The New Nostalgia

Brazilia is home to one of the purest examples of modernist design he sudden emergence of post- energetic and muscular; it has also modernism as a buzz-concept displayed a typical ideological schi- for the Left is long overdue. zophrenia. During the ascendancy of The New For me, the long-prevailing pure economic liberalism, the main attitude of socialists to culture is emphasis was on the baleful effects of contained in bitter memories of confer- subsidy, and the prospects of a re- Nostalgia ences at which leftwing theatricals newed vibrancy if the arts were would painfully adumbrate their aes- returned to the market (or, more The modernist thetic and its relationship to their realistically, if they were consigned to ideology (dredging the Grundrisse for the vagaries of private patronage: in movement is under suitable quotations, fixing their posi- 1978 the Selsdon Group produced a tion on the Brecht-Lukacs axis to the pamphlet starkly entitled 'A Policy for assault from the Right. nearest thou), only to be confronted by the Arts: Just Cut Taxes'). A new era of pastiche questioners who began by agreeing But as Thatcherism Mark I gave way that, yuh, sure, we should use theatre in to Mark II, the emphasis shifted from and nostalgia has our propaganda more. Nor is this economics to cultural politics, from descended upon us. tunnel vision restricted to the far Left finance to content. Predictably, a num- (though the SWP did hone it down to a ber of newly-ascendant Tory MPs But David Edgar asks is fine art). At last year's Marxism Today demanded that leftwing theatre com- it all bad? 'Common Pursuits' conference, a large panies be axed (Teddy Taylor, Norman and representative grouping explored Tebbit and Kingsley Amis among the almost every aspect of the GLC's arts market leaders in this field.) But much policy - from funding to access and more significant was a growing chorus back again - without once addressing of people who saw the modern move- the issue of what kind of product ment as a whole - what the Spectator's socialists should be promoting, en- Colin Welch called the 'avant-garde couraging or defending. reign of terror' - as its enemy. So having disposed of socialist economics Now, of course, the Left has been woken and politics, Mrs Thatcher's thinkers by the thunder of hooves from the turned their attention to what they saw Right. As in so many other arenas of as socialism's cultural form, that com- controversy, the reactionary attack on plex of movements in the 20th century the contemporary arts has been arts that sought to challenge and break 30 MARXISM TODAY MARCH 1987 Hyde Park, Sheffield: the new modernist urban landscape The brightly coloured post-modernist Portland building: a sensation when it was first built down traditional vocabularies (figura- 'This decaying squalor, or both. contemporary critiques of contempor- tive painting, rhymning verse, conven- At its most grandiose, this model is ary art lies in this association between tionally melodic music) in the name of model is exemplified by Brazilia, constructed on modernism and the Left. From abstract Modernity. exemplified a pattern so complete, self-contained painting to atonal music, from express- The most obvious assault on modern- by the design and rational that nobody thought to ionist drama to free verse, from (as ism has been in the realm of of the city of accommodate a cemetery. At its most Tom Wolfe put it) 'Bauhaus to Our architecture, spearheaded by journal- painful, it is the grimy desolation of the House', the modern movement is seen ists like Christopher Booker (who, Brazilia, new urban landscape, from Ronan as being part of the 20th century grasping at least the etymology of the constructed Point to Broadwater Farm. socialist project of imposing on society word 'conservation', has sought to on a pattern So it's not for nothing that cultural a preconceived rationalism that neither recapture the environment for the so complete, historians date the beginning of the end could nor attempted to accommodate Right) and academics like David Wat- of the modernist endeavour from the the infinite variety of actual human kins, fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge self- famous destruction of St Louis' Pruitt experience and aspiration and desire in (whose alumni include Peregrine Wor- contained Igoe high-rise project on July 15, 1972. the real world. As American neo- sthorne, John Vincent, Roger Scruton and rational But architecture is by no means the conservative Irving Kristol once tren- and indeed both Colin Welch and that nobody only site of struggle. In a piece on what chantly argued, the rational is by no Kingsley Amis). The reason is partly he dubs the 'modern art joke', (again in means the same as the reasonable. The that architecture is the most public of thought to The Spectator) Auberon Waugh ac- 12-tone scale, blank canvasses and the arts (or, as the jaundiced might put accommodate cuses 20th