A Visit to the Museum - Notes on Culture and Bar- Barism

A Visit to the Museum - notes on Culture and Bar- barism

John Molyneux

For without exception the cul- required by the interests of the dominant tural treasures he surveys have class, with extreme barbarity. an origin which he cannot con- However, speaking personally for a mo- template without horror. They ment, it was the actual experience of vis- owe their existence not only to iting various museums and galleries that the eﬀorts of the great minds brought home to me just how direct and in- and talents who have created timate has been the relationship between them, but also to the anony- many of the highest achievements of hu- mous toil of their contempo- man culture and the extremes of human raries. There is no document barbarism. of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. - Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Clearly Walter Benjamin’s statement about mankind’s so-called cultural treasures corresponds to certain basic proposi- tions of historical materialism. The whole emergence of ‘civilization’ was predicated on and associated with the division of society into classes i.e. on exploitation and oppression. In particular the development of ‘culture’ and ‘the arts’, whether we are speaking of philosophy, poetry, drama, architecture, sculpture or whatever required the existence of a social class freed from the drudgery of producing its own food and other basic material needs and thus Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son able to devote large amounts of its time to learned pursuits and this in turn required that these basic activities be performed for In the Hermitage Museum in St. Pe- them by others - slaves, servants and peas- tersburg, part of the Winter Palace of the ants. Tsars, there hangs Rembrandt’s The Re- Moreover, the maintenance of such a turn of the Prodigal Son. The central fea- state of aﬀairs was possible only with the ture of this wonderful painting is the father development of a strong central author- placing his hands on the back of his kneel- ity standing above society and exercising a ing son in a gesture of exceptional tender- virtual monopoly of decisive physical force, ness, love and acceptance. The picture was i.e. a state, willing and able to act, when bought for the Hermitage in 1766 by the

48 Empress Catherine the Great who came to Florence is the leading city of the early the throne by means of a coup against her Renaissance and one of the most impor- husband Paul III in 1762 in which she had tant centres of art in the world - the city of him murdered. Giotto, Massaccio, Piero della Francesca, Remove your gaze from the painting Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo. It and turn to the nearby gallery window. It has two focal points: the extraordinar- looks out on the infamous Peter and Paul ily beautiful Duomo (Cathedral), with its Fortress which stands directly on the other magniﬁcent dome designed by Brunelleschi side of the Neva River. The Fortress was, and its Campanile (bell tower) built by of course, the legendary place of incarcer- Giotto, and the Piazza della Signoria con- ation of political prisoners under Tsarism. taining a replica of Michelangelo’s David, In 1718 Peter the Great had his own son, Cellini’s great Perseus and the magniﬁcent Alexei, tortured to death there because of Palazzo Vecchio. his involvement in a conspiracy. In Venice there is the famous Bridge of Sighs which runs from the Doge’s Palace to an adjacent building. The Doge’s Palace is one of the main landmarks in Venice vis- ited by millions annually. It contains work by Titian, Palladio, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo and many other masters. The Bridge of Sighs is also a famous sight be- neath which pass gondolas. But it was not from the romantic sighs of lovers that the Bridge got its name: rather it derives from the fact that the Bridge led directly from the court room in the Palace to the dungeons and torture chambers next door.

Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence

In 1478 a long standing conﬂict between the Medici Family who ruled Flo- rence at the time and their banker ri- vals, the Pazzi Family came to head. The Pazzis, in alliance with the Silviatis (pa- pal bankers in Florence) and with the tacit support of Pope Sixtus IV, launched a coup. On Sunday 26 April during High Mass at the Duomo before a crowd of The Bridge of Sighs, Venice 10,000 they attacked Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici. Giuliano was stabbed nine-

