Category Archives: subversion

The juvenile delinquents — not the pop artists —

King Asa of Juda Destroying the Idols () – Monsù Desiderio

I was looking for info on Media Burn (1975) [Youtube] and [Youtube] and [Photo] by the Ant Farm collective and I happened upon Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes blog. Daniel Flahiff introduces the top five American buildings blog-a-thon:

In response to Tyler Green’s challenge to choose your five favorite American buildings (okay, structures)–which is itself a response to the AIA list–here are my five [a list that could, of course, change tomorrow], in no particular order. What are yours? No, really, I want to know…

The reason I was searching for Media Burn in the first place was a previous search for American radical and activist Charles Radcliffe, the image of the Cadillac smashing into the wall of television turns up when you Google for Radcliffe.The reason I was looking for Radcliffe is that I wanted to introduce you to The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution, an essay published by the British arm of the Situationist International and co-authored by T. J. Clark, Christopher Gray, Charles Radcliffe and Donald Nicholson-Smith. This essay, which I’ve hosted for a while now (most if not all of the SI texts are copyleft), resurfaced to my consciousness following the comments by Muli Koppel to my recent post on social realism and anarchism in 19th century French art.

Of the essay the most potent quote is:

THE JUVENILE delinquents — not the pop artists — are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them.

A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple are the living denial of the ‘values’ in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the delinquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic.

They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell’s Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers — all are the assertion of the desire to play in a situation where it is totally impossible.

All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction. Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom proletarianised along with the rest.—The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution

Some info on Asa King of Judah of whom the destructions are pictured above:

Asa, King of Judah purged the land of pagan cults; all the sites of idolatrous worship were completely destroyed and the worshippers persecuted. The Queen Mother was also deposed for having been involved with same. There was also a large-scale crackdown on prostitutes.

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon …

Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar)

“I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of ‘art for art’s sake.’ No! I have simply wanted to draw from a thorough knowledge of tradition the reasoned and free sense of my own individuality. To know in order to do: such has been my thought. To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them — in a word, to create a living art — this has been my aim.” Gustave Courbet, preface to World’s Fair catalogue, 1855.

The Stone Breakers (1850) – Gustave Courbet

Courbet depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing, challenged contemporary academic ideas of art, which brought him criticism that he deliberately adopted a cult of ugliness. [Apr 2006]

Anarchism had a large influence on French Symbolism of the late 19th century, such as that of Stéphane Mallarmé, who was quoting as saying “Je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre.” (I know of no bomb other than the book.) Its ideas infiltrated the cafes and cabarets of turn of the century Paris.

Related: avant-garde – anarchism – government – French theory

Proudhon and his children (1865) Gustave Courbet

The painter Gustave Courbet was friends with Proudhon and supported the latter’s views on societal change. Proudhon was avant-garde in politics, Courbet in the visual arts. One of Proudhon’s most poetic and prophetic exposés was “To be GOVERNED is …” which is reproduced on this page.

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.)

 

Make it my thing

 

DimDamDom.jpg

Screen capture of French television series Dim Dam, Dom

 

Rose Hobart (1936) – Joseph Cornell

  1. In recent comment exchanges between Andrej ‘Ombres Blanches’ Maltar and myself, we stumbled upon some Youtube footage I do not want to withhold from you, dear reader.
  2. Joseph Cornell’s ‘film remix’ Rose Hobart [Youtube]
  3. Ado Kyrou directed some episodes of Dim Dam Dom though not this one [Youtube] starring Gainsbourg. But one senses definitely his influence. Other director’s of this series were Eric Kahane (Girodias’s brother) and Jean Loup Sieff. –Andrej Maltar
  4. “When watching a film I inevitably perform an act of will on it, hence I transform it, and from its given elements make it my thing, draw snippets of knowledge from it and see better into myself… I could not begin to explain the reasons why since, contrary to Duchamp’s objects, I am not at all sure that these films, generally extremely bad ones, can have an objective value; or then I would have to work on them, make some changes in the montage, cut, accentuate, or tone down the soundtrack, finally interpret them before my subjective vision could be objectified.”–Ado Kyrou
  5. The Dim Dam, Dom video extracts were posted by Youtubian SpikedCandy who also treats us this superb piece of schmaltz.
  6. “This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” –Douglas Sirk’s nobrow quote via Andrej Maltar

A middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema

Matthew of Esoteric Rabbit and Zach of Elusive Lucidity have been watching some of the films from Godard’s ‘revolutionary’ period. I’ve never been impressed by the films of Godard (not Breathless, not Pierrot, not Week End) except for Contempt (I guess due to my predilection for the prose of Moravia) and although I’ve never watched Godard’s political cinema, I suspect that I will like them in the way that I enjoyed William Klein’s Mr. Freedom. Also, here is an interesting post by Darren of Long Pauses on Godard’s 66-67 period.

Some notes on Godard’s films (and especially Le Gai savoir) and a critique by Guy Debord followed by some Godard quotes:

In the ‘revolutionary’ 1969 Le Gai Savoir Jean-Luc Godard liberates himself from all narrative requirements, and emerges as a pure cinematic essayist. Godard writes essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, he films it.

