kinetic artists, such techniques could ensure an unprecedented measure of control. Sutavision, an abstract form of colour TV, already mass-marketed, offers to provide "wonderful relaxation possibilities" giving "a wide series of phantasies" and functioning as "part of a normal home or business office." "Radiant colours moving in an almost hypnotic rhythm across the screen . . . wherein one can see any number of intriguing spectacles." Box three, a further refinement of TV, can manipulate basic mood changes through the rhythms and the frequency of the light patterns employed (Observer Magazine, 23/10/66) Still more sinister is the combination of total kinetic environments and a stiff dose of acid. "We try to vaporise the mind," says a psychedelic artist, "by bombing the senses." The Us Company [a commune of painters, poets, film-makers, teachers and weavers that lived and worked together in an abandoned church in Garneville, New York] artists call their congenial wrap-around a "be-in" because the spectator is to exist in the show, rather than look at it. The audience becomes disorientated from their normal time sense and preoccupations. . . . The spectator feels he is being transported to mystical heights." And this "is invading not only museums and colleges, but cultural festivals, discotheques, movie houses and fashion shows" (Life, 3/10/66) To date, Leary is the only person to have attempted to pull all this together. Having reduced everyone to a state of hyper-impressionable plasticity, he incorporated a backwoods myth of the modern-scientific-truth-underlying-all-world-religions, a cretin's catechism broadcast persuasively at the same time as it was expressed by the integral manipulation of sense data. Leary's personal vulgarity should not blind anyone to the possibilities implicit in this. A crass manipulation of subjective experience accepted ecstatically as a mystical revelation.

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