49 teen times and bled to death on the cathe- Unfortunately the dependency of art on dral floor but Lorenzo, though wounded, barbarism has not ended to this day al- escaped and rallied his supporters who though the links are more indirect and less counterattacked, capturing and killing the overt. The New York Museum of Mod- conspirators. One, Jacopo de Pazzi, was ern Art, generally regarded as the most thrown from a window of the Palazzo, influential museum in the history of mod- then dragged naked through the streets ern art, was the creation of and run by and thrown into the River Arno. Others the Rockefeller Family who amassed their were hung publicly from the walls of the vast fortunes through Standard Oil (fore- Palace. runner of ExxonMobile); no reader of this Twenty years later in 1498, the rad- Review should need reminding of the link ical preacher, Girolamo Savanarola, who between blood and oil. Another of Amer- denounced the corruption of the church ica’s leading art museums, The Getty in and was much admired by Botticelli and Los Angeles, is also based on oil money - Michelangelo, was hung and burned at the in this case the fortune amassed by Jean stake in the Piazza della Signoria after be- Paul Getty via the Getty Oil Company. ing subject to torture by the strappado1. New York’s second most important mod- This unity of opposites between culture ern art museum is the Guggenheim, housed and barbarism is nowhere as clear as in in a famous building designed by Frank Rome. Rome of the High Renaissance and Lloyd Wright. The Guggenheim differs Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel was also, of from MOMA and the Getty in that it arose course, Rome of the Papacy (held at var- not from oil money but from gold mining ious times by the Borgias, the Medicis, in the Yukon. the Della Roveres and the Farneses) which In the UK the Tate Britain was built on was legendary for its corruption, decadence the sight of the old Millbank Prison with and murderous intrigues and which to- money made by Henry Tate whose fortune gether with the Jesuits and the Inquisition derived from the sugar trade which had launched the Counter-Reformation at the its roots in slavery in the Caribbean. By Council of Trent in 1545. So the Rome of coincidence, if you look across the River St.Peter’s and the Vatican museums is also Thames from the steps of the Tate what and simultaneously the Rome of brutal re- you see is Vauxhall Cross, the Ziggurat like pression such as the public roasting in the headquarters of MI6. Campo de’ Fiori of Giordano Bruno, for the ‘crime’ of heresy. But it is the ruins and art of Ancient Rome - the Colosseum, the Forum, the Capitoline Museums, the thermal baths of Caracalla - that most starkly embody the culture/barbarity relation. This is because they were and are so bound up with insti- tution of slavery. The Colosseum, even its ruined state, is a building of awe-inspiring splendour but the purpose it served was unspeakable: the systematic slaughter of Vauxhall Cross, London human beings and animals for ‘sport’. 1A gruesome mechanism that broke the shoulders.

50 And for most of the last 30 years the gists is that the cultural achievements jus- contemporary art scene in Britain has been tify or redeem the barbarism. This was dominated by Charles Saatchi who made concisely expressed by the deeply cynical his wealth through the Saatchi & Saatchi Harry Lime in The Third Man. advertising agency which established itself by running Margaret Thatcher’s elec- Like the fella says, in Italy for tion campaign in 1979. People who have 30 years under the Borgias they worked for Saatchi testify not only to his had warfare, terror, murder, ruthless capital accumulation but to his and bloodshed, but they pro- personal brutishness- a fact conﬁrmed by duced Michelangelo, Leonardo his public assault on his wife, Nigella Law- da Vinci, and the Renaissance. son. In Switzerland they had broth- erly love - they had 500 years One of the largest collections of African of democracy and peace, and art in the world is housed in the Royal what did that produce? The Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren in cuckoo clock. Belgium. How did that art get there? It is only necessary to pose the question to An opposite, and in my view preferable, grasp the answer. It was hardly donated position is that no art, no matter how won- by the Congolese in gratitude for the kind- derful is worth a single human life. Then ness bestowed on them by King Leopold there is also the attitude, common in left 2 and his associates . wing and radical circles, that all art and These examples can be multiplied al- culture of the past and all ‘established’ most indeﬁnitely because Marx’s state- art of the present is so contaminated by ment that ‘the ruling ideas of any age are and implicated in the barbarity and bru- the ideas of the ruling class’ applies with tality of the ruling classes that it should as much force to the area of the arts as be totally rejected in favour of a new ‘peo- it does to philosophy, law, religion or ed- ple’s’ or working class art. This was the ucation; indeed even more so where paint- view taken, for example, by the Dadaists ing, sculpture and architecture are con- in Zurich in World War 1. It was the cul- cerned because the physical and monetary ture and art of the past, they argued, that resources for the making, storage, display had culminated in the mass slaughter in etc of such work are more than are needed the trenches, which claimed 10 million lives to write a book or a poem. And because, or more, and therefore it deserved only to to quote Marx again, ‘If money comes dispensed with and destroyed. A similar into the world with a congenital blood- position was taken by the Proletarian Cul- stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping ture movement (known as Proletcult) in from head to foot, from every pore, with Russia immediately after the 1917 Revo- blood and dirt.’3 lution; they rejected all ‘bourgeois’ art in Therefore the question is what are the name of a new working class art that the implications of this intimate associa- they believed they were in the process of tion between culture and barbarous op- creating. pression? One view, much favoured by Walter Benjamin himself, with whose tyrants, rulers and their agents and apolo- observation this article began, stopped 2Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, especially under King Leopold, is legendary for its extreme brutality. 3Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I, London 1974, pp.711-12.

