ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE A CRITICAL READER EDITED BY WILL BRADLEY AND CHARLES ESCHE TATE PUBLISHING IN ASSOCIATION WITH AFTERALL First published 2007 by order of the Tate Trustees by Tate Publishing, a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd Millbank, London sw1p 4rg www.tate.org.uk/publishing In association with Afterall Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London 107–109 Charing Cross Road London wc2h 0du Copyright © Tate, Afterall 2007 Individual contributions © the authors 2007 unless otherwise specified Artworks © the artists or their estates unless otherwise specified All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-85437-626-8 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2007934790 Designed by Kaisa Lassinaro, Sara De Bondt Printed by Graphicom SPA, Italy CONTENTS 99 Deutschland Deutschland Über Alles Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield Preface [7] Charles Esche 104 Bauhaus no.3, The Students Voice Kostufra Introduction [9] Will Bradley 106 The Fall of Hannes Meyer Kostufra Colour plates [25] 108 Letter, August 1936 PART I – 1871 Felicia Browne 36 Letters, October 1870–April 1871 110 We Ask Your Attention Gustave Courbet British Surrealist Group 29 October 1870 18 March 1871 115 Vision in Motion 7 April 1871 László Moholy-Nagy 30 April 1871 PART III – 1968 40 Socialism from the Root Up William Morris and E. Belfort Bax 121 Theses on the Paris Commune Situationist International 47 The Socialist Ideal: Art (Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, William Morris Raoul Vaneigem) 57 The War in Paterson 125 Response to a Questionnaire John Reed from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art PART II – 1917 Situationist International (J.V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, 61 En Avant DADA: Raoul Vaneigem, René Viénet) A History of Dadaism Richard Huelsenbeck 130 Statement Black Mask 68 Programme Declaration Komfut 132 Art and Revolution Black Mask 69 A General Theory of Constructivism Varvara Stepanova 134 We Propose a Cultural Exchange Black Mask 74 Art and Propaganda William Pickens 137 Psychedelic Manifesto Sture Johannesson 76 The End of Art Theo Van Doesburg 141 Hopes for Great Happenings Albert Hunt 78 Art and Reality Mieczysław Szczuka 143 Guerrilla Theatre Ronald G. Davis 86 Draft Manifesto The John Reed Club of New York 146 Trip Without a Ticket The San Francisco Diggers 91 Open the Prisons! Disband the Army! 152 The Post-Competitive, The Surrealist Group Comparative Game of a Free City The San Francisco Diggers 92 Revolution Now and Forever! The Surrealist Group 157 ‘Experience 68’ The Avant-Garde Artists Group 94 Cannibalist Manifesto Oswald De Andrade 161 Tucumán Arde The Avant-Garde Artists Group 164 Posters from the Revolution, 216 For Self-Management Art Paris, May 1968 Zoran Popovi´c Atelier Populaire 219 The Sword is Mightier 166 Position Paper no.1: than the Swede? On Revolutionary Art Sture Johannesson Emory Douglas 227 Position Paper: Crossroads 171 Art for the Peoples Sake Community (The Farm) Emory Douglas Bonnie Sherk 174 Letter, April 1968 230 Art Hysterical Notions Hans Haacke of Progress and Culture Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff 175 Manifesto for the Guerrilla Art Action Group 241 Ideology, Confrontation Guerrilla Art Action Group and Political Self-Awareness Adrian Piper 178 A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from 245 The Docklands Photo-Murals the Board of Trustees of Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson the Museum of Modern Art Guerrilla Art Action Group 249 Dispatches from an Unofficial War Artist 180 Letter to Richard M. Nixon Peter Kennard Guerrilla Art Action Group 251 Ten Items of the Covenant 181 Insertions into Ideological Circuits, Laibach 1970–75 Cildo Meireles 255 Flyer for the Rev-Revue of Soc-Fashion 188 Radical Software, vol.1 no.1, Orange Alternative The Alternate Television Movement Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot 257 Operating Manual for Leszek MAJ Orange Alternative 190 The Videosphere Gene Youngblood PART IV – 1989 191 Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare 260 Geometric Retroabstraction Paul Ryan Desiderio Navarro 196 Proclamation of the Orange 271 The Border Art Workshop/ Free State Taller De Arte Fronterizo The Kabouters Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Emily Hicks 200 Call to the Artists of Latin America Interviewed by Coco Fusco 202 Womens Art: A Manifesto 277 A Presentation VALIE EXPORT Gran Fury (Tom Kalin, Michael Nesline 204 Notes on Street Art by the Brigadas And John Lindell) Ramona Parra ‘Mone’ Gonzàlez 283 Rebellion on Level p Christoph Schäfer and Cathy Skene 206 Resolutions of the Third World with the Hafenrandverein Filmmakers Meeting In Algiers 290 Popotla 211 Press Release, September 1976 RevArte Solvognen 293 Statement by the Feminist Artist 213 Invisible