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 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 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- 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 pro- ject 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. tion but also in form. Marshall Berman argues in his defini- y the 60s, however, a new Most importantly of all, there is both a tive apologia for modernism All That is Left has grown disillusioned current and a longstanding view on the Solid Melts into Air, 'if bourgeois with the idea that all politic- Left that the connection between the society is really the maelstrom that al experience could be de- political and the cultural avant garde is Marx thinks it is, how can he expect all fined in such deterministically positiv- by no means as self-evident as the its currents to flow only one way, ist terms. If in the 20s the socialist Right would like to pretend. It is after toward peaceful harmony and integra- Utopia was to be reached via the all in capitalist America that the tion? Even if a triumphant communism metamorphosis of the external environ- market in modernist art and sculpture should some day flow through the ment by mechanics, then in the 60s the is centred, it is from capitalist America floodgates that free trade opens up, perceived failure of scientific social- that the most profound formal chal- who knows what dreadful impulses ism (and a disenchantment with indus- lenges to linear fiction and poetry have might flow along with it, or in its wake, trialism per se) led the new radicals to proceeded, it is American capitalists or impacted inside? ... Marx's com- look to the transformation of the themselves who have thrown up the munism might launch the liberated self internal environment through changes 'monstrous carbuncles' of contempor- into immense unknown human spaces in consciousness. ary architecture. On the other hand, it with no limits at all'. In a perceptive chapter on the 60s, is socialist countries which have sought ut in fact, it is precisely this Marshall Berman notes indeed how the to restore and preserve the best of the 'teemingness', this lack of decade saw a conflict of two moderni- past, and it is by and large socialist restraint, which gives art its ties. On the one hand, there was the artists in the West who have revived unique political function, not continued reign of steel-and-concrete, and promoted traditional popular as a weapon of propaganda (the form a smashing and remaking the urban forms, from the folk ballad and the sort of funnel through which ideology environment at bewildering speed, a mystery play to the patchwork quilt is poured down the throats of the movement which had its roots in, and and the union banner. Surely then, the proletariat) but rather as a kind of was an extension of, the technological artistic avant garde should join liberal laboratory for the testing of ideas, utopianism of the 20s (Gropius' second penal policy, first-past-the-post elec- through the medium of metaphor, a successor being Mies van der Rohe). tions, leaving the EEC and pornography testing that because it is not actual can But on the other hand, there was the 60s in the list of causes that the Left has no (in the manner of many experiments) of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, of art trouve, need (or business) to be attached to. take ideas to their logical conclusion, graffitti, poster art and the rock song - try the limits of tolerance, see where the art of those very streets throughout I consider this view to be profoundly mis- they snap. The notion of art as a free which the excavators, pile drivers and guided, but before arguing why, it's zone of human experimentation has pneumatic drills were ploughing - an necessary to acknowledge that the been present throughout history - its art which was about metaphors of Right's conflation of modernism and function as a tester of limits, as a bold personal authenticity and identity marxism is for most of both highly goer-where-none-has-gone-before, is which expressed themselves artistical-

33 MARXISM TODAY MARCH 1987 1960s, 'one of the crucial tasks for modernists ... was to confront the expressway world', and to show the world of urban brutalism 'was not the only possible modern world, that there were other, better directions in which the modern spirit could move'. Is there in post-modernism's dialogue with what preceded it room for a similar intervention? Is there inside all the triviality and cynicism at least a point 'The struggle of departure for serious artists who to rescue accept that (at the very least) the post- modernist project is in need of re- newal? modernism t seems to me there are several from the aspects of what is generally held reactionaries to be post-modernism which fit and young more than coincidentally into the Igeneral project of refashioning a social fogies is part and political vision of progress which of the project can take us into the next century. The to revitalise first is indeed the implied critique of socialism' much of the modernist project as tending to the monolithic and the soulless; the second is post- modernism's rejection of the elitism of much of the 20th century avant garde, its belief that what people say about what they want to see, read and hear (and the kind of places in which they want to live) has a validity not always acknowledged by the high priests of modernism over the last 70 years. But, third, there is hope in the fact that post-modernism is not always just a matter of new things that look like old ones, that the best of contemporary art and architecture implies a comment by the new on the old. So in Dennis Potter's unexpectedly successful Singing De- tective, for example, instead of there being no linear narrative nor recognis- able genre (the modernist solution), TV AM, one of the best known examples of post-modernism in several comprehensible narratives within recognisable story-forms are ly through the work of Ginsberg, mentioned) modernism not only articu- intercut and interwoven in a way that at Burroughs and the Living Theatre, lated but amplified the deepest and one and the same time expresses and theoretically through the writings of truest aspirations of 20th century challenges both the narrative principle thinkers like Marcuse and R D Laing humanity for a better and more rational and the chosen forms. and politically through the assertion of society. In that sense, post-modernism, Almost every socialist accepts that the collective identity of blacks, gays with its over-developed irony, its ner- what is presently going on in both the and women. vousness of commitment, its profound industrialised West and the socialist untruth to form, indeed represents a countries is a necessary reappraisal of If one political vibrant epoch saw an up- headlong retreat. centralist, totalist marxism and an surge of a political art which was in ut if the Right is wrong fully attempt to forge a new socialist prog- dialogue with that of a previous (but to conflate the modern ramme which embraces, but does not also vibrant) epoch, how are we to movement with the egalita- extinguish, the new social and political judge what is going on in the present, rian social project, then it forces clustering round feminism, the an age for which the phrase 'politically may be that there is a complementary black movements, the changing cities vibrant' is hardly appropriate? The error, which is an over-easy identifica- and the movements variously daubed conventional, left view of the contem- tion between post-modernism and reac- 'green'. porary, so-called post-modernist move- tion. As Richard Gott himself acknow- Even the most fervent mod- ment was eloquently articulated by ledges, the alliance between anti- ernist acknowledges that the radiant Richard Gott in The Guardian last modernist conservatives and 'genuine future prefigured by today's commit- December. It is that post-modernism's after-modernists' seeking to recover ted artists will be a less rigidly ordered, obsession with the second-hand, the something from the rubble is not an predictable and indeed monochrome cute, the rococco - its cloying concern easy one, and it will get less easy as it is place than may once have been im- with pastiche, nostalgia, eclecticism, seen that any genuine contemporary agined. The struggle to rescue post- self-reference - reveal it as nothing cultural manifestation (apart, that is, modernism from the reactionaries and more than the artistic effervescence of from pure pastiche of the repainting young fogies is thus part of the project a bleakly bland and superficial time, Rembrandt and rewriting Hayden vari- to revitalise socialism, and rescue us art fit only for a society (in John Lahr's ety) will have to start from its actual all from the vale of conservative words) 'winded, demoralised and position in history, and work with the despond. Its outcome will influence afraid'. vocabulary which modernism has be- more than the shape of the buildings, It's my belief that in its most heroic queathed. the look of the pictures and the sound of periods (particularly, the two I have Marshall Berman argues that, in the the songs. •

35 MARXISM TODAY MARCH 1987