Walter Benjamin / Theodor Adorno
“committed”
vs.
“autonomous”
art
What is the role of the intellectual (the poet,
artist, writer, theorist, historian) within the
processes of radical resistance, class struggle,
or revolution?
What happens to the quality of the work the artist
produces when she or he is expected to be a
tendentious “partisan” for political change, as well as
an” artist of quality”?
“A work of art that is committed strips the magic
from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an
idle pastime for those who would like to sleep
through the deluge that threatens them, in an
apoliticism that is in fact deeply political. For the
committed, such works are a distraction from the
battle of real interests…
Adorno
…but when “works of art merely assimilate
themselves sedulously to the brute existence
against which they protest, in forms so
ephemeral (the very charge made vice versa by
committed against autonomous works) that
from their first day they belong to the seminars
in which they inevitably end.”
Adorno
For Benjamin (as for Brecht) the answer to
these questions involve the release of forces
that artists and intellectuals cannot simply
take charge of and therefore lead.
•Melting down
•Engineering
•Re-functionin (Umfunktioniering)
“Only the literalization of all the conditions of life
provides a correct understanding of the extent of this
melting down process, just as the state of the class
struggle determines the temperature at which –more or
less perfectly—it is accomplished.”
Benjamin
For Adorno, art is paradoxically,
both a cry against surrender to the
post-Auschwitz world – and
inherently made barbaric by the
same political and social forces and
conditions. True art is dark.
Docklands Project by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn, London, circa 1979
Hans Haacke Manet-PROJEKT 74
An “Anti-Catalog” opposed to the Whitney Museum bicentennial exhibition, 1976
“The revolutionary intellectual appears first and
foremost as the betrayer of his class of origin.”
Louis Aragon
1. Didacticism of approach
2. A Cooled-Down aesthetic (anti-pleasurable – pleasure)
3. Dominance of language and use of text to anchor images
4. Anti-narrative and use of interruption (montage - Brecht)
5. Simplification of technique to achieve ends (pragmatic, tactical)
6. Radicalization of institutions rather than form or forms alone
7. Adoption of collectivized and/or collaborative forms of production
8. Art as an organizational tool/part of a broader campaign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZ
A
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=511397820540803155
Art must have an organizing function
& must be a Laboratory of Ideas
Example: Sergei Tretiakov:
•Calling mass meetings
•Collecting funds (for tractors)
•Inspecting reading rooms
•Persuading peasants to join
collectives
•Creating wall newspapers
http://www.brokencitylab.org/
http://vimeo.com/1862439
http://vimeo.com/1586302
http://www.youtub
e.com/watch?v=Bk
eTDmHj2gg
http://www.labofii.net/experiments/
“Autonomous works of art are knowledge as
non-conceptual objects. This is the source of
their greatness.” Adorno
…but when “works of art merely assimilate
themselves sedulously to the brute existence
against which they protest, in forms so
ephemeral (the very charge made vice versa by
committed against autonomous works) that
from their first day they belong to the seminars
in which they inevitably end.”
“The notion of a “message” in art, even when politically
radical, already contains an accommodation to the world:
the stance of the lecturer conceals a clandestine entente with
listeners, who could only be truly rescued from illusions
by refusal of it.”
“It is not the office of art
to spotlight alternatives,
but to resist by its form
alone the course of the
world, which permanently
puts
a pistol to men’s heads.”
Adorno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKLtOQqrHs
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=34
53298926288406872#
George Grosz Heartfield the Engineer, 1920
Kurt Schwitters