Le Gai savoir (Eng:The Joy of Knowledge) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, started before the events of May 68 and finished shortly afterwards. Coproduced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The title references Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. [1]

Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge educated by the mass media. Godard’s “critiques” never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comedians or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same drugstore paperbacks. –Situationist International, 1966

… it is harldy surprising that Godard was dismissed as an imbecile by many of those from the avant-garde milieus connected to lettrism. The ardour of Guy Debord and his associates on the subject of Godard stems directly from the fact that Jean-Luc was providing the bourgeoisie with a middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema. Indeed, the invocation of the penal code during the discussion of prostitution in Vivre sa vie recalls Debord’s similar use of material on the soundtrack of his 1953 feature length anti-classic Screams in Favour of de Sade. —Summer of Love: psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 1960s

Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard’s ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized. [1]

British Sounds (1970) is an experimental film by Jean-Luc Godard, there is a scene with an extended close-up of a woman’s pubis.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. –Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. –Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard

I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of ‘Cahiers du Cinema.’ The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated. –Jean-Luc Godard

Introducing French theory to America

 

A collection of Semiotext(e) titles that have been read.

In my previous post I wondered why Taschen does not publish on political counterculture since they have a penchant towards the realm where “high and low will no longer be perceived as contradictions”. Andrej Maltar answers in the comments section of that post that Taschen is not interested in subversion outside the aesthetic field and points us in the direction of publishers like Autonomedia [semiotext(e)] or the Pranks-issue of RE/Search. He asks “Aren’t these books very interesting in terms of contemporary political subversion?”

 

On Autonomedia and Semiotext(e):

Semiotext(e) is an American independent publisher. It is widely credited for having introduced French theory to America in the late 1970s via its magazine issues and Foreign Agents series. In 2000 the MIT Press began distributing Semiotext(e), taking it over from the anarchist publishing collective Autonomedia.

Without realizing it I already have two Semiotext(e) books in my library: Paul Virilio’s Pure War and his Aesthetics of Disappearance. I’ve read and very much enjoyed Pure War and started to tackle Disappearance. I bought Disappearance for its uncanny cover art.

Related: American academia – critical theory – deconstruction theory – Post-structuralism – queer theory


 

Off-topic, a dedication to all the girls [Youtube] I’ve loved before by way of Carole King’s ‘It’s Too Late’.

Coffeetablishness

GillesNeret

Gilles Néret (1933 – 2005)

In answer to my recently asked question regarding the publishers of 20th century counterculture Taschen came to mind, an international publishing powerhouse with its roots in 1980s Germany. Taschen started out by publishing Benedikt Taschen’s extensive comic book collection and then basically conquered the world with its ‘coffeetablishness’.

Taschen is the best alternative to countless hours of internet browsing and a much better reading experience than the web itself, but buying the books remains more expensive than the internet.

Taschen also illustrates the lack of political subversion in contemporary culture. Countercultural publishers such as Grove in the 1960s also published pamphlet-like tracts. Taschen does not have a politics section; however I like to think that Benedikt and Laure have opinionated views on these matters.

Knots of indecision

In search of the roots of counterculture

Frontispiece to William Blake‘s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which contains Blake’s critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left), are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.

While the phrase “free love” is often associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination, especially in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, there are plenty of historical antecedents.

In 1789, radical Swedenborgians published the Plan for a Free Community, in which they proposed the establishment of a society of sexual liberty, where slavery was abolished and the “European” and the “Negro” lived together in harmony. In the treatise, marriage is criticised as a form of political repression. The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where such ideas could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins) supported the French Revolution, abolitionism, feminism, and free love. Among them was William Blake, who explicitly compares the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).

Another member of the circle was pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn’t marry partner Gilbert Imlay, despite the two having a child together. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay’s infidelity, Wollstonecraft’s belief in free love survived. She developed a relationship with early English anarchist William Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry. Their child, Mary took up with the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Percy also wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in the prose notes of Queen Mab (1813), in his essay On Love (c1815) and in the poem Epipsychidion (1821).

Sharing the free love ideals of the earlier social movements, as well as their feminism, pacifism and simple communal life, were the utopian socialist communities of early 19th century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France and Robert Owen in England. Fourier, who coined the term feminism, argued that true freedom could only occur without masters, without the ethos of work, and without suppressing passions; the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long as people are not abused, and that “affirming one’s difference” can actually enhance social integration. The Saint-Simonian feminist Pauline Roland took a free love stance against marriage, having four children in the 1830s, all of whom bore her name. —Wikipedia

The publishing houses of Western counterculture

Last August I asked whether anyone knew of the German and British equivalents of Eric Losfeld’s Éditions Le Terrain Vague, an editing house I admire for its readiness to publish works of ‘high art’, works of political subversion and the works of erotic avant-garde which accompanied the post-war European sexual revolution. Thanks to the comments by Andrej Maltar I have been able to fill in these gaps. If anyone else knows of other publishing houses that played this role in the rest of Europe (Spain, Italy, the former Eastern Bloc or the Scandinavian countries), please let me know. Below is a little write-up on Jörg Schröder:

Typical cover of März-Verlag with their distinctive look – yellow with thick black and red types. März-Verlag is the German equivalent of similar Western publishing houses such as Eric Losfeld’s Éditions Le Terrain Vague, American Grove Press and Great Britain’s John Calder’s various publishing houses. März-Verlag was run by Jörg Schröder, who published Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Castaneda, Leonard Cohen, Robert Crumb, Fassbinder, John Giorno, Gerhard Malanga, Kenneth Patchen and J. G. Ballard. Jörg Schröder was also the german publisher of Histoire d’O and he ran the German branch of Girodias’s Olympia Press.

More publishers of interest:
Dalkey Archive Press – Atlas Press – Sylvia Beach – Creation Books – Edmund Curll – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Maurice Girodias – Glittering Images – Grove Press – Eric Losfeld – Headpress – New Directions – Obelisk Press – Olympia Press – Jean-Jacques Pauvert – RE/Search publications (V.Vale and A. Juno) – Barney Rosset – Taschen