51 short of outright rejection but concluded For example, the Medici family, over- that because the cultural treasures of the all, dominated Florence during the Renais- past ‘have an origin which he cannot con- sance and after4, and also were patrons template without horror’ the historical ma- of the young Michelangelo. Nevertheless terialist ‘views them with cautious detach- there was also resistance to Medici rule and ment’. Michelangelo’s David was commissioned However, the classical Marxists such as by the City Council to celebrate the suc- Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa cess of the city in deposing them and it is Luxemburg took a rather less detached and clear that Michelangelo himself was hostile rather more positive view of the great art to the Medicis, just as he also had conﬂicts of the past. They argued that this cultural with Pope Julius II who commissioned the heritage - despite its roots in slave, feu- Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Similarly, dal and capitalist society - was something the Tsars may have bought up paintings by which the modern working class should Rembrandt but Rembrandt himself, and not reject or destroy but should aim to his art, was a product of the Dutch Revo- take over from the bourgeoisie and make lution which was broadly anti-imperial and widely available to the masses. Marx, progressive in character.5 And the Rock- for example, is known to have been a feller family’s MOMA in New York may great enthusiast for the literature of An- have promoted Picasso but Picasso was a cient Greece, especially Aeschylus, and for leftist and, for a time, a Communist. Even Shakespeare. Engels particularly admired when the artists are not in anyway radical Balzac (despite his reactionary views) for their work often embodies values that are his realistic depiction of French society. far more humane than those of the ruthless Lenin regarded the plans of the Proletkult tyrants and billionaire exploiters for whom as rather juvenile ultra-leftism and Trot- they end up working. sky variously defended Dante, Shakespeare It is class society, not the art itself, and Pushkin on the grounds that reading which makes artistic achievement rest on their work, regardless of its overt political barbaric and exploitative foundations and stance, would enrich the human personal- while artists can and do struggle in vari- ity and our understanding of life. ous ways to free themselves from this de- In support of this latter position, I pendence it is ultimately a contradiction would add that although humanity’s ‘cul- that can be resolved only by ending class tural heritage’ was, and remains, dom- society. inated and largely owned by the ruling classes and thus unavoidably associ- After the Revolution I am sure we can ated with and tainted by their barbarism, ﬁnd many positive uses for the awesome the relationship between the art (and the Colosseum including housing an exhibition artists) and the rulers is also marked by devoted to Spartacus and the great slave many contradictions. revolts.

4For a period the Medicis were driven out of Florence but in the period of reaction after 1527 they returned as hereditary rulers - a position they retained for 200 years. 5See John Molyneux, Rembrandt and Revolution, Redwords, London 2001.