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Anarchism and Aesthetics CHAPTER 1 Anarchism and Aesthetics Allan Antliff If we understand “aesthetic” to refer to the sensate/emotive experiences that may arise from an art work, then an aesthetic, as a bearer of meaning attuned to anarchist values, does not “own” that experience. Rather, the politics of anar- chism go to work on the aesthetic dimension of art, evaluating its efficacy and cultivating tensions arising from anarchy’s “openness,” its refusal of closure. In the arts anarchism has inspired a plethora of approaches to aesthetics, including the rejection of conventional art production altogether in favor of other frameworks. For example, during the 1960s performance artist Joseph Beuys redefined society itself as an artistic creation—a “social sculpture”—so as to awaken us to our freedom to innovate and galvanize this freedom in the name of an anarchist social and ecological vision intent on dismantling state power non-violently.1 Beuys’ re-conceptualization echoes Gustav Landauer’s assertion that a social revolution is an artistic act, a configuration that speaks volumes as to how integral the qualities we associate with aesthetics are to anarchist conceptions of enacting politics.2 This is to say that the tensile in- terface between anarchism, aesthetics, and art is always anchored in specific contexts and challenges that have as much to do with the artist as they do with society. A case in point is Gustave Courbet. Working in mid-nineteenth century France under the dictatorial Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon III (1852–1870), Courbet developed an aesthetic of “realism” suffused with elements of parody that aped the stylistic strictures of the imperial Ecole des Beaux Arts in order to subvert and attack the reigning power structure. His portrayals of working class people engaged in mundane tasks and monumentalized in a manner traditionally reserved for royalty or posed so as to play up the absurd unnat- uralness of academic traditions rent the political fabric of the annual salon adjudicated by the Ecole.3 Those who condemned this work recognized that 1 Allan Antliff, Joseph Beuys (London: Phaidon Press, 2014), 70–72. 2 Ibid., 72. 3 Courbet’s subversion of “Salon Rhetoric” is discussed in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 76–113. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004356894_003 40 Antliff it did not support their cultural worldview or the systems of power associated with Napoleon III, while those who supported it in the press or purchased it on the art market became Courbet’s allies. In effect, his tension-infused aesthetic simultaneously cultivated conflicts and affinities (the same interrelationship accrues in contemporary demonstrations when “black bloc” anarchists orga- nizing on the basis of affinity intensify the demonstrators’ capacity as a disrup- tive force).4 But that is not all. Adopting Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s concept of realism in art as synonymous with social critique (mere mimesis being inadequate to the task of art’s ethical role in fomenting social change), Courbet also asserted his expressive freedom through formal innovations—thick dabs of paint, varia- tions in coloration and tone, scrumbling, plasticity of brushstroke, palate knife scrapings, and so forth—that enthralled sympathetic critics such as Emile Zola, even if their libertarian significance was lost on Proudhon himself. 5 Courbet’s realism can be likened to a guerilla-style assertion of anarchist values within a cultural field circumscribed by political authoritarianism. The free- dom he sought to realize in painterly terms came into its own during the short-lived Paris Commune (March 18 to May 28, 1871), during which Courbet participated in the founding of the Federation of Paris Artists. The Federation’s program, issued on April 13, declared freedom of expression in the arts as the premise for publically-funded commissions and the establishment of centers of artistic learning (art training, art history, aesthetics and philosophy, etc.) in which new styles could be cultivated without state interference.6 In the midst of an insurrection, realism as social critique merged with all manner of artistic experimentation, a transvaluing process of aesthetic “opening” that held out great promise, however briefly, before the Commune’s demise. Formal qualities such as those that captivated Zola (and, for that matter, Courbet) have served not only as a means of self-expression, but also as a means of prefiguring anarchy. The European-based neo-impressionist move- ment, which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, combined the science of optics with contemporary psychological theories concerning the emotive qualities evoked by variations in linearity (upward or downward curves). In so doing, it developed a painterly style that could serve 4 See Francis Dupuis-Déri, “Anarchism and the Politics of Affinity Groups,” Anarchist Studies 18, no. 1 (2010): 51–54. 5 Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008), 29–31. 6 The Federation’s program is reproduced in Eugène Pottier, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Pierre Brochon (Paris: F. Maspero, 1966), 204–205..
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