Theatre Collective Ip Gim Augusto Boal Art and Social Change 297 How To? Tiqqun 313 Politicising Sadness Colectivo Situaciones 319 Mayan Technologies and the Theory of Electronic Civil Disobedience Ricardo Dominguez Interviewed by Benjamin Shepard and Stephen Duncombe 332 The Articulation of Protest Hito Steyerl 340 A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons Raqs Media Collective 350 The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance Brian Holmes 369 Drifting Producers Yongseok Jeon 378 There is no alternative: THE FUTURE IS SELF-ORGANISED Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies And Jakob Jakobsen PART V – Commissioned Essays 384 The Many ANDs of Art and Revolution Gerald Raunig 395 Rebuilding the Art of the People John Milner 408 Time Capsule Lucy R. Lippard 422 Secular Artist, Citizen Artist Geeta Kapur About the authors [462] 440 Selling the Air: Notes on Art and the About the editors [463] Desire for Social Change in Tehran Tirdad Zolghadr Notes [464] 447 Line Describing A Curb Bibliography [474] Asymptotes about VALIE EXPORT, the New Urbanism and Index [478] Contemporary Art Marina Vishmidt Acknowledgements [479] Contents PREFACE CHARLES ESCHE The recent expansion of Afterall journal, from publication of its first issue by Central Saint Martins in 1998 to the research and production of its accompanying series of books, has allowed us to begin unpacking particular developments in contemporary art in collaboration with a number of new partners. The journal has been co-published by California Institute of the Arts since 2002, and our editorial partnership now extends to muhka in Antwerp. Our first reader, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, was a collaboration with the artists’ group irwin and brought together for the first time texts about the contemporary art situation in almost all European post-communist states, as well as new essays on specific artists or aspects of the region. Art and Social Change is produced in collaboration with Tate Publishing. Edited by Will Bradley and myself, it takes the claims of well-known and more obscure revolutionary art practices and holds them up to the light of today. The bulk of the book gathers an international selection of artists’ proposals, manifestos, theoretical texts and public declarations that we hope will be of value both to the student of art and to the general reader with an interest in this particular facet of the relationship between art, politics and activism. The approaches represented are many and diverse. They range from the socialist art theory of William Morris to the hybrid activist practice associated with the twenty-first century ‘movement of movements’; from the modernist avant-gardes and their ideas of political commitment to those movements that definitively rejected artistic modernism in favour of protest, critique, utopian social experiment or revolutionary propaganda. Some of the texts assembled here are well-known within the field of art history or are available from several sources, while others may have originally enjoyed only limited distribution or are currently difficult to find; some are presented in English translation for the first time. Six especially commissioned essays – by Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt and Tirdad Zolghadr – further explore both the historical context and the contemporary situation. 7 We have sought to be broad in our geographic and political approach, relying on the expressed intention of the artists (stated in their own words) to guide our selection. We have generally been interested in artists that have suggested or even generated alternative social models through the production of their art. Often this has been done in opposition to government and corporate policies. At moments of revolutionary success, however, there is a subtle elision between inside and outside positions that has produced some of the most powerful work effecting social change. This reader combines both possibilities in its selection, favouring those proposals that have sought to enlarge or relocate the zone of art itself, by introducing new material possibilities and by rejecting the art world’s institutional structures and seeking their own. As with the East Art Map reader, the newly commissioned texts bring the questions of an artist’s contemporary options and responsibilities to the fore, as well as visiting the situation of socially engaged art in India and Iran. We do not attempt to suggest a unified theoretical effort at work. The texts presented here offer diverse ideological positions and levels of engagement, and were produced in widely differing situations and for a variety of ends; some are theoretical, some rhetorical, others pragmatic or calculatedly propagandist. Our purpose is to sketch a parallel history which, while closely linked to the accepted narratives of the history of modern art, is also defined against them.