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Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 1 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 2 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 3 Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 4 SEMIOTEXT(E) ACTIVE AGENTS SERIES Copyright © 2007 Gerald Raunig Originally published as: Kunst und Revolution. Künstlerischer Aktivismus im langen 20. Jahrhundert, Wien: Turia+Kant 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com Special thanks to Sarah Wang and Andrew Berardini. The Index was prepared by Andrew Lopez. Cover Photograph by Jürgen Schmidt Design by Hedi El Kholti ISBN-10: 1-58435-046-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-046-0 Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 5 Art and Revolution Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century Gerald Raunig Translated by Aileen Derieg <e> Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 6 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 7 Contents 1. Introduction: The Concatenation of Art and Revolution 9 2. The Three Components of the Revolutionary Machine 25 3. Out of Sync: The Paris Commune as Revolutionary Machine 67 4. The Courbet Model: Sequential Concatenation: 97 Artist, Revolutionary, Artist 5. Spirit and Betrayal: German “Activism” in the 1910s 113 6. Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations 131 7. “Art and Revolution,” 1968: 187 Viennese Actionism and the Negative Concatenation 8. The Transversal Concatenation of the PublixTheatreCaravan: 203 Temporary Overlaps of Art and Revolution 9. After 9/11: Postscript on an Immeasurable Border Space 237 Notes 267 Bibliography 299 Index 313 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 8 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 9 1. Introduction The Concatenation of Art and Revolution “…to say the revolution is itself utopia of immanence is not to say that it is a dream, something that is not realized or that is only real- ized by betraying itself. On the contrary, it is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed.” — Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari1 “In this short article I could sketch only with a couple of strokes the peculiar zigzag line of the relationships between revolution and art that we have hitherto observed. It has not been broken off. It continues even further.” — Anatoly Lunacharsky 2 IN THE LONG ECHO of a revolution, Richard Wagner and Anatoly Lunacharsky each wrote their texts about the “zigzag line of the relationships between revolution and art.” In 1849, in the wake of the failed bourgeois revolution in Germany, Wagner sketched “Art and the Revolution,”3 and about seventy years later Lunacharsky— 9 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 10 influenced by the first experiences of post-revolutionary cultural policies following the successful October Revolution—published the two sections of his short article “Revolution and Art”4 as the powerful Commissar for Education and Enlightenment. The two titles evince a minimal and yet significant variation of the con- catenation of art and revolution reflecting the contrary ideological positions of the two authors. For Wagner revolution seems to fol- low art, for Lunacharsky art follows the revolution: on the one side there is the royal court conductor of Saxony and proponent of the gesamtkunstwerk Wagner, whose later nationalist, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic tirades were to make him a useful point of reference both aesthetically and politically for National-Socialist ideology; on the other Lunacharsky, member of the government for twelve years under Lenin and Stalin until 1929, decisive especially in the early years of the Proletkult for the development of cultural policies in the Soviet Union. The preconditions could hardly be more different, and yet the two texts converge in several paradigmatic aspects due to specific biographic as well as to structural similarities in the cultural- political strategies of the two very different authors. In the years around 1848, under the vague influence of the ideas of Proudhon, Feuerbach and Bakunin, Wagner included diffuse revolutionary tones beyond his tight, mostly musical theory radius of reflection. Lunacharsky’s attitude developed in attempting to bridge the gap between the utilization of art already brought up by Lenin on the one hand, and the radical left-wing experiments of the leftist Pro- letkult wing on the other, into a strangely conservative position, which blocked not only socialist innovation, but also placed itself vehemently before the cultural heritage of bourgeois society. Against this backdrop of the ambivalence, volatility and diffusiveness 10 / Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 11 of both positions, it is understandable that there is a certain degree of congruence in the two very different texts, especially where they are most relevant for our considerations here. Wagner wrote “Art and the Revolution” in 1849, the year of his exile in Zurich following the failure of the Dresden Revolt, in which he had played a certain role, not only as a writer.5 Starting from the “lament of our modern artists and their hatred for the revolution,” the essay was intended to provide “a brief survey of the outstanding moments of European art history,” and despite the defeat in Dresden Wagner still clung to ideas and the concept of the revolution. In 1848/49, however, a certain oscillation in his position was already noticeable: Wagner’s stance, which was even in revolutionary times clearly focused on the conditions of art production and on reforming the administration and financing of art, ranged from radical democ- ratic demands on the one hand to more moderate visions of restoration and reconciliation with the German princes on the other. According to Wagner, the “thousand-year long revolution of humanity,” which he said also crushed the Greek tragedy together with the Athenian state, had now, at the time of writing his essay on revolution, created a situation that first made the artwork of the future possible. According to Wagner, art was to be understood as “social product,” and more precisely as a “faithful mirror image” of the “dominant spirit of the public.” Accordingly, the dissolution of the Athenian state corresponds to the downfall of the “great gesamtkunstwerk of the tragedy.” An artwork, which would be able to encompass “the spirit of free humanity beyond all limitations of nationalities,” could not emerge from contemporary society and art as an “industrial institution.” The drama as perfect art work could only be reborn from revolution: “True art can only rise up from its state of civilized barbarism to its dignity on the shoulders of our The Concatenation of Art and Revolution / 11 Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 12 great social movement.” Wagner’s attitude, swaying between cultural pessimism and revolutionary pathos, although not yet ultimately decided in its tendency toward totality and authoritarianism, already moved him to grand pronouncements in 1849. “Only the great revolution of humanity, the beginning of which once crushed the Greek tragedy, can attain for us this art work, because only the revolution can newly and more beautifully, nobly, generally give birth from its greatest depths to that, which it snatched from the conservative spirit of an earlier period of more beautiful—but lim- ited—education, and devoured.”6 Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote his article, “Revolution and Art,” in two steps, the first part in 1920 as a newspaper article, the second as an interview on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Octo- ber Revolution. This means that the text was produced in a period that was no longer permeated by the fresh energy of the Russian Revolution, but in which the terminology and programs of this initial phase continued to be characteristic. For Lunacharsky, in the conventional diction of the revolutionary context, bourgeois art is initially denigrated as formalistic, as having “advanced merely a whimsical and absurd eclecticism.” Revolution, on the other hand, “is bringing ideas of remarkable breadth and depth.” For this rea- son—and Lunacharsky is still writing futuristically here in 1920—the highest cultural politician of the Soviet Union antici- pates “a great deal from the influence of the Revolution on art, to put it simply: I expect art to be saved from the worst forms of decadence and from pure formalism.” Conversely, art is defined as a means of revolution, particularly because of its function in agi- tating the masses and as the appropriate form of the expression of revolutionary policies: “If revolution can give art its soul, then art can give revolution its mouthpiece.”7 12 / Art and Revolution Raunig-Final2-MIT 7/11/07 3:54 PM Page 13 Lunacharsky and Wagner thus begin their analyses from extremely different experiences, standpoints and even concepts of revolution, yet surprising points of congruence are recognizable. Most of all, there are two figures that they have in common, which not only come up in both texts, but generally represent dubious twins in the different conceptualizations of the relationship between art and revolution. For texts propagating the concept of “revolution” in their titles, the first figure consists unexpectedly profanely in the question of the function and financing of art, which characterizes both texts as belonging to the genre of art policies.
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