century painters and sculp- glass-and-steel monoliths may well be it, the most difficult to avoid: there is a cemetery' tors of trying 'to establish their super- rational, but what most folks appear no off-switch on the street where you iority over the common man by produc- actually to want - reasonably enough, live). But it is also that architecture ing work which he neither understands you might think - is stories with plots, provides the most blatant example of nor enjoys'. And in his notorious pictures with subjects, houses with what the Right sees as the essential Disraeli lecture of November 1985, porches and music with tunes. modernist project, which is the imposi- Norman Tebbit cited as evidence of the tion by discontented, declasse intellec- baleful effects of the permissive socie- The Right, then, is clear on its position: tuals of an unrealistic and Utopian ty the notions that 'grammar and it has seen the future and it knows it vision (based on a mechanical and spelling were not important', that 'to be doesn't like it. Why, then, has the Left one-dimensional reading of human na- clean was no better than to be filthy', been so muted in its response? The ture) on ordinary people who did not that 'good manners were no better than reason is surely clear from the above. ask for it and do not want it, a vision bad' and indeed that 'bad art was as Many of the populist demands of the which for that very reason degenerates good as good art'. cultural Right echo current feelings on quickly into totalitarian uniformity, or The importance of almost all the the Left, feelings which are also part of 31 MARXISM TODAY MARCH 1987 perhaps exclusive to periods of con- scious aesthetic challenge, of which the most dramatic (certainly since the Renaissance) has of course been the modernism of our own time. This characteristic of the modernist project can be best seen by citing and comparing the two brief, shining mo- ments when radical art and politics could be seen barking up roughly the 'What most same tree, which were, of course, the folks appear early 20s and the late 60s, periods actually to characterised both by an extreme testing of the limits of painting, sculp- want is ture, literature and music (provoking stories with typically horrified reactions from plots, cultural conservatives) and by a sense pictures with Classical Bauhaus incorporated into a teapot of commitment to some kind of future subjects, Utopia of which their art was a its tradition. Many leftwing Labour questionable. There have in fact been prefigurement. houses with councils, for instance, would have only two, short periods this century What is fascinating, however, is how porches and considerable sympathies with the when the political and the artistic avant different those Utopias were, and, music with Right's position on the elitism of much garde have walked anything like hand moreover, the way in which the vision of the avant garde, and in doing so, they in hand; for most of its short life, the of the 60s can be seen as a response to tunes' would echo criticisms of formalism and project of modernism has been not so the ambiguous success of its precursor. decadence in the arts which have much the mapping of the New Jeru- As Walter Gropius himself put it, in characterised the actual cultural poli- salem as the exploration of the waste- defining his Bauhaus project in 20s' cies of most socialist countries most of land, not the expression of unbounded Germany: 'Just as the Gothic cathedral the time. faith in the powers of the human mind was the expression of its age, so must When Edinburgh puts community art to construct a rational future, but the modern factory or dwelling be the above opera, or Bristol prefers adven- rather the often futile attempts to expression of our time: precise, prac- ture playgrounds to symphony orches- contain a seemingly limitless confusion tical and functional, free of superfluous tras, these councils are not just making and despair. And even where modern- ornament, effective only through the a point about resources. They are ism's vitality has overcome its com- cubic composition'. Gropius' first suc- pointing the finger at both historical plementary tendency to atomisation cessor at the Bauhaus, the marxist and contemporary high art - Schubert (for example, when the vibrancy of 60s Hannes Meyer, took this idea even and Shoenberg, Henze as well as pop art confronted the atrophy of further, into the realms of constructiv- Handel - they are asserting that it is existentialism), can we really argue ism, where the image of art-as-machine the proper business of a socialist that the energies thus released push provided a potent (and, in the fledgling cultural politics to make the arts necessarily, or even partially, towards Soviet Union, recognised) metaphor for accessible not just by price and loca- the finality of a communal Utopia? As the actuality of politics-as-science.

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